TRANSCRIPT

The purpose of my being here- and I have been here since the last week of July- I've been doing a process that restoration architect Peter Stokes- one of our pioneer restoration architects in Ontario- has coined 'house archaeology' and I deal from my background. What I'm doing, is I'm working down through the various layers of paint. If you can vision a dig at an archaeological site, and if you can vision a layered cake concept with the top layer being the most recent and the bottom layers being older as you go down to the very bottom layer which would be the original layer. By using abrasive cleaning techniques, sandpaper, I'm able to produce a colour orb, which goes down through the various layers of paint which are all very datable and I'm finding the decorating history of the house- how the woodwork was painted at various times of its history which correlate very nicely with the floor plan I just described. Now what we've been finding here is the usual sequence of colours and paint types going down through modern oil and latex paints into the led based paints of the nineteenth century which were very much like artists' colours in oil, which we describe them now. Very rudimentary base, colour and pigments that were mixed with red lead, grey and white led and glazed just as artist would glaze an oil painting on canvas. And by 19th century tastes, very, very typical colours, but by today's standards, probably colours that would shock the modern decorator, probably harping back to the sixties more than the current times in terms of decorating history and just to give you an example, in the first room I described, the dining room, we found the floor and baseboard under several layers which transcend through the 20th and early part of the 19th century we found an unusual paint on the floor and what was described in the nineteenth century as 'mop board', we know it as baseboard today, both the baseboard and floor paints were usually a unit colour, a similar colour, and with pine floors of being pure pine and very evident is pine in a lot of historic homes today that are privately owned.