This Old House

I live in a house that was built in the 1890's by a local baptist Minister named McLallen. It was a grand old place and was very modern for its' day, as the 3-hole latrine they used was actually attached to the back of the house. (No traipsing through the snow in the middle of the night) The holes have been covered over, shelves have been added and now we use it for storage. We fondly refer to this closet as "the 3-holer." The 3-holer provides great cold storage for food and drinks at Christmastime when the fridge gets full. I can only imagine what it must have been like to sit in there to use the facilities in the winter of 1897! Robin has suggested knocking this part of the house off, but I couldn't bear to demolish such a quirky piece of history. We had to rescue a sick cat out from one of the old holes once. She got in through the crawl space, got injured and we had to pry the seat covers off. There's still a bit of funk under that shelf after all these years.

At one point this old house was a nursing home. They were probably able to house 5 or 6 people here, and I am guessing that is the era when they laid down institutional asbestos tiling over the old wood floors. We have 2 bedrooms that still have it on the floors, and have covered a lot of the rest of it. There are 2 stairways in this house, a front stairway and a narrow back stair. It reminds me of my grandmother's house. She always referred to the back stair as the servant's stairway. Could be. Our floors are NOT level, we have cracked window panes, missing storm windows and creaky floors. But I like this house. It has character. There are some really cool wooden details in this house that are hard to find in new homes- like pocket doors, matching doors throughout, wide trim and large tall windows. Plus, this place has good karma. Happy people have lived here, and still do. I've had more than several people tell me this- people who have visited and people who have lived here while I've been in Japan. I think perhaps houses have auras, depending on their history. Ours has a happy one, at least.

I will tell you that one day shortly after we moved into this house, Nathan came down stairs from his room and told me he'd seen someone reflected in the mirror behind him. Nate was getting dressed in front of the mirror and saw a little old man in a wheel chair just looking at him. When Nate turned around to look in his room, nothing was there. I asked him if he felt afraid. Nope, it was just an old dude. He wasn't frightened he explained very matter-of-factly, as if he were telling me his light bulb needed changing. We've never had any experiences like that since. I'm sure all the drumming and electric guitar, all the loud singing and piano playing has been enough to clear the air of any lingering spirits.

We are planning on doing a few things to increase the energy efficiency of this old drafty place, so we started with an energy audit. This really nice guy named Blake (who lives in town here) came by to check things out. He checked for insulation, took pictures of every room, checked our appliances, our crawl spaces, our basement, our attic. The very coolest thing he did was to close up all the windows and doors and seal a very powerful fan blowing out into one of our doors. Then he and his assistant went around to find leaks. They went in search of blowing air. When it was all said and done, he congratulated me on having the windiest house he had ever audited. Wow! I feigned excitement, "What do I win??"

They will send me their report with prioritized suggestions for improvement in a couple of weeks. I guess we'll go from there.