Dorka the explorer
Happy birthday, Nance. May your next fifty-three be as good as the first.
Frick has quite the little beard going on.
Robyn and I explored the house across the street yesterday afternoon with her father. It was fun, but also sad to see such a nice looking old house in such bad shape, harvested and left to rot. The building style is very similar to our house, which came along some 60 years later. The materials are the same, too, lots of rough cut lumber for the framing and tongue-and-groove pine for the floors, walls, and ceiling. They certainly don’t make them like they used to.
No one fell through any floors.
We didn’t encounter any critters, except for a lone daddy longlegs. We didn’t find any bodies, or see any ghosts.
We found some interesting items, though: a couple of old handmade dresses, a rusty pocketknife, and an empty bottle imprinted with “Dr. King’s New Discovery.” Dr. King’s discovery claimed to cure coughs, colds, and consumption (TB) back when it was popular in the 1890’s.
I’ll shut up now and just bring on the pictures. You can click on any picture to get to a bigger, more detailed version. Bear in mind that we were in a dark house without a flashlight, so some of the pictures may be a little fuzzy.
The floor of the front porch was scary, because the boards weren’t nailed to the joists.
They were just laying on them, and didn’t look all that solid.
The stairs to the front porch could use a little work.
Just inside the front door is an entryway, with rooms to the right and left.
Directly ahead was another small room (maybe 6×8′) with stairs and a door out the
back of the house. You can see the rough cut studs (which are actually 2″ x 4″) here
separating the entryway from the back exit.
Most of the rooms had layer upon layer of wallpaper. Our house was like that, too.
Why anyone would cover up that nice old pine is beyond me.
This room is to the left of the entryway, and also has a door to the front porch.
The chimney is sagging, and to the right you can see where the house’s only bathroom
was added later. The studs are smaller and newer, and that door is hollow-fill.
More fine old wood that could still be put to good use.
We found W-2s for a married couple. The husband worked in local construction
and the wife worked at a legendary local restaurant (Greenbrier, for those of you in the area).
Between the two of them, they made about $5100 in 1973.
The stylin’ bathroom. Note the fuzzy cover on the tank lid and the spiffy
fake paneling on the wall.
This is the back of the front door, and more of that wallpaper.
A window in what I assume is the dining room (it’s off the kitchen), and still more wallpaper.
A lot of the window frames in this house look like they could be cleaned up and reused.
The kitchen supports have collapsed, and it sits about 12 inches lower than the rest of the house.
As you can see, it’s a model of modernness.
Evidence of the collapse.
Old, old, old.
More wallpaper, on a different wall of the dining room.
There was an old drawer laying in the floor. I don’t know what it went to, but…
…judging from the dovetail cuts, it was completely handmade.
Another good-looking window frame, looking out onto the front porch.
Looking out the back door (the door that’s pictured in the first interior shot above)
over towards the kitchen. There’s a creepy well out here, which I’ll get to in a bit.
A better view of the stairwell that’s near the back door.
We couldn’t go up it, because it was blocked by boards and crap.
This shot, which is kind of confusing, is looking up the stairs. There were
boards from the landing across the stairwell, resting on stairs, thus making
something like a ceiling over them.
Fortunately, the stairs in the dining room were mostly clear.
I won’t lie here. It was scary going up them, not knowing if they were
going to hold. Lucky for us, they did.
Halfway up, I sensed an ethereal presence and snapped a quick shot.
Just kidding. It was dust.
I like this picture. I like it better in black and white.
The floor up here didn’t look all that solid, so we stayed at the top of the stairs.
There are a couple of rooms we didn’t get to see, off through the door you can see
in the left of the picture. Right in the center is an old molded mattress.
Again I am led to wonder why someone would put ugly assed wallpaper
over such nice pine.
I think the banister could be harvested and used.
The room at the top of the stairs has a NICE window looking out the
front of the house. It was probably 5-6 feet wide.
The flooring looks like it could be harvested, too. Plenty of wood there for sanding still.
The room through the arch is to the right of the entryway, and the room I was in
when I took this picture is at the front of the house. If you look back up to the first two
pictures, I’m in the part of the house that’s to the right. The stairs I just came down are
on the right (out of the picture).
What it looks like between ceiling and floor. Our house is the same way.
Under the stairs. Note the broken 45 in the bottom left. That’s a Carpenters
song, released in 1976. It’s said to have been Karen’s favorite song.
Handmade dresses, hung on a sill.
Out back, the old well sits like an evil toad. Inside the concrete cap…
…the stuff of which nightmares are made.
When I was clearing off the cap so I could get pictures down in the well,
a board slipped in. It took a good three seconds to hit bottom. It thumped on
solid ground, so I guess the well’s dry. My guess is that the sparkles above are
broken glass.
Going through the old house was a pretty awesome experience. I’m still tempted to offer to buy it from the current owner. If I understand correctly, he’s almost finished harvesting wood, and there’s still a goodly amount of usable lumber in there. Enough big pieces to build a nice tractor shed, I think. It would be pretty awesome to sink several treated posts for support, then build the rest of my tractor shed out of rough-cut pine that’s over 130 years old.
