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sarahmichelefOur neighborhood was built in the late 1940s and early 1950s - our house dates to 1950. Like lots of post-war development, there are a handful of types of homes in the neighborhood. It’s not as bad as the street that TRex’s daycare was on - take a walk down Tudor Road using Street View and see what I mean - but there are a LOT of houses that look very similar to each other up here, too.
Because we always enter our house from the side, I hadn’t really thought about the fact that it, too, is a tract home until just recently. Honestly, I don’t know why it took 4 years for me to figure this out, but it did. Pictured here is what our house looks like from the front. It is virtually identical to probably half of the houses on our block. There is a variation on this theme, which involves a second gable in front of the one our house has.From the side, they all look pretty much like any house drawn by an older elementary school student - a brick box with a sloping roof, plus the gable.
The cool thing, though, is the ways in which the houses have been added on to. Most retain their original footprint, but almost all of them have various second-floor additions frankensteined on. Ours is no exception. I haven’t been able to get into one of the other houses to confirm this, but here’s what I think has been added to our house, whose profile is quite different from the other houses of its type.
Note how the line of the roof changes; I think* that when the garage (at far right with the grey roof) and upstairs bath (in the yellow portion) were added, they also expanded the footprint of the house. From this side, that extension is where I am sitting right now - the study/guest room. On the other side, it is the screen porch through which we enter the house. We KNOW the second-floor bath and the garage are additions - that bath is out of line with all of the other plumbing in the house, and nobody was building houses with attached garages in 1950. I think that in doing that addition, they also moved staircases. Right now, the stairs to the second floor are in the “leaving room” - the entryway with the doors to the screen porch and the garage. The stairs to the basement, on the other hand, are right smack in the middle of the house - in a straight line from the front door, off of the little hall that connects the kitchen, living room, dining room, and bathroom. To me, it would seem much more logical to have these reversed - “main” stairs beginning in the center of the house, basement stairs in an out-of-the-way location.
There are at least two more house archetypes in the neighborhood - I will sketch them up for you later. Clearly I need to get to be more friendly with the neighbors so I can go poking around the floor plans of their homes and see how they compare.
*M disagrees with me on this, for a couple of reasons. 1) our fireplace is in a different location than any of the “twin” houses. 2) the changes I think were made were REALLY dramatic structural changes. I would add as a possible third piece of evidence that we are on a corner lot, which none of the twin houses are, and it’s possible that the bigger lot led to a slightly modified design.
Because we always enter our house from the side, I hadn’t really thought about the fact that it, too, is a tract home until just recently. Honestly, I don’t know why it took 4 years for me to figure this out, but it did. Pictured here is what our house looks like from the front. It is virtually identical to probably half of the houses on our block. There is a variation on this theme, which involves a second gable in front of the one our house has.From the side, they all look pretty much like any house drawn by an older elementary school student - a brick box with a sloping roof, plus the gable.The cool thing, though, is the ways in which the houses have been added on to. Most retain their original footprint, but almost all of them have various second-floor additions frankensteined on. Ours is no exception. I haven’t been able to get into one of the other houses to confirm this, but here’s what I think has been added to our house, whose profile is quite different from the other houses of its type.
Note how the line of the roof changes; I think* that when the garage (at far right with the grey roof) and upstairs bath (in the yellow portion) were added, they also expanded the footprint of the house. From this side, that extension is where I am sitting right now - the study/guest room. On the other side, it is the screen porch through which we enter the house. We KNOW the second-floor bath and the garage are additions - that bath is out of line with all of the other plumbing in the house, and nobody was building houses with attached garages in 1950. I think that in doing that addition, they also moved staircases. Right now, the stairs to the second floor are in the “leaving room” - the entryway with the doors to the screen porch and the garage. The stairs to the basement, on the other hand, are right smack in the middle of the house - in a straight line from the front door, off of the little hall that connects the kitchen, living room, dining room, and bathroom. To me, it would seem much more logical to have these reversed - “main” stairs beginning in the center of the house, basement stairs in an out-of-the-way location.There are at least two more house archetypes in the neighborhood - I will sketch them up for you later. Clearly I need to get to be more friendly with the neighbors so I can go poking around the floor plans of their homes and see how they compare.
*M disagrees with me on this, for a couple of reasons. 1) our fireplace is in a different location than any of the “twin” houses. 2) the changes I think were made were REALLY dramatic structural changes. I would add as a possible third piece of evidence that we are on a corner lot, which none of the twin houses are, and it’s possible that the bigger lot led to a slightly modified design.
