This Old House

      I grew up in an old house of both indeterminate age and style. 

     It probably dated to sometime in the late 19th or very early 20th centuries, it never seemed to have a definite "style".  It lacked all of the elements normally associated with any specific architectural style.    It was just a big square two story box with 4 rooms down and four rooms up.  It had been built with no extra ornamentation either inside or out. No gingerbread trim, the woodwork was plain and probably of pine which was always kept painted.  The floors were pine, great for splinters, also kept painted or mostly covered with rugs and later with wall to wall carpet. The walls were plaster with wall paper in one or two rooms downstairs.  At some point in time an enclosed porch had been added to the front.  When my parents purchased it in 1950 there was not even any indoor plumbing.  Dad walled off one corner from the kitchen and created a small modern (for 1950) bathroom before they moved in and the old outhouse was moved away from yard near the back door and sat behind the tool shed for several years.  The new bathroom left my mother with a smallish L shaped kitchen. I'm sure she was happy to give up some kitchen space for an indoor bathroom.  

For a short time, perhaps around a year or two, three of the upstairs rooms were occupied as a separate apartment by my dad's brother Gwin and his wife Josaphine. The fourth room upstairs was shared as storage space.  There were small closets in three of the upstairs rooms, but none downstairs.  They shared the downstairs bathroom as well but had their own kitchen upstairs.  I can remember, as a toddler, standing at the bottom of the stairs and asking my aunt for gum and she would throw a stick or part of a stick down to me. Eventually my sister was born and my Aunt gave birth to my cousin and the shared living arrangement became crowded. My Aunt and uncle and cousin moved out and my family expanded into the upstairs. My parents occupied that house for 54 years and raised us 5 children there.  During those 54 years the house received several major updates including a kitchen remodel and two different additions.  Today my nephew is raising his family there and there have been further remodeling projects and additions. The house still lacks any definitive style description.    

I have had people tell me that they were not interested in owning an old home, for a variety of reasons…. too much cost to bring them up to date and keep them maintained, style not what they like, room layout that doesn’t meet current lifestyles, and any number of other reasons (excuses).  My wife and I have lived in a “modern” house exactly 4 of our 50 years of marriage.  It was a nice place, and served our young family well for those 4 years but it just didn't seem "natural" for either of us.  Besides that 1960’s vintage National Home we have lived in a classic 1920’s bungalow, an 1880 farmhouse, a small 1880’s town house that that originally sported a gingerbread victorian porch that a prior owner had had removed as he tried to alter the appearance of of the house to appear as a much older colonial style (not recommended),  a very special 1850 brick Greek Revival farm house and finally a 1913 Colonial Revival where we have been for the past 30 years. All very different styles and all had their own advantages and all presented different challenges as we tried to make them into homes that worked for our family. 

As you can see, besides the National Home, our homes all shared one trait…they were all homes of “a certain age”.  Some might label them “historic” and indeed our current home is part of a historic neighborhood and is protected under the city’s historic preservation ordinance.  That protection assures us that after we are gone the house will retain some protections and will perhaps be maintained long into the future. The first thing a friend asked me when he learned our home had been included in a historic district was “does that mean you can never change anything?”   

In short the answer to that question is “NO, that does not mean we can never change anything”. Exterior work requires approval by the historic review commission and that normally presents no problems.  I would probably be prevented from wrapping this brick home with vinal siding or tearing off the porch or making some other alteration that changed the overall style of the house.  Work on the interior of a historic house however, does not require pre approval…you can make the interior as “modern” as you want.  Add bathrooms, remove bathrooms, remove walls to make larger rooms, refinish floors or replace them with modern material, etc, etc.  Let me provide an analogy for what you can't do, using food.  You can't take a meatloaf and put icing on it, making it look like a cake.  

Kitchens in old homes are notoriously unfriendly to the way in which people today like to work in a kitchen.  For one thing kitchen designs of old never assumed more than one person would ever be working in the kitchen at the same time so many original kitchens in older homes were quite small and had few cabinets and few or no counter tops, instead relying on the home owner using a stand alone kitchen cupboard. 

I want to show you what I mean about making the inside of an historic home as modern as you wish. The following photos were taken 4 historic homes in my neighborhood. Each kitchen is suited to the homeowners tastes.  Two of the houses date to the first decade of the 20th Century, the other two are in homes that date to the mid and late 19th Century.