Visit to the Museum…

I visited this museum 3 or 4 years ago but I thought that it was worth another visit…

As you can see above, it was settled in 1868, right along the Walla Walla river which is way over there in the background behind that rear row of trees.

I love these old homes that have been refurbished…wouldn’t want to tackle restoring something that old myself but don’t mind minor upgrading of a home if I gotta or if it’s for improving livability.

I don’t know now which of these furnishings were original but I do know many of them were and after restoration were put on display here where they originated. To modern aesthetics though, these old homes are more cluttered then today’s homes.

After WWII my family was struggling as dad couldn’t find a job. So we moved into a cabin in the forests of Montana that one of dad’s relations gave us use of for the winter. We had a stove very much like this one.

Very interesting how an established pioneer family lived after they were settled and became leaders of the community of the old Milton area. Lots of history with that family that I won’t recount here. You can google them if you would like to read a little about them and the house.

Much of the attractive wall paper patterns are modern reproductions where they scrapped off chunks of the peeling paper and sent it to a repo business. Costs a bunch but you get an exact original copy. I helped gather samples when I was a volunteer at a historic site up at Lake Tahoe as they moved from room to room refurbishing. Not remodeling though, just refurbishing as that’s the Forest Services’s mandate for donated properties. They also do a thing called Arrested Decay or similar where they don’t improve a structure but do hidden stuff that keeps the buildings from falling over. You can see that sort of thing at any ghost towns owned by the government.

And that was the tour of the homestead. The original barn and carriage house are not open to the public at present so I didn’t get to tour those, but no biggie. I recall my last visit the barn was open for visits and it’s really cool. Huge place. The upper floor used to host community dances but I doubt the space is safe for that these days.

I’ve been trying to find a house to buy in M-F so I spend a lot of time researching and visiting properties lately, and then my computer…I use Linux Ubuntu and it was driving me nuts. I’ve spent so many hours trying to get it upgraded to the latest version, failing each time. Repeatedly attempted the upgrade over the last several months. Finally gave up trying to upgrade and opted for just installing the new version over the old version, where it wipes the HDD clean during install. I did make a full backup on a backup HDD just before doing that. Finally got it up and running today, spent 6 hours downloading my files to the new setup, installed and tweaked my favorite apps, tweaked things even more so my apps all work because things never seem to work the same after an upgrade, and now I can post here to my travel/RV repair blog as easily as I used to be able to. And then I’ve been slowly getting to the minor repairs to the RV that were needed: Lubed the pantry shelves so they go in/out easily (not as simple as it sounds — story here: Pantry…  ) And then I fixed the water heater with my sons help. Just about done with that: Water Heater… All that’s left to do with the WH is to grind off some screw heads, straighten the panel I’d bent out of the way that covers the bottom of the heater, and reinstall it with new caulking. It’s part of the insulation setup for the tank and helps keep the bottom of the tank clean too.

And finally, I’ve got the toilet to fix. For some reason the new ball valve has shifted so activating the water from the flush pedal is problematic. I installed some new parts but there’s still more to do once I get the ambition.

Anyway, thanks for reading! See ya next time!