My Home

I’ve always admired Victorian houses, and there have been times I’ve thought that it would be nice to live in one.  Well, now I do, not the whole house, just half the ground floor.

The two story building was divided so that the top floor stayed intact as a single unit and my level, which may originally have been for carriages, was divided in half, from front to back so it’s long and narrow.  There is no hallway, so to get from room to room (other than the bathroom) you have to walk through an adjacent  room.  It’s fine living by myself, but when my daughter was visiting and sleeping in the back room, when she got up in the middle of the night to go the bathroom, whose bed room do you think she had to walk through?

Floor Plan - Not to Scale

There’s not too much that seems “Victorian” on the inside of my unit.  The ceiling at eight feet is a bit higher than normal, and the windows with their lace curtains go up to the ceiling.  But the bedroom, guest room and living room all have wall-to-wall carpet.  There’s no exposed wood and all walls and doors are painted off-white.  The kitchen has been modernized with an electric stove (powered through a rectangular duct that sticks out from the wall) and Formica counter tops.  The floor is linoleum.  The bathroom has a stall shower, which at my age I prefer to say a claw-foot tub, and a small sink set in a narrow vanity.

There’s no fireplace and no central heating, just a single wall heater in the living room.  That appliance, a space heater and briefly turning on stove burners worked fine for the one winter I was here when I left daily for work, but now that I’m retired and home more, I’ll see how well I stay warm and how much it will cost.