I have one (1969 house) but I think they’re a fire hazard? Easy lane for a fire to shoot up from one floor to another. It is very nice for disposing of my dirty towels, that’s for sure.
My grandparents had a laundry chute, right in the middle of their kitchen floor. I assume it was a laundry chute, but it seemed like stupid place. Not just that it was in the floor, but the kitchen floor. A few months after they moved in, they covered it up the hole and moved it elsewhere.
In an old house I lived in, my bedroom had a little tiny closet. I never understood the point. My bedroom had 5 doors. One to the ‘hallway’ which was a little area by the other bedroom and kitchen, one to the dining room, one to the living room. Due to this, I’ve had people suggest that it may have been originally designated as some kind of (servant’s) staging area since it could access all the different parts of the house so easily. Another door for a small closet under a spiral staircase and then this tiny closet. You’d open it and it was just the space between the wall. Literally, just about 3 inches deep. I don’t know what you’d keep in it. The guy that rented it before me (who I knew) took the shelves out and tucked his aquarium into it. I just put a desk in front it.
laundry chutes are a fire hazard. they spread fire and smoke.
When I was young, my grandparents bought a 1920s bungalow for my dad & us kids to live in.
They almost gutted the place whimper & took out the neat old fixtures, registers & lot of the woodwork. They painted over the existing wood except for the risers on the stairs & the interior side of the closet doors. They tore out the laundry chute but left the hole there to just drop clothes down. They also left the old sink, but moved it to the basement laundry area.
The old carpet was hideous & ruined so it needed to go. I just wish they’d restored the house to its former glory.
I love my grandparents, but I hate how they “updated” that house. Once in awhile, I’ll still get a whiff of the original wood…
My mom and dad bought one of the family houses when they got married in 1949, a 1890 Queen Anne victorian with a round tower and all.
Jackasses who bought it back in 198-something tore out the built in hoosier cabinet [it has a built in sugar bin, and flour bin with a built in sifter. All of the most top of the line all the bells and whistles versions] that was original to the house and plunked a totally ugly reproduction craptastic version that looked like it was bought at K-mart. sigh They also ripped out the butler’s pantry [designed to hold silver,dishes, glassware and tableware, not food in cans and boxes, sort of like this, but no sink on the left, but an ‘island’ where the cook would put the food for the butler to put onto the plates and dress for serving. I happen to have the full table service for 16 including serving pieces, silver flatware, glassware, silver tea, coffee and chocolate set and trays/platters/silver and crystal salt and pepper cellars, and anything else you can think of that originally more or less went with the house. It was actually my g-g-g-g-grandmother’s original ‘wedding’ service. I have the original paperwork that came with it when it was shipped over from Europe, but alas not the original barrels it was all packed in] Then they bashed down the original hand sculpted plasterwork on the ceilings and put up textured ceilings. Ripped out the original hand block printed in China for some British company wallpaper in the dining room and put up that horrid red velvet and gold flocked whorehouse paper that is ‘period’ for victorian [whore]houses.
I could go on, but would be seriously depressed and need to drown my sorrows in vat of hot chocolate, and being diabetic it would probably kill me [or get my feet amputated] sigh
Did I ever mention that as the child of an antique/fine arts dealer, I detest do it yourself and remodeling shows? The fastest way to get me to scream is to dump stripping chemical on an antique so you can ‘make it your own’ and after seeing a pair of house flippers on tv take a chainsaw to a pristine wooden wall in a Pasadena Craftsman so they could install an AV system I have sworn off watching most every home show out there. [though I could probably make a good living forging antiques … I do actually know many of the things one looks for in the proper antique, and that is the begining of how you forge something :o]
Really?! Can I move in with you, ZipperJJ? I’m a great cook and I promise to do my share of laundry 
Actually, my boyfriend just told me that there’s one in his house! I didn’t know about it because it’s inside of the entry coat closet. Not a very convenient location, IMO.
