We’ve lived in this 1760 house for almost 30 years. Its age is most visible in the cellar, where the joists are split trees (a few with bits of bark still on them) and everything is built around a central chimney (the chimney itself has a little storeroom with a swinging wood door under it - unusual according to contractors who’ve worked down there).
The house itself is traditional colonial with a few odd nooks and crannies (like the little door behind the radiator in the front hall, used to access the inner workings around the chimney). It does have lath wall interiors, and behind the walls/during repairs and upgrades we’ve found corn cobs, old newspapers, and once, a 1770 account ledger/balance sheet.
It constantly needs work of some kind, so there’s that.
Well, that has my brother’s old circa 1900 house beat by a very large number of years!
Still, it was cool to have a house built with servants’ quarters in mind, very mature landscaping, the original architectural plans, and most of the original interior. And certainly, yes, lathe plaster walls.
There are still a few luxury builders who still build plaster walls in new houses, claiming that they have much better sound-deadening qualities than drywall, but such builders are very rare, and so are plastering skills.
I lived in my twenties in more than one house with no running water, and in one with no electricity. We hauled water from a spring which we also used as a refrigerator. The heat was a wood/coal stove. In the winter we hung a toilet seat on the wall behind the stove, where it got quite warm, and carried it out to the outhouse for each trip. The sensation of sitting on that literal hot seat while a cold draft came up from beneath was definitely interesting.
The house I grew up in was built at least in part in the late 1700’s. It had clearly been built in two sections, had been used at some points for two families, and still had two kitchens (one of which we used as a laundry room); as well as front and back stairs. It had been significantly modified before we got there, and modified further by the time I was old enough to remember (apparently some of the modifications decided upon by my father over my mother’s objections), but a lot of the original layout and construction was still there. I took it for granted, growing up in it. I wish I’d paid it more attention. I still dream about it sometimes.
That bomb shelter line is kind of a stopper. I expect they’re quite common in Israel, though.
I wish they had thought of a heated toilet seat. His next home was only marginally better. It was a basement with no superstructure. There was a well inside that provided water, and it didn’t flood in the spring like his first house’s basement.
As far as I know, it’s still going! You can visit it in Arcata, California if you’re ever in the area. I can dig up some old photos if there’s interest.
In college I rented a room in a big old Victorian house that the owner had divided up into 13 units (!) to rent to college students. The room I rented was the smallest in the house, and had originally been the pantry. It was right off the kitchen and was 10 feet long and 7 feet wide. To gain a little more usable space I built a platform over the bed, making a kind of bunk bed with the upper bunk just being a carpeted platform that I could sit on and read. Apart from the bed+platform there was just barely room to maneuver around the perimeter of the room. But it was damn cheap.
A few years later I happened to be back in that town and stopped by to look at my old room. It was no longer being used for living space, and just had a couple of bicycles and some other junk in it. It looked pretty full with just those odds and ends in it.
