Here are some more pictures of my funky house!

Okay, the front again, with some layout notes:

The left bay is the side-loading two car garage with a covered patio behind it. Future plans: Coming out from the front will be the new master suite, while the patio will become the new kitchen/breakfast room. There may or may not be a basement under the master suite.

The center bay contains the entry and the kitchen and dining area at the front of the house (the large window opens onto the dining area) and a powder room and pantry with the 14′x26′ living room at the back. Future plans: The kitchen/dining area will become the formal living/dining with a second window to match the first. Downstairs under this area is a walk-out basement, with a big rec room, mechanical stuff, a big closet, and the meat smokers and sauna. Future plans: Enclose air handler in its own closet, rip out sauna

The right bay contains the true master bedroom in the back, the hall bath in the center, and two kids’ bedrooms on the right upstairs. Future plans: Master bedroom will become the play room. Both bathrooms need to be renovated to make better use of the space. Downstairs, it contains a master-sized bedroom (but tiny closet and no bath), a powder room, a kid’s bedroom, and the well room/utility room. Future plans: The placement of the windows makes the master bedroom perfect for a library/office. The electric hot water heater will be replaced by an indirect hot water heater in the basement (MUCH cheaper to run), while the half bath will probably expand to a full bath at the expense of the well room.

Now, the pictures!

THE ENTRY

This is standing in the entry looking straight ahead into the living room. On the left is a closet and the dining/kitchen entry.

Looking to the right as you enter, you see the stairs leading up and down. Up into the catherdral ceiling area are three bedrooms and two baths, as outlined above, down one level is two bedrooms, a pwoder room, and the well room, and down another level is the basement–so no basement stair s hidden in a closet! It really feels like a part of the house.

This is standing in the doorway to the living room looking back at the entry sidelight. Don’t you love the reed glass?

Now we turn left into THE KITCHEN

This is the kitchen and dining area! Original cabninets but not countertop, original vent hood, original double oven, new flooring.

The dining room window. I love the styling and want to put a twin next to it when I rip out the kitchen and change it to the formal liv/dining.

Through the door in the kitchen is a little area that has three doors off it. The first goes to THE YELLOW POWDER ROOM.

Why is there a toothbrush holder in the half bath? Why not? I just want to mention that I’m disappointed that the fixtures aren’t yellow, too.

Across from it is the door to the PANTRY.

Big, huh?

And then there is the door to the GARAGE.

Yes, the garage has a cathedral ceiling. And, since it’s on an on-grade slab, its ceilting is four feet higher than even that! I’m thinking about a storage loft… The landing I’m standing on will become a hallway to the new master suite, BTW, which will echo the wood of the right bay and will have the windows from the current garage in the eaves.

Now we’ll go back into the entry and turn lrft to get into the LIVING ROOM.

There are two focal points. In this one, you can see the fireplace and huge patio doors. The fireplace will serve as a focal point for one seating area….eventually. At first, though, it will be my formal dining room!

The other focal point is, of course, the TV, which will go against this wall with another furniture grouping. You can see the patio with the wall stone here that will be the future kitchen/breakfast area. Much more logical location! Yay! Though in a smaller room, the new kitchen will be larger, and the wall will be so cool since I’m not going to put any wall cabinets on that side that would cover it.

Now, let’s step out onto the deck and go OUTSIDE.

There is some cool detailing around the patio. Don’t like the color, though–it’s wrong for the house.

The center and garage side of the house from the back. Notice the walkout basement. With some landscaping, it will be more walkout and less basement!

The bedroom bay of the house from the back. Those white accent pieces are all over the house, but many need cleaning badly. (Actually, so does the brick in places…) I have to buy a power washer to remodel the Barn, anyway… The windows are to the master bedrooms.

Look down into the trees beyond the edge of the back yard. That’s the clubhouse! Our property goes down farter than you can see in this picture, all the way to the other side of the stream.

Back inside, we return to the entry and go UPSTAIRS.

The MASTER BEDROOM is on the left. More cathedral ceilings and cool lights…and another fireplace!

It has its own teeny bathroom. So blue! If I rip out this and the adjoining hall bath, I can make much better use of the space.

Across the hall are the KIDS’ BEDROOMS.

The lower window of this one looks over the entry. The upper is in the eaves and starts at about 6′ from the floor. Very cool. The closet has a cathedral ceiling with windows inside–I love it! *g*

This room has a really cool light fixture and the same windows in the eaves (and another normal one against the other exterior wall). These are a good side, too–11′x12′ or so.

