Our house
We live in a very small house, by American standards. It was built in the early 1930s. It has two small bedrooms upstairs. It has one bathroom, a living room, a dining room, and a kitchen downstairs. The basement is half-finished so there are two more small rooms down there. The walls are lathe, which means they are sort of plaster over wire mesh and they feel like rock. The floors are hardwood (underneath various other flooring options on the main floor). We have archways and picture rails and other charming old details that newer houses do not have. We had a coal shute for years until we took it out to put in an egress window.
I love this place. I love the solidness of it. I love that it has an upstairs and a basement (I grew up in Washington State in a house that had neither). I love that it is old and that many families have lived here. I wonder about them all the time. Who left the Disney stickers on the mirror? Who painted so much of the wood in the house flat, light green (it has almost all been painted over numerous times but I see that color everywhere when we renovate). I wish I could sit down in my living room and shut my eyes and be transported back to 1933. What kind of pictures hung from that picture rail? What did the furniture look like? Who might walk into the room?
The Minnesota History Museum did a wonderful exhibit a few years back in which they built part of a fake house inside the museum that was an exact replica of an old house in the Twin Cities. Then they filled it with the actually history of who had lived in the house over the years. They also detailed the history of the neighborhood and how it had changed. It was a very interactive. You walked through this house and you saw photos, you could pick up objects from various time periods, you could listen to audio accounts of what people remembered. I could have stayed in that exhibit all day.
We have redone much of our house, and while I love how it all looks and know it needed to be done, there is a small part of me that was sad to see the pink plastic fifties tiles in the bathroom go into the construction dumpster. Somebody loved that pink bathroom once, when those fancy modern tiles were brand new. And while the kitchen cupboards were hideous and we really needed new ones, there was something fascinating about the layers and layers of paint on them and the seventies bright orange contact paper we could not get off some of the shelves.
Someday someone I do not know likely is going to stand in our bathroom and look at the faun and nymph and mermaid art tiles amongst the white subway tile in our bathroom and say "Those have got to go". Then they will redo the room in some style I can't imagine. But maybe not. Maybe they will sit in the bathtub and gaze at those tiles and wonder who put them there. And maybe they will say "Those have to stay" just like we did with the picture rails and old doorknobs. I'm okay with it either way. I do hope that they wonder about the people who lived here before they did, though. I think it is good to wonder about the stories that were in a space before you showed up on the scene.
I love this place. I love the solidness of it. I love that it has an upstairs and a basement (I grew up in Washington State in a house that had neither). I love that it is old and that many families have lived here. I wonder about them all the time. Who left the Disney stickers on the mirror? Who painted so much of the wood in the house flat, light green (it has almost all been painted over numerous times but I see that color everywhere when we renovate). I wish I could sit down in my living room and shut my eyes and be transported back to 1933. What kind of pictures hung from that picture rail? What did the furniture look like? Who might walk into the room?
The Minnesota History Museum did a wonderful exhibit a few years back in which they built part of a fake house inside the museum that was an exact replica of an old house in the Twin Cities. Then they filled it with the actually history of who had lived in the house over the years. They also detailed the history of the neighborhood and how it had changed. It was a very interactive. You walked through this house and you saw photos, you could pick up objects from various time periods, you could listen to audio accounts of what people remembered. I could have stayed in that exhibit all day.
We have redone much of our house, and while I love how it all looks and know it needed to be done, there is a small part of me that was sad to see the pink plastic fifties tiles in the bathroom go into the construction dumpster. Somebody loved that pink bathroom once, when those fancy modern tiles were brand new. And while the kitchen cupboards were hideous and we really needed new ones, there was something fascinating about the layers and layers of paint on them and the seventies bright orange contact paper we could not get off some of the shelves.
Someday someone I do not know likely is going to stand in our bathroom and look at the faun and nymph and mermaid art tiles amongst the white subway tile in our bathroom and say "Those have got to go". Then they will redo the room in some style I can't imagine. But maybe not. Maybe they will sit in the bathtub and gaze at those tiles and wonder who put them there. And maybe they will say "Those have to stay" just like we did with the picture rails and old doorknobs. I'm okay with it either way. I do hope that they wonder about the people who lived here before they did, though. I think it is good to wonder about the stories that were in a space before you showed up on the scene.