Reply #60: Base housing, trailers, bunked with a grandparent... a little everything. [View All]

[politicat]

My great-grandparent's house has 12 rooms (7 can be bedrooms, though one's the farm office and one was set up as a classroom for my grandmother and her brothers) and one bathroom, a coal burner in the basement and a secondary gas system. The house on the south side of the road had four bedrooms, five public rooms and one bathroom (it now has two, but the family that now owns it put the second one in.) We had an outhouse on the north side until 1980. Both of the farm houses were originally built in the 19th century and added on to over the last century; both houses started as 4 rooms (Parlor, 2 bedrooms and a kitchen.) The big house usually had 7 to 14 people living there at a time, until the late 80's when we stopped raising things that needed farm-hands year round.

The first house I remember was base housing, and it was pretty scary. The second one had two bedrooms and a big "playroom" that I now realize was not a very safe place for anyone, let alone a child. But it was cheap.

I usually had my own room growing up because I was eldest and needed the study space; sometimes I had my own bathroom, sometimes I didn't. Depended on the configuration of the house. But we lived in 24 houses in 16 years, so they kind of all blend together.

Some of them were huge, but luggage allowances meant we didn't have a lot of stuff.