January 2, 2012
| |
The Milkman’s Son
By Tracy C. Baker
A House Is Home #149
Our Home
I just finished a fantastically fun read called “At Home – A Short History of Private Life” by Bill Bryson. Readers may remember his delightful, informative and funny book called “A Short History of Nearly Everything.” If not, I highly recommend that one, too. In “At Home”, Bryson takes you through his home, a former rectory in England, room by room with a history of how this or that room or object came to be.
Well, that got me to thinking about our humble abode. So, for the New Year, I would like to present to you a very short observation on our home.
The Front Yard
The front yard was a disaster for most of the 30 years we have been here. Funny since it was one of the first things I set my sites on when we moved in. Full of junipers, weeds, and lava rock I really hated it. Yet time and money and other projects kept cropping up and the yard kept getting put off until a couple years ago when I began the job of getting rid of said rock, pulling up most of the junipers, yanking out the weeds etc. I like our front yard now. It seems to fit us and is drought tolerant with flowering bushes, some nicely bonsai-trimmed junipers and a watering system that doesn’t require dragging a hose all over the place.
I think it could be a yard easily envisioned by those who first moved in here, but maybe that is just my whimsy.
The Garage
Ours is the original garage although it has been added to in the back and lifted onto a foundation at one time or another. Now, it is nearing the end of its life. One wall is leaning precariously inward as the badly poured foundation is leaning outward. It has never held a car during our occupation and in fact the “floor” is simply gravel and wood planks.
When we moved in we dumped several boxes of things in there and they haven’t been opened since. Over the decades, we have added this, that, and the other things until there is barely room to move. Not that I haven’t tried to clean it up. I have held four garage sales since we moved in here, but it seems that every time I hold a garage sale, there is less room than before. I am not sure what causes this phenomenon but it has now infected my home office as well.
The Back Yard
The back yard isn’t much to speak of. I do not have a farmer lot like many of our neighbors do. It is somewhat small, but not nearly as small as some I have seen in newer homes. It is, as Goldilocks intones – Just right! I mow my little lawn, tend to my two trees, plant my small garden and shovel up the Buff’s poop. We have a wonderful back yard furniture set all ready for the patio we plan on building…someday…
The Exterior
Stucco and wood-framed windows, a small amount of Spanish tile, a flat roof with parapets; and that pretty much describes our little rectangle. Many of the windows were replaced at sometime in the early 1960s with aluminum windows, but I still have a few of the wonderful old double hung – the ones with the cotton rope and lead weights inside the frames. One year, I even tackled removing all the paint so I could actually open them, top and bottom! Yet they are aging terribly and it may be time to replace them all. This too is on our long list of “to dos” that go along with owning a home originally built in 1927.
The Living Room
One of the first things you may notice about our living room is the small wood-burning fireplace with the built in redwood mantle and bookcases. We don’t use it much anymore. It is tough with Spare the Air bans that last most of the winter. I was told by one of my earlier neighbors that many people burned coal until the 1950s in the fireplace. I could see that. After all, it was for heating back then. Most of these homes had either a wall or small floor furnace installed in them which didn’t heat the front of the house much.
The Dining Room
The dining and living rooms used to be separated by doors. I have seen them in another similar home, but they were removed from ours by a previous owner. They were beautiful doors; French-paned beveled glass with brass and glass knobs. I imagine they just took up too much room. Where they used to swing open to the living room, we have placed a couple side chairs. I would love to have them back again, though.
The dining room contains a unique feature of these older homes – built-in sideboards. They are gorgeous wood beauties with French-paned glass doors. Ours are a little worse for wear, but I do love them.
Another feature throughout the house is a crown molding that doesn’t quite go to the top. I was always puzzled about this until I remembered working as a guide at the Meek Estate in Hayward in my teens. These are lath and plaster walls, not very conducive to hanging pictures with nail and hook. Thus, you place a painting or picture on wire with small hooks to grab hold of the crown molding rim and voila! A hung picture without the cracks and holes in the wall! Of course, these days, with earthquakes shaking everything, we want to be sure we have our paintings and pictures securely fastened, so we have used the heavy duty screw-in type hangers to ensure they stay up.
The Kitchen
I think the kitchen is one of the most fascinating rooms in the whole house. It is tiny, not really a good setup for cooking even after our tear out and remodel in 1989 (after which we gained another 3 feet of counter space and several more cabinets.) One does try to stay out of the cook’s way during the cooking process. Otherwise, as we have learned, it quickly deteriorates into the Stateroom scene from the Marx Brothers movie “A Night At The Opera”
If you still own one of these homes that has not had an extensive kitchen remodel, you may have noticed a pantry-like cabinet with a somewhat high bottom shelf. When we did our remodel, I found out why. Below this cabinet was a cement block, lined with lead. To the consternation of the remodeler (and the further draining of my wallet) he had to remove the block so the new cabinets would fit.
