Susan, I wonder that you have a whole floor in your house that you only visit part of the year. How big is that house?

We rented this big ole house when we had 3 teens who needed space. They moved out, but we still liked the house, and were too busy to move. And then the Mudcatters started visiting.

The house has, at various times, been a 5 BR single fam dwelling, a 2-family dwelling-- even a 3-fam for a time. Many people living in the community now have loved here and told me what it was like when they lived here. The lady who delivers our mail (and whose father Hardi buried last year) grew up in the house working the farm as a teenager, and told me how some of the layout has flexed over time.

Her people are close to our landlord's people. They live down the road on the big dairy farm they started after they moved off this farm. They win the county fair's dairy prizes most every year.... Hardi buried our landlord's dad too, not so long after we moved here. He warn't in our church, but he knew Hardi, and that's how it works here.... you get close if you're solid.

Anyway-- this property (diff owner) was originally the HQ property for dairy farming on this road; we surmise from the amount of space and the numbers we have slept here that it was planned to be able to sleep and feed 35 or so workers in bunks at peak seasons, plus a second farmworkers' house across the creek. That house is also owned now by our landlord, but has a different tenant every few years.

The landlord's fam bought this property when the property's widowed matriarch eventually sold out to stay in FL fulltime, because their barn had burnt and they needed a good barn for hay and dry cows. The house, tho, has been a rental ever since-- their own house is 1/4 mile up the road and I see the green silos from my front porch. We've become good friend over the years, swapping favors like county folk will do. Bruce made a man outta my kid (let him milk cows in all weather, fun job), and we've had the pleasure of Bruce's kids doing a chore or two here as well, esp. vacay pet-feeding. They also own a number of smaller properties that can be rented or used to help pay farm helpers-- our house they call The Brick House.

Anyhoo-- the attic was built over a laundry room and downstairs studio apartment-- an addition to the main house. At one time the attic was a 16' x 16' dorm-type bedroom. With faded wallpaper when we moved in (1994). The side walls are 4' high and then it slopes up from there to be normal room height in the middle-- much more headroom that the average attic. All new drywall and wiring now, over an old pine plank floor (2x6's).

It was this attic that mostly burned in our Dec. 2000 fire. We were lucky the nextdoor tenants saw it break out and threw creek water on it in a bucket brigade-- smoke filled the maion house but the fire narrowly missed coming in because the addition was added onto a brick wall of the original house. There is still smoke stain on the door casing above the door that opens between them, where you can see how it poured up and into the kitchen on its way up the staircase to the bedrooms.

We came home to find the fire trucks just packing up. It was about 2 weeks after I had stopped managing the local Red Cross-- I knew these fire volunteers well. I had often been on fire scenes they were running, to aid disaster victims-- then suddenly WE were the victims ourselves. It was pretty surreal to joke with the fire chief as people here always do.... but that's how this place runs. Ya gotta laugh when it's tough.

At that time we had one kid still here, and the attic stored empty moving boxes, Christmas stuff, unused furniture, and other seasonal stuff. The floor below (mostly unheated) we've used at various times as an office, a playroom, an adult ed classroom, a music room, a spare bedroom.... it's Hardi's weight room right now.

The attic portion was rebuilt so well after the fire that I took one look and saw usable space. We started hosting Catters before the work was all done, in fact, and the first Gather we hosted found me sitting amid burnt rubble, on the now-nice back porch, in an afghan.

The attic soon had a number of accumulated beds and linens. This is mostly described in the MudDorm thread. We planned at the outset to use it as camp-type overflow sleeping space. We furnished it with free or thrift-shop items that could mostly be left behind when we eventually move (for either the next tenant or the parish thrift shop to pick up).

Mudcatter Hesperis almost moved into it as a studio apartment, but did not make it across the border from Canadia.

Later Hardi and I decided that since the rebuilt attic had the only decent wiring in the house, we should try cooling it for the humid nights that periodically last an entire summer here-- I can't stand humidity. We discovered much to our joy that the wiring up there and its miniscule (new) window DID stand a trailer-sized AC. The night we went to WalMart to get it we installed it and, that night, made a king bed out of two twin beds.

Over the several years since it has been increasingly a place of refuge. There are a few photos of the old MudDorm layout (and colors) in a YouTube montage:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocjMckTtZ1Y


The total spaces of this house basically amount to three different one-floor-living spaces, so we use them that way. Each floor has some kitchen and loo capability. The kids' rooms have also been re-purposed a number of times.

Now if I could just build a high deck off that attic room, it could help keep the building from tipping over the rest of the way AND I'd have a brekky balcony up there! :~)

The main house (all brick) was built in the 1800's out of clay dug out when the farmworkers' property got a pond. The clay was molded and fired at a brickmill that used to be just up the road. The family that built it (the builders, not the farmers) still work in the area as contractors, and I learned about the bricks when they came to fix a loo one day.

~Susan