That Old Place

That Old Place

As I look back, I did a lot with That Old Place.  It remains the oldest house we ever lived in (circa 1930 I believe).  It was a solid brick building with a rectangular dormer in front.  It had two concrete steps and a small cement porch that was only halfway covered by the second story.  Inside, the walls were made of real masonry stuck, painted a sort of creme color, with most of the woodwork painted in white enamel.  The ceilings were also stucco between exposed timbers spaced evenly across the length of each room.  The single exception on the first floor was the small kitchen, which was adjoined by a booth-like eating table.  It had a full dining room and a screen porch as well, so this odd kitchen seating arrangement didn't matter much.  My mother loved the place because of the dining room, my wife claimed that was because she was dying to get rid of the old dining room furniture she had as a hand-me-down in her own townhouse.  

We later discovered the previous owners had removed a half bath and installed the booth in its place.  Having one two children under the age of four, we quickly reconverted it to that needed half bath.  The full bath at the top of the stairs was tiled in its entirety, walls, ceiling, tub enclosure--all of it--in pink ceramic tile.  We never had the courage to tackle changing it.  

I learned the craft of wallpapering there.  I wallpapered all three bedrooms (one of them twice).  I really only learned the most important part of wallpapering--choose only vertical patterns or you'll never finish.  But I digress, the stories of my remodeling adventures, which haunt me still, are for another day.  This is just a description of the house.  The roof was newly replaced, and the exterior, made of old-timey red--almost porous--brick, had been tuck pointed with a dark gray mortar leaving no indentations between the bricks.  i'll mention only two more things that will fill you with foreboding about my tales of do-it-yourselfing.  The yard had no fence and the basement was unfinished.  It had a ribbon driveway--two separate eighteen-inch wide strip of cement, separated by two feet or so of grass (or mud, depending upon the time of year.  We moved in during the snowiest winter in a half-century, so it was March before we learned our driveway was not cement all the way across.  It was buried in ice and snow a foot thick for the first three months we lived there.  

A second discovery made later that Spring was that the house was nearly encircled by aa half dozen varieties of perennial chrysanthemums.  That more than made up for the driveway issue.  We loved that place and the people we met there more than any other in our lives thus far.