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choco_frosh) wrote2016-11-20 07:34 pm
choco_frosh) wrote2016-11-20 07:34 pm
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OK, OK, zheesh! Sorry about the lateness: The last week I've been laid low by a combination of the cold (still with me!), depression, and a schedule that included three days of insanity at work followed by three days in Nashua looking after Peter. (And having an interview with a temp. agency.*) But anyway:
My brother's house
It may have only been the day AFTER that I realized that I had seen my brother's house before. A couple times a week, for years, in fact: while on the way to choir. It's near the St. John's Bangor (Where the preaching is horrible, but at least the choir's good!), and while it's a block away from the main drag, the arrangement of streets means it's visible. And, um, noticeable: Big white house, with two hugely tall floors in a weird Italianate/Neoclassical style.
I didn't recognise it at first because it's tacked onto the end of a much more conventional-looking (at first glance) New England house, which has three stories (and isn't even as tall as the neoclassical bit WITHOUT its attic. See above re: ceilings), apparently built 1870, although I would have guessed a couple of decades earlier.
But that isn't the weird bit. You get farmhouse-style buildings with neoclassical fronts plonked down in front of them all over New England.
This one is weirder. And the story of how it got that way, almost as weird.
Apparently, somewhere 'round about 1890 the house came into the property of two spinster lawyer sisters** who, despite their shared rejection of society's norms and embrace of the legal profession, apparently decided that they couldn't share a house.
So they split it.
Down the middle.
And (I'm fairly certain) remodeled it such that the two halves were mirror images. Two front doors, opening onto two flights of stairs, back-to-back, with a room on each side on all three floors.
Then they stuck this ginormous neoclassical extension onto one side.
Also subdivided, and in mirror image. With two more front doors, opening (I'm assuming) onto identical weird entry halls (Brother and sister-in-law keep bikes in theirs) with spiral staircases and access to the identical--and circular (because the weirdness just couldn't stop)--front rooms, FROM WHICH you can get to the adjoining bits of the original house.
With me so far? Because we're not done yet.
The CURRENT owners of this siamese-twin house then stuck an extension onto the OTHER side (it actually blends so well with the original architecture that you wouldn't know this from the outside), and decided to partition part of the building off as a separate apartment.
You are probably expecting...well, that this apartment is inhabited by my brother, and you'd be right about that. But you'd probably also expect that said apartment would be, oh, say, one of the halves of the original house. Or, like, the whole third floor, or something.
Actually, you probably aren't. You know better by now.
Instead, my brother has: the ground floor of one of the neoclassical bits, the adjoining room in the original house, and the adjacent side door cum entry hall and stairs...but NOT the room beyond; but BOTH rooms on that side of the house on the two upper floors. So his bedroom is ABOVE the landlord's TV room; and his guest room/living room on the second floor is connected to a staircase that is walled off at that point so that the landlord can use it to get to that half of the neoclassical attic.
(&%^%*, the landlord's part of the house must be even weirder.)
Sooooo...yeah. Sort of "two up, two down", except that he has a couple of attic rooms as well. And the two up don't remotely line up with the two down.
*School DIDN'T, ultimately, get canceled, so I was able to make it down to interview in person. The interview itself didn't go so well, though I'm not ENTIRELY sure what I was doing to make my interviewer seem so ill-at-ease; and it seems that while they have a WHOLE bunch o' temp. projects, longer-term stuff is thin on the ground at the moment; and I'm not QUITE prepared to jump ship and hope I can make ends meet with an unpredictable income. But at least I'm on their list, I guess...
** Who even knew women lawyers were a thing in the 19th c.?
My brother's house
It may have only been the day AFTER that I realized that I had seen my brother's house before. A couple times a week, for years, in fact: while on the way to choir. It's near the St. John's Bangor (Where the preaching is horrible, but at least the choir's good!), and while it's a block away from the main drag, the arrangement of streets means it's visible. And, um, noticeable: Big white house, with two hugely tall floors in a weird Italianate/Neoclassical style.
I didn't recognise it at first because it's tacked onto the end of a much more conventional-looking (at first glance) New England house, which has three stories (and isn't even as tall as the neoclassical bit WITHOUT its attic. See above re: ceilings), apparently built 1870, although I would have guessed a couple of decades earlier.
But that isn't the weird bit. You get farmhouse-style buildings with neoclassical fronts plonked down in front of them all over New England.
This one is weirder. And the story of how it got that way, almost as weird.
Apparently, somewhere 'round about 1890 the house came into the property of two spinster lawyer sisters** who, despite their shared rejection of society's norms and embrace of the legal profession, apparently decided that they couldn't share a house.
So they split it.
Down the middle.
And (I'm fairly certain) remodeled it such that the two halves were mirror images. Two front doors, opening onto two flights of stairs, back-to-back, with a room on each side on all three floors.
Then they stuck this ginormous neoclassical extension onto one side.
Also subdivided, and in mirror image. With two more front doors, opening (I'm assuming) onto identical weird entry halls (Brother and sister-in-law keep bikes in theirs) with spiral staircases and access to the identical--and circular (because the weirdness just couldn't stop)--front rooms, FROM WHICH you can get to the adjoining bits of the original house.
With me so far? Because we're not done yet.
The CURRENT owners of this siamese-twin house then stuck an extension onto the OTHER side (it actually blends so well with the original architecture that you wouldn't know this from the outside), and decided to partition part of the building off as a separate apartment.
You are probably expecting...well, that this apartment is inhabited by my brother, and you'd be right about that. But you'd probably also expect that said apartment would be, oh, say, one of the halves of the original house. Or, like, the whole third floor, or something.
Actually, you probably aren't. You know better by now.
Instead, my brother has: the ground floor of one of the neoclassical bits, the adjoining room in the original house, and the adjacent side door cum entry hall and stairs...but NOT the room beyond; but BOTH rooms on that side of the house on the two upper floors. So his bedroom is ABOVE the landlord's TV room; and his guest room/living room on the second floor is connected to a staircase that is walled off at that point so that the landlord can use it to get to that half of the neoclassical attic.
(&%^%*, the landlord's part of the house must be even weirder.)
Sooooo...yeah. Sort of "two up, two down", except that he has a couple of attic rooms as well. And the two up don't remotely line up with the two down.
*School DIDN'T, ultimately, get canceled, so I was able to make it down to interview in person. The interview itself didn't go so well, though I'm not ENTIRELY sure what I was doing to make my interviewer seem so ill-at-ease; and it seems that while they have a WHOLE bunch o' temp. projects, longer-term stuff is thin on the ground at the moment; and I'm not QUITE prepared to jump ship and hope I can make ends meet with an unpredictable income. But at least I'm on their list, I guess...
** Who even knew women lawyers were a thing in the 19th c.?