I own a cottage in Suffolk, England. It is one of three cottages built in the 17th century using timbers from a grander house that stood in its place in the 15th century.
One of its features is a bressummer beam above the fireplace. This bears flame-shaped scorch marks where, according to our local archaeologist, people in the past inserted lit tapers.
Fascinating to think that these marks could have been made at around the same time the Mayflower set sail.
I toured a huge old Victorian in our town. It had a walk in closet. I’d have bought the house for the sake of the closet.
From about waist level down the drawers were wide and flat, traylike, for linens. Upper levels were taller for some clothes, and for towels and such. The shor wall had graduated hooks and pegs for garment hanging.
Oh, and there was the tiny room on the third floor, at the back of the house, with the narrow stairway that led down two flights to the kitchen. It was for a live-in servant. How many homes these days have servants, much less live in ones?
The house I grew up in was built by my grandfather in the 40s. He framed it in oak - trying to hang a picture was hopeless, the nails would just bend. The control for the furnace was attached to what looked like a bicycle chain that ran to the basement through two holes in the floor. There was a coal room down there with a chute to the outside for deliveries.
Also a monster.
Or maybe that was just in my nightmares.
My house was built in 1924. In the kitchen there’s a brick platform for a wood burning stove. Someone put up fake bricks behind it and to the side over half of the rectangular piece of wall that juts out, near the stove. We checked out that jut and found out that it’s a chimney for the smoke from a wood burning stove. No hearth at all, just the rectangular chimney all the way to the floor.
Someone had enclosed it with wallboard some time after the stove had been switched to a gas model. Then later someone put up the fake bricks. There’s a decorative tin cover over the slightly more than head-high round opening for the stovepipe. My son took pictures up the chimney through the stovepipe hole with his iphone. It looks usable.
There’s an antique kitchen store in town. One time when I visited I saw a combination stove. Two burners and the oven could run on burning wood and either two or four burners (and the oven) ran on gas. I had no cash for such a thing, but I occassionally think about the possibility.
I bought a specific woodstove to replace the cruddy one we had previously. It has a baking oven, and the top is designed for cooking upon.
I do some antique restoration as a side part of our buisness. Mostly old brass lamps, I could weep sometimes to see how badly some have been butchered.
Anyways our (now) machine shop was built in a semi rural area in 1920 as a Nash dealership and service station. My buisness partners’ Grandfather bought it 41 years ago. The building is square, the showroom is one front quarter of the building. It could have held 2 small cars, with floor to ceiling windows on two walls. Smaller plate glass was put in sometime later and we lost the top three feet or so. However the windows are still 8 feet tall. To get cars into the showroom from the shop is two barn looking sliding doors with wonderful cast iron rollers and hardware.
The working bay is big enough to hold 4 cars two deep 14 feet to the ceiling. Og only knows what hardwood the joists are made of. They measure a true 2"x14" We learned years ago to not even bother trying to drive in a nail whenever we run wire or pipe hangers. Have to pre drill first.
The interior shop walls are all also 1’ thick planking that we are 99% confident lead painted. Hit it with a hammer and the paint doesn’t chip, hell you barely dent the wood.
The two front garage doors measure (getting a tape measure…) 9 feet wide and 10 1/2 feet tall slab doors. No articulation, one big solid framed slab. You pull the pin latches on either side and give a HEAVE and up they swing on the pivot and up the track. To close them I have to reach up to the pull rope and half leap and use my body weight to pull them down.
There is a grease pit for doing oil changes and the like, only about 3 1/2 feet deep with a gravel bottom that floods whenever there is even the possibility of rain clouds on the horizion. (Did I mention the 2 story hill behind the building?) The pit is covered with planks and we never use it for anything but irate customer disposals.