The itty bitty hall bath. Ugh. This needs help! I love the yellow tub, tiolet, and sink, though. *g*

Now let’s go DOWNSTAIRS.

This is the master-sized bedroom with no bathroom. Another fireplace, but I can’t use it until I get a hearth! This will be the library eventually. The room isn’t as dramatic as the one above it, BUT (and this is important…) it has much more wall space because of the higher windows and the placement of the closet. More room for books!

The other half bath. Green and glorious!

This downstairs bedroom is smaller.

Can’t forget the well room! I still haven’t found the washer and dryer connections. This looks like a place or the washer…but where does one plug it in? (We’re working on finding them or getting an allowance to install them…)

Let’s go downstairs to the BASEMENT. It was hard to get pics of the sauna, and the meat smokers are pretty darned boring, so here are pics of the main room, the ballroom practice room. *g*

This is from the stairs looking into the room.

And from the room looking back to the stair. The paneling and flooring are….GOING.

Okay. I can announce my big news! I’m moving to Maryland at the end of August!

We really love the activities and opportunities and the atmosphere in the DC region (ok, except for the politics and the general blindness to the rest of the country ). Plus, DH was recruited by a fabulous company where he can do cutting-edge research exclusively, and I found a house that we’ve already signed a contract upon. Here’s a picture!

It is 2,600 sqft (plus a 700 sqft walkout basement) in a lovely established neighborhood on 2.11 acres that back up to a nature preserve. *gggg* Gorgeous trees, big lawn, perfect place for playset and outdoor kitchen and a future swimming pool, even… And a stream down in a valley running through the back woods with a shed on the slope (read: secret hideout) overlooking it. (And deer that will surely eat my entire garden, *sigh*…) It was designed by some snooty European engineer in the 1960s but is a swanky 1950s style–it has a certain Eichler flavor without being uncomfortably modern or wastefully energy inefficient, and it is just dripping with personality, which is what I love in a house, though I usually gravitate toward pre-1940s houses. (DH likes the neighborhood, the fact that the basement’s big enough for a practice ballroom, being less than 2 miles from work, and the size. As for the rest, it’s four walls and a roof with lots of windows…) Only ONE couple has ever owned it–they have recently died and their middle-approaching-senior-aged kids inherited and are selling, so it was immaculately maintained, and except for paint, flooring, and a few of the light fixtures, ieverything is original to the house. It has all the original tile in the 2 half and 2 full bathrooms (which is now on the cutting edge of “in” again–Ann Sacks’ new catalogue is full of 1950s retro tile, for example–and I think it will end up going classic and not out this time around) as well as the original kitchen…EEEK! *g* The 1960s built-in stainless steel double oven is doable for a while, but I’m not giving up my dishwasher! The “invisible hinges” aren’t exactly Blum hardware and are begining to go, too, making the wood-patterned plastic laminate cabinet doors sag.

And, of course, there are the swirly VCT tiles in the dark-paneled basement (both GOING), which also has the sauna (also going!) and the dual built-in MEAT SMOKERS so you can give yourself cancer right in the
comfort of your own home. I love the finish carpentry on the stairs and the fact that the *entire* upper floors are cathedral–and the funky windows under the eaves. And the three 1950s-style fireplaces, and the reed glass in the sidelight, and the light fixtures, most of which are original (and SO cool–not builders specials)!

There are three fabulous original fireplaces–one in the living room, one in the masterbedroom, and one in another room that would be a master if it had its own bathroom. Right now, htere is a kitchen with a big eat-in area, one living room(/ dining room for us) upstairs and a big walkout basement, a 2 car garage (on the left in the picture, side-loading), 2 powder rooms, 1.75 bathrooms, a laundry/well room and 5 bedrooms. You can’t really tell in the pic, but the right hand side of the house is two stories (bushes hide the windows). Upstairs are three bedrooms (1 big, 2 smaller), and downstairs are two (one big, one small) plus the well room. The upstairs big bedroom is the true master, and it’ll be our master bedroom until we add on an new, larger suite, and the other two rooms will be set up as bedrooms. Eventually, that bedroom will become the playroom while the large downstairs room (which has higher windows) will be an office-cum-library. *g* For now, though the larger downstairs room will be the playroom and the small one will be my office! (We’ll also be adding a new kitchen/breakfast area, so that the old one will be a formal living/dining room. Altogether, we’ll have another 750 sqft above grade, so it will be 3,350 above and 700 below. The addition will be seamless with the house, though–basically, the garage area will come out 24′ more than it currently does, and that will be it!)

