This Old House

No, this entry has nothing to do with Bob Villa or his PBS show, sorry. This entry was actually inspired by my friend Caleb, who blogged a few weeks ago about his new apartment and the history there.

I'm staying in a 150 year old Victorian house with 12 other study-abroad students. I live in a double-room with a girl named Sarah from the University of Denver. Our room is in the "basement" of the house, a room about 5 steps down from the main level of the house, off the back of the kitchen.

The house, probably because of some combination of age and student residents, has a few problems. For instance, the roof leaks in two places when it rains hard. One of those places is in the center of my bedroom, so I get to sleep to the lovely dripping noise of water hitting the pan in the middle of our floor. The house wasn't built with warmth in mind, so it gets very drafty. The wind pours through the cracks in between the bottoms of the doors and the floor, as well as whistling through loose window panes. I also have yet to encounter a sink that didn't have a slightly drippy faucet.

I'm not sure quite how, but we also managed to break our washing machine, which resulted in tons of water leaking out of the machine. My housemates and I fought a losing battle attempting to catch the streams of water in pots and trashbins, then when that failed, wiped it up with mops and swept onto the porch with brooms. You can just imagine me standing in our kitchen sweeping rivulets of water out the back door of our house, right?

There is only one kitchen for all twelve residents, which also presents a problem. For the three hours around lunchtime or dinnertime, the kitchen is crowded with people, all stepping on each other and reaching around one another's arms trying to use the one sink and one stove in that room. You can also imagine, I'm sure, the piles of dishes that accumulate when 12 students with no dishwasher all conclude that "someone else will do it".

The house has some lovely nineteenth century quirks as well. The floors in the main area of the house are lovely, shiny-scrubbed hardwood floors. The house is marked with incredibly high ceilings, too, so footsteps echo through the house like stones down a well. Many of the rooms have secret back doors, either into the back yard, the overgrown side yard, or the mysterious courtyard. The courtyard, as we discovered in our second week here, actually attaches to a garage, which has two cars in it that are completely foreign to us. We have no idea where the cars came from, though we assume they belong to our landlord, Peter.

By far the most interesting problem with the house, though, is the power. There is one set of outlets in the house that, if used, automatically blows the fuse for the entire back half of the house. We also have another essential kitchen outlet that sometimes causes the fuse to blow as well. Instead of just resetting, however, the fuse sometimes refuses to stay on, leaving the back half of the house in complete darkness for hours on end. The light in the living room is also slightly possessed. It is on a dimmer switch, but it likes to dim, brighten, flicker, and occasionally impersonate a strobe light just for fun when no one is near the switch.

Ah, the eccentricities of an old house. It presents its own unique challenge, since you never know what might go wrong or what strange secret it may reveal next. At least we can never get bored of it!