I just completely lost myself in a Friday evening for five hours and I feel magnificent. Once again I was playing with my school clock collection, something I haven’t really done over the past year or so.
After restoring the clock from my elementary school my OCD kicked in and I could no longer accept the fact that there was one room in our house that did not have a clock from my clock collection, and that room would be the kitchen.
The reason I never put a clock in the kitchen was mostly by design but partly due to laziness, the kitchen walls (at least where a clock would go) are all outside walls and our outside walls are stuffed to the gills with insulation. The thought of fishing the necessary wiring for a clock in the kitchen was overwhelming; I have a hard enough time pullng wire through inside walls let alone finding my way through insulation, so I went with a quartz clock instead and left well enough alone.
Until tonight.
About a week ago I saw a beautiful clock from a Kansas school from 1919 or 1920. It wasn’t an ebay find, but rather I stumbled upon it through an online search (on Bing!). It was at an antique shop. I contacted the owners to see if they would ship it up here and a week later, here it is.
This clock is slightly different in design from it’s younger siblings in the house and uses a different mechanism than the others but a little wiring ingenuity and it’s clicking right along with the rest of the clocks throughout the house. Pulling the wiring through the wall only took about five hours and I didn’t even have to rip out the wall to do it.
The exercise of installing the clock was oddly relaxing for me and I feel great that accomplished something I couldn’t do.
I haven’t cleaned the clock up yet, aside from removing several layers of dust. The paint splatters from it’s former classroom actually match the paint in our kitchen so I’ll probably wait awhile before repainting it, if I ever do. I kind of like the history of the clock being on display like that. Earl told me this is one of his favorites in the collection. That’s always a good thing.
I think it’s one of my favorites as well.
