Realtor Photo
Stay tuned!
2/21/02
We've been settling in in our second full week of being here. We love it. We are down to the last few boxes here and there, except for the spare bedroom, which still has many bags full of things that are waiting for shelves....there is no furniture in this room except for the computer table and a bookcase. Mom is "donating" my old twin bed, a desk, and a night table, which will go in here to complete the spare bedroom. I just want to add several wall shelves to accomodate my collections...
I am still playing with paint chips, deciding on room colors. Mom plans to "inspect" the dining room and kitchen floors with us, which, underneath all the ancient linoleum and other floor coverings, are laid with wonderful hardwood boards of good width. When viewed from the basement, the support boards still retain their bark!! Very neat. We are hoping that the dining room (at least) is refinishable.
Today as I watched TV after work, I imagined a fire roaring in the fireplace...*sigh*...someday soon we will have it inspected and hopefully up and running!
3/5/02
Stay tuned!
3/7/02
*notes: the pantry is not shown here, but it is on the right side as you enter the dining room from the kitchen, between the fridge wall and the chimney wall that butts into the dining room. I just realized that I didn't draw the fridge and the wall between it & the cupboard to the right proportions (the fridge does not stand in front of the doorway at all!!). That doorway is arched--very neat. Also, the back porch is not shown but in reality it's attached to the house, behind the kitchen. :O)
A little history of our house:
This house was built in 1862. It stands along Pike Run Creek, a tributary of the Monongahela River. Some interesting finds inside: old but shiny steel beams made by Carnegie that were used in coal mines support the first floor. The original main floor supports still exist and are hardwood from the area (poplar, we think) and still have their bark. The house must have been lifted at one point because they re-did the basement with cement blocks and bricks. It would have originally been stone/riverrock. They used roofing-style tar paper underneath much of the flooring inside, we are not sure why. We think that they used to have a front porch as well as the back porch....we have a nice high ceiling in the dining room.
5/1/03
Hello again! It has been a long while since I've added anything here. So, straight to the updates: The Picturetrail album is gone because they now have "phased out" the old free accounts (i.e., stole my digital photos & locked them away in an "archive" that I cannot access) and are now requiring annual fees. Forget that! BUT, I do have a great gallery at pbase.com, which you can access at the other link on this page. I added some new photos from this month there, including new flowers & plants, newly-decorated bedrooms, & new kitty pics (of course).
Other news: I got some tulips to plant out front and in the process ended up redoing the entire front "garden" area (along the front of the house) by moving all the rocks out about 1 foot so they frame all the plants. Looks a LOT nicer but I still need to fill in with more plants.
That's about all for now!
11/11/04
Hello there. I haven't updated this site in over a year so I'm here now to do just that. The Picturetrail and PBase accounts are long gone because both those host sites have changed to fee sites. Bah. I have all my garden photos now at my Geocities site, which is:
Updates on our home: we've painted the stairway and it looks brand-new and bright; I've got a large backyard garden filled with native perennials and a few great annuals, and a cute winter birdseed tray; we've got a few furniture additions to the house and the utility room is completely redone and finished. Now we still have a lot of work to do painting the rest of the downstairs (just to update the rooms) and to redo the kitchen floor one of these days.
We are definitely loving thise house. It becomes more of a home to us every day. Yesterday we removed the old rug from the dining room and discovered a little note that the former owners left--"started using floor carpet Nov. 20 1963." They seem to have labeled everything like that. The hardwood floors seem to be refinishable downstairs, the downside only being a bit of tar residue from tarpaper they laid (for what reason, I don't know) under the carpets upstairs and down.
I don't have any photos developed yet. :o( I will have them on this site as soon as I can.
The week after moving in, I transplanted my large candytuft plant to our new backyard. It's doing fine considering how COLD it's been. It's an evergreen plant, though, so it's already been through 2 winters. This summer we plan to create a garden of vegetables and flowers. Let's hope it works---we've never really done our own before. I have Vegetable Gardening for Dummies to help me along LOL
Here is a drawing I just created of our house (compare with photo):
The previous owners were an elderly couple, and they raised their children here. The husband died approx. 1 year before the wife moved to a retirement-type home, and then I believe she died sometime at the end of 2000. Along the doorway between the kitchen and utility room, about three generations' worth of their heights are marked. (to be continued)
