My old house

I have finally finished repairing all the doors in my dining room that did not close. There are six doors in my dining room, which I think is unusual. Two doors lead from the kitchen into the room, one to the wine cellar, one to the attic, one to the front porch and one to the downstairs bathroom. The entry to the formal living room is an archway. That’s because it represents the connection of one very old house, the dining room, to a not very much newer house, the living room, et al.

The dining room actually existed on its own as a house at one time in the early 1700’s, four lots down our street. The living room, den, birthing room and large attic, now two bedrooms and a bath, existed on the current site, first as a Cape half house and later as a full Cape.

The dining room house was dragged down the street around 1800 to 1830 and added to the Cape. On the back of the dining room there was a very old winter kitchen. The summer kitchen and the outhouse were in the back yard on opposite sides of the barn. There are lilacs where the outhouse used to be. I still have the permit that allowed my grandfather-in-law, Frank Crosby, to add indoor plumbing in 1936. Not a moment too soon according to my late mother-in-law.

Frank’s wife Gert complained bitterly that she had no pantry and the wood shed was on the other side of the barn. At different times, Frank went down to the Town Wharf nearby and purchased old shacks from the fishermen there. He had these shacks dragged here, cut down a window at the back of the kitchen and made the opening into a door. Then he stuck the shacks onto the back of the old kitchen. One became a pantry and one the new wood shed.

This whole section collapsed in 1984. An inspection revealed that when Frank had installed a sink in the kitchen, he left the drain pipe under the crawl space to empty into the sand there. Almost fifty years later the accumulated moisture caused the floor to give way and so went the rest of the kitchen.

We rebuilt this area. We created a modern kitchen and family room following the original exterior footprint despite our protestations to the historic commission that there was nothing original about the two fish shacks!

At the same time, we removed an odd projection from the front door. It was a very small shack that Frank had found somewhere, origin unknown, and stuck to the original front door to create a sort of closet for Gert who claimed a great lack of closet space.

This front door is actually on the side of the lot away from the main street the house sits on. This was done purposefully so that the dust from the horse drawn wagons on the dirt road wouldn’t get into the house in the summer when the front door might be open for the breeze.

So now all the doors in the dining room close properly. My guess is that absolutely no one but me will notice!