Around the side is the two restrooms. What would have been the ladies had no access to the inside, the mens had a door coming in. After all what Lady would have ever entered the “shop” area in 1920? The transom windows still show from the outside but wooden plank siding was put over the doors and the rest of the outside walls along with that magic substance of insulation in the 1970’s. Don’t get me started on the scary ass boiler we tore out 10 years ago…
In 1973 when the family bought the place it still had the “Ding Ding” air hose and bell system in the driveway. The bells are still on the wall over the door but the hoses were the first thing to go when the grandkids figured out they could make the ringing by jumping up and down on the hoses. Grandpa’s patience went only so far.
It’s a neat old building and considering my oldest lathe is from 1906 and the newest is from the 1950’s, if it wasn’t for the flourescent lights you could easily picture it looking a lot like it did a half century ago. The back wall has tons of dusty old hand tools and bits of odds and ends of detritus hanging on nails like a giant art installtion. We’ll never use 90% of them (but maybe…) so I leave it alone. Makes visitors stare.
Oh yeah one last thing, The bench I’m sitting at, like all the other benches in the shop is welded iron piping for legs and runs of old bowling alley for worktops. 2-1/4 inch thick tongue and groove boards on edge. Need to heat something with a torch and smash it with a sledgehammer? These benches aren’t moving.
The 1890s row house that served as my grad school bachelorette pad had the most amazing walk in closets. They were large enough to use as a little office, and had big bright windows. They were apparently designed to store large steamer trunks.
My grandparents’ house, built in the 1920s, had a large button under the rug in the dining room that was wired under the floor to a buzzer in the kitchen. It was used to signal the cook when a course was finished. My brother and I loved to duck under the table and push that button.
My grandparents weren’t wealthy, but my grandmother always had a housekeeper/cook. The only thing she made was Floating Island Custard, which was always the highlight of every holiday dinner at their home.
The house also had a small formal parlor in front next to the entryway, where guests were “received”. The grandkids were never allowed in there unless accompanied by my grandmother.
Even Sven reminded me of something about row houses.
In the late 80’s when Uncle Sam owned me I had an apartment in Center City Philadelphia. The row house was four stories tall with 7 apartments. I’d say the building was built around the turn of the century.
The double front doors were about 8 feet tall and narrow. Each was less than the standard width of a normal door. The right hand door had the key entry. Thus me and countless other tenants opened the right side door twisted a bit and went inside. The marble step at this threshold had a dip.
How cool is that? Human beings trodding countless steps to a nondescrept building wore a hollow into the stone.
My ~100 year old bungalow has had many “upgrades” over the years that we are try to undo. Anyway, I thought I would share a photo of the floors that we have redone last year. Don’t know what they were smoking when they put them in, but we love them.
livingroom floor
I want your house so very, very, very much I can’t even begin to tell you. That’s wonderful.
My grandmother’s house, built in I don’t know when, had a front door with a large oval window and an oval outside doorknob. It also had two doors to the bedroom, one off the living room and one to the bathroom. And the bathroom had another door leading to the kitchen.
My current house, built in 1956, is rather mundane but it has bedroom closets with sliding wooden doors and drawers in the bottom. There is also a closet right by the front door, which is very handy. It also has recessed chrome-surround lights in the soffets above the front and outside garage doors as well as in the ceilings just inside of the front door and the door leading to the garage. It also has a 50’s-style built-in doorbell above the front door. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work. It also still has the original boiler and baseboard radiators for heat.
I don’t know if it’s a feature, like a butler’s pantry or hidden staircase, but half of my home is a log cabin built in the 1840s. It’s constructed of hand-hewn oak logs, some nearly 2 feet in diameter.
We recently remodeled our home and, as part of the project, cut a walkway through some of the logs to access the other part of the house. The contractor burned though numerous chainsaw blades and one chainsaw engine just trying to cut through 2 logs. It took 3 guys to carry a 3’ chunk of log. They were astounded and impressed that people could have built this place by hand.
Given the right circumstances, you could have had it… I’m halfway through selling it right now!
If you’re interested, i managed to find some pictures of the 15c beams.
You can see the taper marks in the fireplace beams in one of them.