I’m so inspired right now. *g* I’m looking at the new linoleums (like marmoleum, NOT vinyl) and terrazzo and quartize/terrazzo-like solid surface counters and oak strip flooring and birch slab cabinets and stainless steel and 1950s-style tile and am getting very excited! (I have to admit–the house has no pink bathrooms. Ours are PALE yellow, mint green, blue, and another yellow, plus another yellow shower in the basement. *g* If any were pink, I WOULD be looking for a sledge hammer….) Oh, and the 40s/50s-esque small-scale modern furniture lines, too… Yum. With a house with this much personality, it is quite feasible that, except for appliances and upholstery, I can do a renovation/decoration that will not become dated because it’s so tied to the house’s period–something that really appeals to me, too, because I love refining things to my vision of near-perfection and then leaving them be!

Have I ever mentioned that one of the things I thought about going into in college was a triple double major in interior design, landscape design, and architecture? *g* I like everything too much….

So my brilliant computer scientist husband is spending quality time with his son right now, pursing the intellectually stimulating task of simultaneously making farting sounds with as many different parts of their bodies as possible. They have been doing this for about ten minutes.

Why did I get married and have a boy again?

“There are sadistic scientists who hurry to hunt down errors instead of establishing the truth.”
- Marie Curie

This was a Quote of the Day on Google a while ago, and it amused me because it sounded so much like what many authors say about their critics. To some extent, I agree–those who delight themselves in tearing apart others’ life’s work ARE rather sadistic. However, as brilliant as she was, Marie Curie missed a critical point: Truth will not be found when you base your reasoning upon falsity. And truth–artistic or scientific–is so important because its purity, its reliability, its…accuracy. So the hunting down of errors–or the criticism of bad work–is the measurement of one’s work against the touchstone on truth. If you can’t hunt down errors, then you cannot test something to find that it is true. And where is the establishment of truth then? How can you tell is from all that is false?

….it’s just that my life is exciting (not work-related) right now, but I can’t talk about it yet! Ack! *g* So I can’t really think of much else to say, so I’m not saying anything!

I was looking at something a wrote today, and I’m just glad that this is not the age of hand-writing anymore. I never would have gotten pubbed unless I hired a copyist! My handwriting’s worse than my typing. A LOT worse.

People are very concerned about the obesity epidemic and are speaking about it as if this is the first time that such a problem has occurred–the first time that a more sedentary, more urban way of life has caused serious social health issues. They act as if we have no way to guess what will happen as a result, nor really any way to control it. But something like this HAS happened before, more than 150 years ago.

Before the Industrial Age, people suffered from plagues and famines with depressing frequency. These were acute conditions, however. An illness would come, it’d kill 2%-50% of the population, and then it would go away. The crops wouldn’t grow for a few years, and people would die, and then the rain would fall or stopp falling or it would warm up again. That isn’t to say that many people didn’t suffer from chronic illnesses, from TB to syphilis to infections to toothaches. It simply wasn’t a crippling social problem, if for no other reason than a person with a horribly infected wound tended to become a beggar and die whenever food was short or he caught whatever acute illness was being passed around that year.

The existence of a large body of semi-invalidic or at least delicate individuals didn’t come about until industrialization. There were several reasons for that. For one, acute problems like plagues and famines were no longer the killers they used to be. Britain’s Industrial Age was preceded by and, to a large part, made possibly by a revolution in farming that took place starting several centuries before, which allowed Britain to produce a surplus of food for many years. Only very rarely did crop failure threaten people’s wellbeing. In addition, plague-type epidemics became much more rare. No one’s really sure why this is the case. London of 1750 was filthier and more crowded than that of 1666 (the last great plague year), but it seems that illnesses come and go in cycles, and though there were still cholera epidemics, smallpox, and the like, the Black Death and similar plagues simply…went away for a while.

So without plagues and famine killing off the weak, the problems of the new pattern of life became more and more socially problematical. Yes, people were living longer, but more lived in suffering, unable to work, dependent upon the local government or upon their relatives or their own saved up money to support themselves.

What were these new patterns? Well, let’s start at the top. I’ll discuss conditions in the late Georgiam to high Victorian age, because that’s when they were the worst.

