Moving on.

I have talked to a few landscapers, and most of them deal with poison ivy infestations with the liberal use of chemicals.
Since my well is right in my front yard, I want to use as few hazardous chemicals as possible, so this isn't going to work.
I was in Home Depot last night, and may have found an answer though!

Sure, I'll cook, but at least I won't itch.

I've been trying to get away from disposable goods because filling landfills and oceans with our garbage is bad, but in this case, I'm making an exception.


Last night I wandered around upstairs and tried to force the sack of prednasone ferrets living in my brain to pay attention and make sense of the hardware and electricity situation.
A lot of doors were reconfigured on the front (oldest) part of the house. There's Norfolk latches on a few bedroom and closet doors that look identical to this example (taken from an Ebay auction out of Maine).

Eventually they will all be stripped of their generations of paint and look like this.

On those doors, there's lift off hinges that look a lot like these examples from Horton Brasses. At least, this is what I imagine they look like, under the paint. I haven't attempted to get any of these off to strip. On the doors with the lift off hinges, but no Norfolk latch, there's often a turnbuckle latch that looks an awful lot like this:

But in my case, covered in layers of paint.

In some cases, the turnbuckle has been replaces with a little Victorian spring assisted catch. Eventually, I'd like to get all the ones with evidence of a turnbuckle back to that - they are lower profile than the Victorian catches, and make more sense with the Norfolk latches and iron lift-off hinges.

I looked and looked at the wires, and have come to the conclusion that there's probably 2 electrical feeds to the second floor - a white cable that services the master bedroom, and a big thick black cable that services the rest of the rooms. I'm hesitant to start working on the rooms, because I'd really like the snake wires for switches, even if I leave the original pull chain fixtures where they are for now. I think that's going to take some more reading and noodling around in my head.
Probably best left to dealing with post-prednisone.