In a house such as this, filled with the oddments of six or seven generations, most of whom died here or, if they died elsewhere, their belongings returned, finding space for a new order is difficult.  One of the charms of the house is that one never knows exactly what a drawer will hold.  Yet, when one is entirely reworking an attic room for another sort of work space; those oddments are probably in the way.

So one balances the charm of the room essentially untouched for decades (just quietly getting more and more stuff….) with a working space.  How? In this case, a drawer got reserved for the cleaned oddments that would be left: maybe a strange candlestick, a massive square nail, some old painted tin boxes, a toy, an odd bottle…that sort of the thing.

The rest get used for saner, sorted storage which will relate to the room’s new use.

The dust goes.

More importantly, my tame electrician spent the morning rewiring a wall sconce…We’ve had problems with that particular style, the wire is bent over a sharp point and after ninety years the insulation fails.  This one did not blow fuses, this one simply arced, and arced, and burned through the sconce plate.  God loves fools.  It could have burnt the house down.