The First Story

Here's a tour of the first floor before the demo started.  All of the downstairs windows were boarded up to keep people out while the house was empty so the pictures are a little dark.  But ignore that if you can and come on in.

There used to be a little entry hall right inside the front door.  Behind the door to the left were the stairs that lead to the 2nd floor.  The stairs were really steep and covered in bulky carpeting which explains the silver handrail. You'd hold onto it for leverage and pray you didn't bite it while going in either direction.  Those were very short, scary treads.

Now you're in the main room.  It's easy to picture the layout of the first floor, it's a rectangle shape that runs about 40 feet deep by 20 feet wide.  In the picture above you're looking back toward the front door and you can see, inside that little closet, the slanted underbelly of those treacherous stairs. Stand near that boarded up window by the front door, turn around...

and you're in the living room,  That bright light is a cutout in the wall that looks into the kitchen.

Here's the kitchen, small and efficient.  And right next to the kitchen was this bathroom.

The kitchen and bathroom used to be at the back of the house.  They were just beyond the open doorway in the picture on the left and that edge of white brick wall next to the open doorway used to be on the outside of the building.  But then someone built a set of back stairs and then enclosed them.  Then the addition was added, right off of the back enclosed stairwell, and it became the master bedroom.  The picture on the left is looking out of the master bedroom into the stairwell and beyond into the dark dark bathroom. The picture on the right is the looking into the master bedroom. The addition and the stairwell were removed in the demo and replaced by the cedar porch. 

And this is what the back stair area looked like. There was a closet that's out of frame and I gotta say that, for an old house, they had a lot of closets.  I think they had more storage space than I'll have with the new build.

Down the stairs was a door leading to the backyard and if you took a right at that landing at the bottom you'd need to duck really quickly or you'd bump your head on the way into the basement.

The stairs and the addition were slanted and rickety and not very well built.  It was nice to see all of that go away.