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robb65 · 56-60, M
Picture a 150y/o four room house with a wide hall running front to back. Picture additional rooms added by on by people who weren't carpenters (probably 75-100 years ago), some of which were built using whatever used lumber they had laying around. When I bought the place there were four doors opening onto the back porch.
dancingtongue · 80-89, M
@robb65 Our first house in Oakland was somewhat like that. Not quite as old, but almost 100 today, and somone had tacked on a large room in back extending the length of the house. Turned out it originally must have been intended as a sunroom/greenhouse for plants because it had no electricity, no insulation. The realtor had dressed it up with some cheap paneling to look like more than it was to maintain it was an additional bedroom or family room. But it was in our very low price range, and accepted a Veterans' mortgage -- most did not in those days. When we got to the point of being able to afford it, we had that room torn off and built a legitimate two-story addition.
robb65 · 56-60, M
@dancingtongue It's fairly common to find what was once a porch become walled in. A dead giveaway is a floor that slops noticeably towards the outside wall. This was a common way to add a bathroom to a house built before indoor plumbing.
My kitchen wasn't part of the original house. The floor joist start out as 2x12's up against the original but the farther back you go they get smaller as they ran out of usable 1x12's. One wall of my kitchen was covered in horizontal layer of 1/2" tongue and groove, then a layer of paper bags from the cleaners (with a three digit phone number) in the next town south, and then a second vertical layer of 1/2" T&G. This was nailed up with cut nails.
There was once a second house on my property that must have been torn down in the late 20's or early 30's, I suspect some of the lumber in the additions to my house came from there, I'm just not sure if it was done long enough ago that cut nails were still being used or if they salvaged and reused the nails as well.
The house and almost 5 acres sold for less than 25,000. Needless to say I couldn't have rented a place as cheap as the house payments were.
My kitchen wasn't part of the original house. The floor joist start out as 2x12's up against the original but the farther back you go they get smaller as they ran out of usable 1x12's. One wall of my kitchen was covered in horizontal layer of 1/2" tongue and groove, then a layer of paper bags from the cleaners (with a three digit phone number) in the next town south, and then a second vertical layer of 1/2" T&G. This was nailed up with cut nails.
There was once a second house on my property that must have been torn down in the late 20's or early 30's, I suspect some of the lumber in the additions to my house came from there, I'm just not sure if it was done long enough ago that cut nails were still being used or if they salvaged and reused the nails as well.
The house and almost 5 acres sold for less than 25,000. Needless to say I couldn't have rented a place as cheap as the house payments were.
dancingtongue · 80-89, M
@robb65 The layer of paper bags reminds me of the first property my parents ever bought -- 20 acres of cotton land with an old shack on it. The interior "walls" of the shack were sheets of the brown paper that they used in the vineyards to lay out the grapes to dry into raisins. The exterior had never been painted, so the wood had shrunk from the sun exposure, leaving gaps, so at night you could lay in bed and listen to the breezes rustle the paper walls.