Monthly Archives: April 2013

“Before” Part III

You can see parts 1 and 2 here, respectively.

As mentioned previously, our house is a three bedroom, 1.5 bath split-level. Here are some views of the bedrooms. There isn’t much to say about them other than they too have beautiful oak floors under the carpet, and the house has a matched set of Anderson casement windows with “piggy back” storms – in the bedrooms these windows are great because they allow lots of light in but remain private as well as letting you utilize the wall space beneath them. The bedrooms also each have similar amenities – each has a stained wood sliding door set on a standard rectangular closet (not shown in these pictures.) My Grandmother also had a love of lots of window treatments as evidenced here – she routinely covered up all of the beautiful wood trim and windows themselves. We don’t follow that belief. This was common throughout the house, and in the old pictures I have around too.


Master Bedroom

Continue reading

About That Header Picture

So, you may wonder what the picture at the top of the blog with the old truck in it is about. Through some deductive reasoning, you probably (correctly) assumed that it is a shot of the house being built. One of the cool things about owning a house that comes through your family (and was built by them) is that you usually get a lot of historical documents and reference materials. I have a whole collection of pictures starting from when the foundations were poured forward – I even have the plans. I’ll post more on those another time. The picture has a handwritten date of October 19th, 1958 from my Grandfather on the back. Coincidentally, I posses the camera this was taken with – a Voigtlander Bessa 6×9 that takes 120 medium-format film and shoots amazingly beautiful pictures. Here is the uncropped shot:

 

It’s All About The Sputniks

One of the most talked about features in our house are the Sputnik lights. What is a Sputnik light, you might ask? Why only one of the most quintessentially mid-century light fixtures out there. A Sputnik light is any one of a variety of space-age starburst style fixtures. The atomic age feel was inspired by, as you may guess, the space race from the 1950s and 1960s – the light looked sleek and contemporary with polished metal arms…not unlike a certain Soviet satellite. I don’t know if they acquired that name at the time or if they were retro-named years later, but regardless – a Sputnik chandelier and matching sputnik ceiling lights have been a fixture in this house since its construction. Here is a picture from 1966:

Continue reading

More “Before”

Our house is what we would classify as a medium-sized house: a bit over 2000 square feet, three bedrooms and one a half baths with an attached two-car garage. As a back-split, the house has some really awesome structural features. For instance, there are no load-bearing interior walls. In addition because there is a common interior wall between all levels, running things (like a wire from the attic to the basement for our TV antenna) is ridiculously easy – you just put it down the chase. Drop ceiling on the lower level? That equates to easy access to any underfloor areas. Smart and crafty, that grandfather of mine.

The kitchen has two really great features. First, it has this awesome built-in bench as you see in the above picture. It was built around 1962, and has been reupholstered several times over the years. The covering in this picture is from the late 90s and it definitely shows. That patterned wallpaper? 1986. I know you’re jealous. But as you can see – lots of windows (8!) and lots of light. Continue reading

Where to Start?

Before we moved in, my grandparents built our house and lived here for nearly 52 years. One of the cool things about that for us is it means we have literally all of the history of the house in pictures and sometimes our own memories. I have stacks of pictures and slides, and a bunch of pictures I took a while before my grandmother moved out so we could see how different things end up being.

Well, this may take several posts..

Let’s start here. The shot at right is the living room circa 2011, taken from the balcony of the top floor (where the bedrooms are.) When you enter the house (just out of sight on the right side of the picture) you are greeted by a cathedral ceiling and the foyer and living room are open to the second floor. My grandparents had all of the hardwood floors in the house carpeted as of about 1962. The couch in the picture is gold crushed velour – it was reupholstered from the original Continue reading