Saturday Night Genealogy Fun -- Your Ancestral Home Description

 Calling all Genea-Musings Fans: 

 It's Saturday Night again - 

Time for some more Genealogy Fun!!

Your mission, should you decide to accept it (cue the Mission Impossible! music) is to:

1)  Do you recall the layout of one of your family homes (a parent's home, a grandparent's home, your first home with your spouse/SO, etc.)?  Can you estimate the size of the house and the size of the rooms?  What features were in each room?  Can you draw the floor plan, showing doors, windows, etc.?

2)  Tell us about your selected family home in a blog post of your own, in a comment to this blog post, or in a Facebook comment.

Here's mine:

I did this for the house I grew up in at 2119 30th Street, the upper floor of a two-story house (shown below in 1929):

From Google Maps, I estimate that the house is about 44 feet wide, 64 feet long, and 25 feet high.

Here is the description of the rooms as I recall them:

The home was an upstairs apartment. On the northwest corner of the house were six steps of an open staircase into a covered staircase with ten steps to the front door, and three steps to the entry room. The entry room served as my father's office and had a wall heater. It opened to the living room, master bedroom and dining room.

The living room was on the west side of the house and there were two couches, a TV set, a table, a central coffee table with magazines and decorations. The TV set was opposite the west wall. There was a "cubbyhole" over the front staircase where we usually had the Christmas tree.

The sun room was on the southwest corner of the house, and had a view south down 30th Street a few blocks, southwest to downtown and beyond, and west to the block across 30th street. My mother did some artwork (watercolor painting and copper enameling with a kiln) there in the 1950s until late 1955. When Scott was born, Stan and I moved into the sun room. My father built a long desk along the inside wall, and a standing closet. After Randy and Stan moved out in the late 1960s, Betty reclaimed the sun room and would do her copper enameling art and read books, while sipping sherry before fixing dinner.

The master bedroom was on the south side of the house and opened to the sun room, the office, the back bedroom, and the hallway. The room had a standard double bed, a really large closet, dresser drawers and nightstands with lights.

The back bedroom in the southeast corner of the house was Stan and Randy’s bedroom until Scott came along in 1955, and Scott then had the back bedroom.. There were bunk beds, a closet, and a desk for our homework and hobbies.

The hallway connected to the back bedroom, the master bedroom, the bathroom and the dining room. The hallway had a utility closet on one end and cabinets with shelving for towels and sheets. The bathroom was on the east side of the house and had a toilet and a bathtub.

The dining room was on the north side of the house, had a large bookcase with encyclopedias, reference books and fiction books, a serving table and a large oval dining table with chairs. It connected to the office and to the hallway and the kitchen.

The kitchen was on the northeast corner of the house and had a stove, an ice box, a sink, a washtub, limited storage space, and a work table.

The kitchen opened to a back porch that had the back staircase on the north side of the house down to the ground (20 steps) along the north side of the house (until about 1952 when it was torn down and rebuilt on the east side of the house. The clothes line from the back porch went over to the Fern Street house to the east and was used to dry clothes.

Here is the rough sketch made from memory and scaling the Google Satellite View Map:

The rooms are:

E = Entry

LR = living room

Sun = sun room

MBR = Master bedroom

2BR = Second bedroom

H = hallway

B = bathroom

DR = dining room

K = Kitchen

I spent two hours figuring that out and all I got was a lousy sketch.  The cross-hatch area are stairs. I tried to put windows in and doorways in but they are only approximate.  The whole sketch is approximate.  

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