That Old House

I was in my old hometown again, yesterday, helping my mom move some furniture and boxes around between her home and her business. Out behind the business building, there’s a very old house that’s now used as a storage barn. I and my uncle moved some stuff into and out of the house, and we all took the opportunity to look around in the old place.

The house is somewhere between near 100 years old. It sits about two feet off the ground, on concrete block pillars, and has old style concrete steps leading up to the front porch. It’s in a very delapidated condition—it’s not a show model by any means. The front door lock takes an old skeleton key (which my mom has), but the only functional lock currently on it is a padlock on a new latch.

It’s small: a small front room, a small middle room, a small kitchen, a small bathroom, and a very small closet. The ceiling is maybe six and a half feet from the floor. Another room, notably bigger than the others, looks to have been added on after the house was built. Its ceiling is even lower, and what was a window on the side of the house was made into an embedded shelf in the now interior wall.

All the white paint, inside and outside, is flaked and peeled like bad dry skin. The walls and floors are just one board thick, and there are a few holes showing the ground beneath the house. There’s electricity run to the house for a couple of bare light bulbs with pull chains, but it’s obvious the line and sockets were added some time later in the house’s life.

The place is packed full of junk thrown in by various people: old tools and machines, old lawmowers, old furniture, old. . . junk that I couldn’t identify, etc. (“Old” in this paragraph means “2-10 years.”) My step-dad originally used the house to store things for the business, like extra tables and boxes of supplies, but over the years, some workers and some family tossed more stuff in. I don’t know why most of the old junk in the house now wasn’t taken to the dump instead of thrown in the house—it’s not a good place to store anything you’d ever want back in your living house. There’s a bed mattress in there—upon seeing it, my mom commented that she wouldn’t store a bed mattress in that old house overnight, much less for a year or more. It’s more of a junk yard than a storage house, now.

There’s also about a dozen wasp nests. My mom had exterminators come out a week or so back to kill all the wasps, so there’s bug corpses all over the place. And there were a couple wasps still moving, so we had to keep an eye out for them as we explored around.

There was one closed door in the house that made me curious to look in. I commented that behind the door was probably the old skeletons. While we had some stuff moved away from the door, I went to open it. My mom suggested I stand behind the door to open it, in case anything came out. My uncle made a spooky suggestion, and I’ll admit that my imagination started worrying me. What would be behind that door? Even if there wasn’t anything really spooky or scary in there, there might be an animal or some wasps.

I turned the old knob and pulled the door. It was a bit stuck, so it required a little tug to open. It was just the bathroom. An old sink, tub, some junk, but no toilet. But there was a really old washing machine—something from the 40s or 50s maybe. That was a neat little find; not that we did anything with it but look at it.

The house is an interesting thing to examine, especially when you realize that people actually lived in little homes like that, through hot summers and cold winters. You don’t often see this kind of historical living space. Most historical homes are the larger mansions of their day, not the more common small shacks of the average poor family. The big, old mansions get preserved and shown as examples of historical homes, but the small, old places wear down or get torn down and forgotten. It’s cool to see one of the last such old homes before it inevitably falls apart and is lost.

Bullgrit
bullgrit@totalbullgrit.com