So what required a lead-lined cement block?
The ice box!
And I mean a real, honest-to-goodness, “The Iceman Cometh” ice box!
Seems the ice box and its accompanying accruements were built right into the house right here. When the electric fridge came along, the ice box was removed and it became a cabinet.
At some point, a previous owner also put in an all-in-one metal sink and cabinet, I am sure to take the place of the old time sink with the curtain that covered it. We updated it once more to a porcelain sink with a garbage disposal and a built in dishwasher…progress isn’t always bad!
The biggest problem I have with the kitchen now is, in our latest attempt to update it, I have had a heck of a time removing the old chair rails and wall paper (note to homeowners – if you put up wall paper, do not use the super heavy duty paste - as our installer must have -to put it up!) It does NOT want to come off regardless of steaming, strippers, and even sanding! It took hour after hour of working on some of the walls over and over again to finally get the last vestiges off
Okay, enough of my remodeling troubles. On to the…
Breakfast Nook
One of the things I love about these homes is, even though they are small, they still wanted to fit in these little touches. To enter our nook, you pass under an arched entryway in which sits a small table and two chairs, which is about the only thing we can fit in there. I spend quite a bit of my time in there as that is where I watch what little television I watch. I don’t like Winnie’s programs and so she retires to her TV and I to mine. I sit and read the paper, complete a crossword or two, maybe grab a snack from our ice box, until the evenings fare is over.
Laundry Room
The little handyman-built extension off the side of the kitchen is our laundry room, pantry extension, and general “Where are we going to put this? In the laundry room, I guess” place.
Who knows when it was built? My guess is sometime in the 1940s or 50s when someone saw a need for an enclosed room rather than the laundry porch that I think was there before hand.
The Hallway
It’s a hallway. That’s about all I got, sorry.
Actually, this hallway does have a little something to say. It was once separated from the dining room with a door like the bedroom doors. I know this because I found this door in the garage after I moved in. I imagine it was removed about the same time as the dining room doors were. I don’t know when the style went from closing off rooms to opening them up, but obviously one of the previous owners did.
Anyway in our hall, you will find door number 1, door number 2, or the curtain where lovely Carol Merrill is standing…wait, sorry, lost my train of thought. Make that door number 3. Door number 1 leads us into…
The Bathroom
It is hard to believe, but prior to the 1800s, most people believed bathing to be very unhealthy – which is very strange because many ancient civilizations were quite big on bathing (Romans, Greeks, Persians, Minoans, Babylonians etc) and left extensive records and evidence of this all over the world. For reasons only our ancestors can explain, it never caught on once these civilizations died out and, in fact, during the great plagues of the dark and Middle Ages, the powers that be came to the conclusion that bathing was downright dangerous!
Maybe it was the stench, or maybe they finally woke up, or both, but sometime in the 1800s people decided that bathing and hygiene were good things and that, according to Bill Bryson’s research, spawned the development of the modern bathroom with all its varying amenities. And, oh, by the by, although a gentleman named Thomas Crapper invented the 1st flush toilet, he did not lend his name as a slang term for said toilet or what may be deposited into it. The slang term crap is much, much older than Mr. Crapper’s time.
Bathrooms are really not that complicated. Most contain a bath and/or shower, a toilet, a sink, and a mirror. Those living a life of luxury may even have two or more bathrooms, some with two or three sinks, mirrors, cabinets, a spa tub, a power shower, a bidet and so forth. In our little place, we are lucky to have room for one bathroom.
The Bedrooms
Might as well do all three as they are essentially the same.
Bedrooms are another rather late development in homes. Seems before that a bedroom was also where you ate, talked, met visitors and everything else. There were no “rooms” in homes. Home owners slept on the eating boards and servants and children slept on the floor (thus the saying being above board.) Sometime around the 16th century, bedroom chambers and beds became more common. The servants still slept on the floor, mostly at the foot of the master’s bed.
Looking around our bedrooms, you will find no servants at the foot of our beds; perhaps a dog toy or two, but no servants. Two of the bedrooms sit at the back of the house and are equal in size and shape. Two windows and a smallish closet – which we have expanded as far as we could using closet organizers – are in each of the rooms.
Of course, none of the limited closet space belongs to me. No, I was relegated to bedroom number 3 where what little closet space there was is now occupied by the central heater. So, in the mid 1990s, we hired one of those closet and shelf builders to come in and turn it into an official office for me. I also had them install a closet for me! It’s mine! Stay away, Winnie! (Just kidding…not!)
Thanks for taking the tour. That’ll be 50 cents please.
And that is about it. No architectural marvels or stand out accoutrements. Just a house. We will continue to make improvements when we can, but overall, it is what it is. And what it is is ours, free and clear. That is an accomplishment in and of itself these days.
Fini
Tracy
Copyright 2012, The Milkman's Son and Tracy Baker
No comments:
Post a Comment