Saturday, March 22, 2008

History of the house..

The house was built in 1930, but this was not the first building on the property. The former owner told me that her husbands family had this land from the late 1800s, that they had across the road to the west a mud dug out house and then later built a small building they used as a house in the back of where this house is which was much much smaller. When they built the main house they wouldn't had indoor plumbing or electric lighting.

Electric didn't come to the area until 1949. We still have all of the old wiring in the house plus newer maybe mid 70s to 90s added in. I'm not sure when the plumbing came to the house but its all iron pipe, and if you look behind a door off the kitchen you can see the pipe that runs from upstairs to the bathroom to the basement. Its part of the charm of the old house.





The house has complete hard wood floors but most of the floors were covered with flooring of some kind to keep the wood good. Linoleum was very popular, and there is many different patterns thru out the the house. Alot I'm thinking is original from when the house was built.
In the rooms that doesn't have linoleum there was carpet (1970 era).

Back in the 30's when building a house they didn't have the fancy tools they have today and alot of the wood is hand tooled. This house has lots of fancy wood, in what would have been the dinning room just of the kitchen and the parlor next to it was separated by double wood doors, we think all the wood would have been white or yellow oak.
The builders we're craftsman in those days and had special touches to what they did. There is wood original to the house thru out the house. There is many doors in this house I'm not sure why there would have been so many entrances into the house but there is 5 doors leading to outside. I know they would have had a separate entrance to the parlor/sitting room for Sunday visitors and also if there was a death the would have used the parlor as the viewing room.

The back of the house has the enclosed porch that was enclosed later after the house was built.
There are 2 entrances to the house in the back. 1 into the kitchen and 1 goes into the hall next to the kitchen next to the upstairs. This maybe have been used as the mud room. They put a sink on the one wall and at one time there was a light above the sink. At the end of the hall way is a door to the basement and straight ahead was a door into the dinning room ( now closed off). In these old farm houses there was a reason for everything that was done.

The house had an unfinished partial room (with the slant of the roof) next to the bathroom and a long room on the north side upstairs. The one on the north is our storage room for now its long and not to wide and has the slant of the roof.

We had an inspector check out the house, he found it sound with some minor problems. Which is true the house is solid but has some problems. So little by little we find and fix and bring this charming old farm house into the modern day without loosing its charm.

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