As long as we were going to have carpenters in the house, we added a little job to their list. Earlier this year, Ted and I shut off our landline telephone. The problem: the white phone plate was still attached to the wall and it covered the hole where the phone line came in from outside. Fortunately, we have extra tiles from our 2023 kitchen backsplash update. The guys chipped out 4 tiles and replaced them.

After the grout was applied, you’d never know we had a landline on that wall, except that, out of habit, when we come home, we still look at that corner to see if the answering machine light is blinking with a message.

Ted and I are old enough to remember having the first phone installed in our parents’ homes, party lines, crank phones, dial telephones, long distance charges that were cheaper after 7:00 p.m., collect calls, person-to-person calls, pay phones, princess-style phones, wall phones, phone cards to charge instead of putting change in a pay phone, finally being able to purchase a phone instead of paying “rent” to the phone company for it every month, answering machines, car phones, cell phones, smart phones. . . . We must be really old!