Pollution. We are producing, in toto, more pollution today than ever before because our population is so much higher. However, the concentration of pollution in the cities in the high Victorian age was much higher than anything anyone can experience in a first world country today. The famous “pea soup fogs” of London were brown smog, and they could change the color of a gaslight flame and slip into the houses so that you were walking through fog in your parlor. Lung conditions were a constant worry and a constant threat–when people went to the country to “take the air,” they weren’t weird or foolish. They were getting out of London into a place where they could cough up all the soot in their lungs, where they would not be hounded by asthma or where their scarred lungs could heal a lottle before returning. Even the poor costermongers of London often sold in the towns of Middlesex and other surrounding counties, and those who were particularly sensitive to the conditions of London made a point to spend as much time in the country as possible. Water pollution was at levels we could not imagine today. The Thames was little more than an open cesspool. You could see human waste, dead animals, and trash floating down it. It stank so much one year that Parliament literally could not meet (1858), not with matches burning and camphor-soaked cloths hung–the stench was so overpowering that the MPs literally struggled for breath. It was a problem at all social levels–Prince Albert died from a sewage-born illness. People got their water from the Thames upstream of the city or the underground tributaries of the Thames, and the cholera epidemics of the 19th century were caused by the infiltration of human waste into the water, and you can imagine the many lesser ills that were regularly spread in this manner. Sewage was a problem in another way, too. Only a small number of houses were connected to the public sewers–largely because only the wealthy could afford to make such connections, and the wealthy had no desire to do so because it would, in addition to letting the sewage out, provide the perfect way for rats, beetles, roaches and the like to climb up the plumbing and get IN. Many people, then, has cesspools. And the rich paid people to empty their cesspools wherever it was needed. But the poor…often didn’t. Sometimes, cesspools would overflow and basements would fill up with human waste–inches, even feet of it. Sometimes, there never had been a cesspool and people used the basement, anyway. Often enough, people continued to live there in the poorest districts, if it wasn’t too deep. One reformer recounted how a family of eight slept in a bed above the muck in one cellar and walked on bricks that kept their feet above the level of the sewage. Where basements hadn’t become cesspools, there were usually one of two other places people depoited their waste. First, privies (outhouses) were in common use in the back gardens of both the poor and the middle class. Often enough in poor areas, they suffered from the identical problems of overuse and overflow as in-house cesspools, turning the entire back garden into an open yard of waste, running off when it rained to contaminate the surrounding areas. Second, plenty of areas had neither cesspool nor privy, and residents threw their waste into the streets or, as I mentioned above, they sometimes used the basement. In fact, one reformer reported that more than 80% of houses in one rookery had overflowing or no locations for human waste.

In addition, though more and more dangerous chemicals were being used in the manufacture of various goods, worker protection and pollution controls were virtually nonexistant. Even things as simple as the tiny particles of cotton from the process of making thread can cause emphysema and chronic bronchitis.

But another enormous problem is that there were, for the first time, a significant percentage of the population that did not exercise enough to maintain a basic level of health, which magnified the effects of all the other problems. Many of the poor stood in factories, working only with their hands, or they hunched over their needles 14 hours a day or sat on the tops of cabs. This was actually a biggest problem in the middle classes–for the first time, public transportation took men to jobs where they spent all day sitting behind a cramped desk while their wives travelled in carriages to see their friends or oversaw the servants from their chairs (and while corsets were not the general health-threat people today assume they were–few women tightlaced–they certainly didn’t help, either). “Nervous” and pulmonary lung ailments were at levels never imagined before, and people from all walks of life suffered.

And so people invented solutions.

1) Day trips. It became popular to leave the city and engage in vigorous activity in the countryside for the sake of one’s health for the length of a day. From Brighton to Coney Island, middle and lower class urbanites began using the new transportation systems to escape the confines and pollution of the city if just for a Sunday afternoon.

2) Holidays. Middle class people and even some lower class began taking longer trips out into the countryside and to locations on the Continent (middle class and above) that were known for their good air or healthful activities. Sanitariums became wildly popular resorts, where people could go to improve their health. (Think “19th-c health spa”, where you eat “scientific” foods, play sports and weightlift, splash around in pools, get massages, and have a daily enema to cleanse your body of all the bad toxins and imbalanced humors or whatever. Yeah, you just THOUGHT the whole California detoxing thing was new…)

3) Exercise. People began to exercise simply for the sake of their health. Weightlifting, aerobics, and the like all started during this time period as a result of the woes of sedentary urbanization. Gym class began to be offered in most schools, and fitness became a goal in education. Ever wondered where the glorification of sports came from? Well, some saw being out of shape as a moral failing, and so the opposite must be a virtue, an so athletes were lionized for the first time in many centuries. The Olypmics could hever have started in 1796 or 1696 or 1596. They were a product of the age.

