Randy's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun challenge for August 23 was this:
Do you recall the layout of one of your family homes (a parent's home, a grandparent's home, your first home with your spouse/SO, etc.)? Can you estimate the size of the house and the size of the rooms? What features were in each room? Can you draw the floor plan, showing doors, windows, etc.?This sounded both fun and challenging. I wrote about my childhood home years ago using photos but I had not considered the sizes of the room. I'm in no way adept at estimating measurements that are longer than a foot so I could be completely wrong about how wide and deep the inside of our house was.... (I hoped the county auditor's website would have measurements but it didn't.) I guess my drawing is somewhat proportional if inaccurate.
My parents owned the duplex and we lived in one side (except that the dividing wall on the second floor between the two sides of the house had been removed. The house had a wide front which, when divided into the two sides, made the width and depth of each side about equal, though maybe a little deeper than wider.
This is my rough (very rough) drawing of the layout of the house.
The kitchen had one wall with the refrigerator and sink and around the corner the stove. Because the essentials weren't in a triangle against three walls, it allowed for a kitchen table to take up a good amount of floor space. (Our current home as the sink, stove, and refrigerator on three walls. No island or table for us in that part of the kitchen!)
The room beside the kitchen was somewhat of a work room. My father's desk for repairing watches and jewelry was there, my mom's sewing machine was also there for a while, and eventually my mom's desk stood opposite my father's.
The upstairs ran the width of the building but was narrower than the first floor. It was one long hallway with four rooms opening off it. The rooms on either end were larger than the rooms between them. All had windows (two in the end rooms) and there were high windows along the back side of the hallway, but there was no air conditioning. One fan in the hall did nothing to circular air in all four rooms, or in any of the rooms, if truth be told. We sweltered on hot summer nights.
The wide front porch was one of my favorite places, especially in the summer. It was a place to play games with friends, read, and watch the thunderstorms.
As I think of this house now I think how compact it was, and my mom's motto was "a place for everything and everything in its place." She was definitely the leader in running her household.
If I were to go back and visit, I'm sure it would seem much smaller than it did when I lived there.
—Nancy.
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Your home was beautiful and that front porch is great. I didn't even notice that it was a duplex at first. It looks very much like a one family house.
ReplyDeleteThank you, Linda. I think the angle of the photo makes it look like a single dwelling and honestly, when I look at it now, it hardly seems large enough for two families.
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