Your tour of the old house did what old houses always do to me - I begin imagining the family who first built the place. How excited they must have been to move into their new home … their children waking up to summer mornings - did they all work in the fields, or were they affluent enought to have hired help? Was there a one-room schoolhouse nearby? All the Sunday dinners cooked over the years in that old kitchen, the babies and the old grandpas. The livestock and then, later, maybe the excitement of the first horseless carriage. If only those old pine boards could talk…
Thanks for the photographs, Fred.
I vote that you do exactally that. Not that you asked, but it would make for more interesting DIY posts in the future!
awesome! I wonder what happened in the years between 1976 onwards and now - when was it last lived in - any ideas? I love it!
Does anyone else think the kitchen looks like the Cramden’s kitchen in “The Honeymooners”?
Thanks for the photo tour, Fred. (Don’t buy it, Fred…you need a break…and when your veg comes in you’ll have much more work than you bargained for.)
You really should buy it. How could you keep yourself from picking up those remnants - the dresses, the record, etc.? How much did they guy pay for it, and why has it been sitting since the 70s?
Zabadu, I’m more interested in the wood than the remnants.
I’d like to find out more about the house, for sure, but right now I’m looking into tracking down the history of my own. Land’s cheap around here, so I can’t imagine he paid too terribly much for it.
That’s funny, I’m more interested in the remnants than the wood!! I’d love to have pieces of the wallpaper, the dresses, the record and other bits you can find rummaging around.
And yeah, when I saw the bannisters, I said to myself “those will work…”
How much would “not too terribly much” be around?
About $3000 / acre, give or take. Maybe as much as $4000. Definitely not like the $30,000 for a quarter acre in the burbs.
Those pictures broke my heart. There’s something so wrenching about an old abandoned house.
I think you should buy it, rip off the kitchen, replace it with a new one, fix the rest of it and make a killing!!! It looks like it still has good bones. The roof still looks straight (from the pix). They sure don’t make houses like that anymore.
Hey Fred - I collect old Bud cans - Iwould love to get my hands on the Bud Dry can in the last picture - I would pay for it plus shipping. let me know!
Those pictures broke my heart. There’s something so wrenching about an old abandoned house.
I think you should buy it, rip off the kitchen, replace it with a new one, fix the rest of it and make a killing!!! It looks like it still has good bones. The roof still looks straight (from the pix). They sure don’t make houses like that anymore.
I agree. I looked at them thinking “I could do this here, and this there..”. The arch is what sold me on the building.
BTW Fred, Happy Birthday!
I think maybe they did the wallpaper thing because it was “fancier” than the bare wood.
Lotsa people collect old wallpaper scraps and the like so keep that in mind if you do decide to buy the house….could make a killing on eBay.
LOVE the pictures, thank you.
My goodness, Fred…. your cock certainly is getting hairy! Guess that’s what happens once one hits the adolescent years, LOL.
Nice tour of the old house… thanks for sharing!
I’m certain the people who lived in the house in the beginning would have thought the bare pine was “ugly assed>” Much like someone today having bare sheetrock on thier walls.
What a fun pictorial. I wish I could go there!
I KNOW someone is drooling over those wallpaper samples. I tink they are very collectable. And when I saw the Bud Dry can I knew someone would want it as well. And I was right!
Thanks for the tour!
Fred, you fucker - I am NOT that old! Have a happy birthday, too - We’ll celebrate both our birthdays when we come down with an awesome Catchphrase tournament (but I’m not sitting near you, ya kicker).
Hope the Leprechauns bring you joy!
Wow, what a great old house! I also feel a sadness at what I feel is such a waste. I wonder what made someone just walk out one day and never return? It seems someone has to be paying at least the taxes on the property, why not at least rent it out?
Interesting tour, Fred! I’m sort of a well geek - how wide was it? I don’t run into wells that old out west here really, so those old homestead ones fascinate me. D’you think it was hand-dug, or an early auger drill?
[…] Yes, today was my birthday (I’m 42, dammit - Fred’s a liar). I spent the first part of the day at work dealing with a bunch of self-entitled idiots who worked my last goddamn nerve and had me muttering bad things about them under my breath. I was aching all over and it totally blew what little concentration I might have had so dealing with annoying idiots was not making me happy. Couple that with the fact that I haven’t done anything right at the office for the past two days and you can pretty much assume the kind of mind-set I was in. Happy Birthday, whee! […]
Thanks for the pictures, Fred. Ditto to what everyone else has said, except that uncovered well is pretty scary to me.
Jules - the hole in the top of the concrete cover was 12-16 inches across, but the actual well opening was three feet or more. It was pretty dang scary.
I think when the house was built, seeing as it was all built out of wood right, that wood was considered common so if you wanted to be genteel you painted or hung wallpaper. Now it is almost the other way around. If I wanted to put up really nice wood panelling it would cost a fortune but painting or wallpaper would be considerably less. Also considering how rare ‘real’ wood is now, everything is laminate or veneer, that is why we love it so much. My first house was about 50-60 years old and we discovered it had a lot of the original trim that was now covered with layers and layers of paint but underneath was a gorgeous dark wood that we were pretty sure was mahogany. We also had great hardwood floor that we refinished as well. Then we bought this house we are in now which is about 4 years old and has so little character that it feels barren. We are working on it but I think it takes decades for a house to take on the same sort of character that draws people to houses like the one you have pictured and the house you guys just bought.