4) Diets. In this age, obeisity was a relatively rare problem, but eating badly was very, very common. Traditional foods focused on meats and simple starches and little else. Breakfast cereals emphasizing whole grains were invented as a response to this problem, as was a new emphasis on vegetables, fruits, and vegetarianism.

These efforts were largely successful, and combined with public health laws regulating everything from food and drugs to polluton and working conditions, they helped significantly raise the average quality of life.

Today, we’ve forgotten the lessons of the 19th and early 20th centuries. We aren’t exercising anymore, and school gym class has been turned into a joke, where everyone is guaranteed an A as long as they show up because actually training for and grading physical fitness is just mean to the fat/slow/clumsy kids. (And grading normal classes is mean to the dumb/slow/poor test taking kids….) We aren’t eating what we should, having increased our average caloric intake hugely over the past 30 years. When we vacation, we typically look for a place we can sit in the sun or shop–neither of which are healthful–and “de-stress”, while we are spending our weekends in front of the TV instead of outside. (We also don’t breastfeed our children enough, buy them too much junk food, and cut back in wrong places like feeding kids skim milk instead of whole.)

Perhaps, too, we need new laws for a new age, just as pollution laws became critical for the first time with the advent of high urbanization. I don’t mean we should sue McDonald’s for making us all fat. But just as companies are required to report nutritional contents, I wouldn’t mind it if a calories-per-serving/meal law were enforced. That would mean that a container or a meal-package that NORMAL people would think SHOULD be eaten or drunk at one sitting should have no more calories than would be appropriate to eat or drink at one sitting. Perhaps restaurants should be restricted to offer no meal-regular drink combination (main dish, however many side dishes as come with it, drink with refill) that would result in exceeding 600 calories, and maybe the average meal on a menu should be kept to 500. Desserts and appetizers (per person) shouldn’t be sold that exceed 150 calories. And all meals offered have to meet some minimal standard for nutrition. (Ditto for store-bought convienience foods, and ditto max-sized packages for junk foods.) That doesn’t mean that people couldn’t BUY more food if they wanted to…but at least they wouldn’t kill themselves by eating just what’s on their plates or by becoming so accustomed no huge serving sizes that they do it to themselves at home, too. Americans over the age of 8 eat out, on average, four times a week. They eat home-cooked meals 5 times a week, of which 3.2 are prepared convenience foods. (I assume the other meals aren’t cooked, and I know on average 2 a week are skipped…) Instituting such a law would mean that about 7.2 meals a week, or over one third, would be calorie-controlled if such measures were taken. And maybe people would begin putting less on their plates the other two-thirds of the time…. (Buy smaller plates! It works!)

Now, about that EXERCISE…!

I’m not a person much inclined to moderation. For example, I’d like to live in a house with at least two living areas, a two-story library, a big home office, four kids’ rooms, a separate kichen and breakfast area, a big pantry, a big laundry room, an exercise room in the basement…..

But then again, I think it would be really, really cool to live in this lavendar house, which has this floorplan.

I also don’t want to live in a small city or in a town not in reach of a large city. But then again, it would be awesome to be a homesteader in, say, Idaho.

Yep. I’m weird.

I’m in Texas now. I stopped by my parents’ on my way to MD to ditch the dogs. During the 12-hr car trip, the Bear was getting tired, and I wanted to convince him to take Blue Blanky so he’d conk out. So I grabbed it and prtended to suck my fingers as I held it, which is what he does. He thought it was hilarious, of course. And then I let my head sag slowly to the side and sucked slower and slower until I stopped. He giggled for a moment, and then there was a worried pause.

“Mommy? You still driving?” he asked, his voice laced with concern.

I said nothing. Didn’t even move.

“Still driving, Mommy?” he asked again.

I still didn’t respond.

He’s getting VERY worried now. “Still DRIVING?”

Okay. I responded then. “Yes, I’m still driving, Bear.” But what I was THINKING was, “If you were just two years older, I would have started to swerve….”

Yep. I’m a bad, bad mother.

Her: you still awake?

Me: no.