Re: Floorplans

On Thu, 26 Jan 2006 16:54:57 -0600, Suzanne A Blom wrote:

>>
> That was great, but, damn, when I did my rough sketch from it, even tho you
> say square, I still did the Milwaukee narrow-fronted house.--& that was the
> one thing I already knew was different from the few pictures I'd found. This
> is why I needed a plan to start from, to start to undo my preconceptions.
> Thanks again.

Narrow houses are older than what you specified. The typical plan there is
only one room wide, upstairs and downstairs, and the chimneys are on the
extreme ends, with entries near the middle of the long walls. If the
builder was saving money, porches go across the lower floor level; if he
wanted to be pretentious, the porch roof is at upper level, with tall
columns. The reason for it is ventilation -- one can open windows on both
sides of the room for a breeze. Davy Crockett's house, in Missouri, is like
that. The style was on its way out about the time of the Civil War.

Of course, in Milwaukee it was street frontage that controlled. You find
the same in New Orleans, the so-called "shotgun" plan, three or four rooms
in a row with entrances on the short side. Those are po'folks houses,
though.

In the plan I was describing, the kitchen flue is on the inside wall,
between kitchen and dining room, near the outside of the house. It isn't a
"chimney" because it doesn't serve a fireplace, only stoves: cookstove
below, bedroom stove above. The "big" fireplace between parlor and dining
room is closer to the outside of the house than to the hall, but there's
room between it and the outside wall for (on the parlor side) a small
closet, and (on the dining room side) the china closet. The big double
doors are on the hall side of the closet.

Note that in master bedroom and all the upstairs bedrooms the fireplaces,
as such, have been closed off; the chimneys now serve as flues for bedroom
stoves.

The "small" fireplace, between "sitting room" and master bedroom, is closer
to the hall, again with room for a small closet there (the only remaining
closet after the bathroom was added). There were once big closets on the
outside wall side, but they went away when the bathroom went in.

What I have been describing is a house belonging to the prosperous owner of
a foundry and machine shop in a small town. Around 1952 the wall between
the entry hall and the sitting room came down, opening sitting room + hall
space into a "living room" suitable for TV watching :-) The owner died in
the mid-seventies, and the house is now a funeral parlor. It has been added
onto considerably. A smaller version, with only the lower floor, was my
grandmother Warrick's house (built 1911). Grandmother Locke's house (built
around 1922) did away with half of the hall, from front door to the wall
between kitchen and dining room, and pushed the back out a bit to allow for
two bedrooms back there.

Windows. One word: lots. Before air conditioning, ventilation was at an
absolute premium. Across the front porch, four big windows facing the
street, one facing the carriage portico (and a door there). The windows
look quite odd to us, nowadays -- the bottom of the sash is only a foot or
less off the floor, and the windows are six feet high and two and a half
wide. Both upper and lower sashes open. Each sash is a single large pane of
glass, conspicuous consumption in those days (mullioned windows are a relic
of expensive glassmaking). Only the bathroom windows are up high. Each
upstairs bedroom has two such windows on each outside wall. The master
bedroom has three on the carriageway side and two on the back wall, one of
which has been turned into a door for access to the "conservatory" porch.

Ceilings are ten feet on the lower floor, nine on the upper.

All the door facings are a full 6" wide except those of the front door,
which are 8", and an inch thick. The upper crossbar of the facings is
longer; it's cut off at an angle and milled lengthwise, giving an effect
rather like the wings of the German eagle. Parlor wallpaper is heavy, a
dark-tan background with dark-green and maroonish (dried-blood-color)
velvet flower patterns. The dining room is paneled in mahogany, boards set
vertical with milled beading. The sitting room is mostly bookshelves, but a
lighter version of the parlor wallpaper is visible...

I can noodle this for hours :-)

Regards,
Ric
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