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04 Jun 21 - 09:12 AM (#4108726) Subject: BS: Who first lived in your house/pad ? From: Donuel color me surprised It was the ambassador from Brazil There are still remnants of a T-1 phone system and flamingo colored bar. |
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04 Jun 21 - 01:25 PM (#4108781) Subject: RE: BS: Who first lived in your house/pad ? From: Stilly River Sage What took you down this investigation pathway? Looking at old property records (did he own the house?) or a serendipitous discovery? |
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04 Jun 21 - 01:38 PM (#4108785) Subject: RE: BS: Who first lived in your house/pad ? From: Donuel Why would he pick an average split level? He must have been in a hurry or thinking about his kids with the Park and all. This is the current Brazilian Embassy on Mass. Ave. where its called Embassy row. Embassy We were always told about the original owner but it didn't sound right. |
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04 Jun 21 - 02:02 PM (#4108795) Subject: RE: BS: Who first lived in your house/pad ? From: Joe Offer I got to know a very nice lady at church who went by the name of "Butterfly." After I knew her for a year, I happened to find out that she had lived in my house in the 1960s. She was the second owner, but it was her husband who dug out and built the basement of the house, one wheelbarrow at a time. She's the one who planted most of our trees and roses. It was fun to find out stories about what our house was like fifty years ago. When COVID began, I started playing Words With Friends with Butterfly, and she was a formidable opponent. She died two weeks ago, at the "age of 95-3/4," she'd say. She would have been 96 in August. May she rest in peace. It was a pleasure to know her. -Joe- |
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04 Jun 21 - 02:28 PM (#4108800) Subject: RE: BS: Who first lived in your house/pad ? From: Jack Campin The last place I lived was an Edinburgh tenement sold as separate flats in 1844. We have a copy of the title deed. The first owner was described as a "minibus driver", which is a good few years earlier than the first use of the word "minibus" the OED knows about. (Though I know of another use of the word from Edinburgh in 1838, so our title deed doesn't make linguistic history). |
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04 Jun 21 - 03:39 PM (#4108810) Subject: RE: BS: Who first lived in your house/pad ? From: Stilly River Sage Nice story, Joe. It sounds like all of her hard work paid off and resulted in a friend as well. My sister was looking at houses in Seattle, and I have an idea that the woman who sold it heavily favored my sister as the buyer because they both loved the garden that she'd put in and tended for so many years. The garden is still a major feature of the house, if the woman ever drives past to look. My house was built by a man and his wife, he from Jordan (Middle East), she from Texas. They apparently had a fabulous large garden with fig and other fruit trees back there. I found the remnants of a brick patio by the fence but none of the garden remained. He was apparently an old fashioned man, they had a couple of daughters, and only after a son was born did he pick up his family and move them all back to Jordan. My next door neighbor told me this story. The house was then rented out for many years, and empty for two before I bought it and have done some more gardening but mostly trying to keep it from falling down around my ears (the foundation needs work.) Amazing - come February I'll have been here 20 years. |
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04 Jun 21 - 04:07 PM (#4108813) Subject: RE: BS: Who first lived in your house/pad ? From: Helen I don't know who originally owned my 100+ year old house - which is no longer here because we had it demolished to build a new one. It was not in a good state of repair so about 10 years ago we thought it would be better to start afresh with a new build. We were worried that if we started trying to renovate the old weatherboard house we would find a million problems and the budget would blow out massively. However, back in the mid '70's when I was a student, I rented the house with a few friends. The owner wanted to sell it and I would have dearly loved to buy it but alas, being a poor student, I was not in a financial position to come up with the money. In the late '90's, about 15 years after I had bought a house in the next suburb, I drove past this place and saw a For Sale sign on it. I went to the real estate office as soon as I could and did the deal soon after. Hubby and I were married a couple of years later so he moved in here. The man who owned it when my friends and I rented it in the '70's worked at the nearby steelworks and lived a few streets away from here. He was a very down-to-earth, good bloke. A lot like my Dad. The house I lived in before this was owned and lived in by the same family since it was built over 100 years ago. The man passed away when he was about 98 years old. His wife had passed away about 20 years earlier. His married daughter who lived in her own house sold it to me. It was a lovely old place with some interesting features dating back to when it was originally built. The house I grew up in was also built a few years after the other two houses. My Dad's family bought it when it was newly built and he was born there soon after. He passed away 11 years ago and my sister and I sold it. We always thought we would keep it in the family but unfortunately we needed to sell it. |
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04 Jun 21 - 06:48 PM (#4108833) Subject: RE: BS: Who first lived in your house/pad ? From: Black belt caterpillar wrestler Our house was built on the footprint of the previous house here back in the 1990s. We hae a couple of photos of the previous house and that looks to be a newer build than the first mention of a house in this position, somwhere back in about 1750. It certainly predates the census records. Robin |
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04 Jun 21 - 07:45 PM (#4108842) Subject: RE: BS: Who first lived in your house/pad ? From: Steve Shaw There was a settlement here, probably a smallholding, in the early 1800s, called "Moor," and our house is called Moor Cottage. But the current house was built in the late 1800s by Squire Mucklow, a typical scoundrel squire who took from the poor, like all squires, but who, Gawd bless him, did try to look after his tenants when times were hard in the early decades of last century. I won't dwell. A few years ago a couple of old boys came to our house out of the blue and described for us life here in the 30s and 40s. No water, no sewage, no rubbish collections, but happy day nonetheless. We're still friendly with the people who we bought the house from in 1986, and we know that the house was derelict for a couple of decades before that, before they bought it for £5000 in 1976 from the local farmer (who we still know well after all these years...) |
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04 Jun 21 - 11:25 PM (#4108848) Subject: RE: BS: Who first lived in your house/pad ? From: Stilly River Sage Our walls can't talk but we can talk about our walls. Very interesting. This property (our small village) was developed as a residential area in starting in the 1960s after buying out a farm or ranch that was located here from probably the late 1800s. I have the impression that it was a dairy farm, but further out around the edges of town are some old ranch properties. On the other side of the creek from me are the oldest houses in the area, built in the 1950s. I think there must have been something older there, but it isn't showing up in the county tax records. |
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05 Jun 21 - 04:25 AM (#4108869) Subject: RE: BS: Who first lived in your house/pad ? From: Jon Freeman Not the first owner but Peter Thomas, a former Secretary of State for Wales once owned the first property my parents had in North Wales. There was a bit of confusion about that house and I read a suggestion online that it had formerly both been a shop and a pub. I don’t believe either of these suggestions. There had been a pub, which was probably in ruins by 1900, in the grounds but what remained of this building became the garage for the new house. I believe the house I live in now started life as a grain store. It had what we use as the living room added in the 60s and I’ve met someone who said he was in charge of this part. One older person with one of the local taxi companies used to refer to our place as "the piggery". The pigsties are in the field behind us. We use one set of 5 and the other set which are further up the field are pretty well covered with blackthorn, etc. |
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05 Jun 21 - 10:38 AM (#4108898) Subject: RE: BS: Who first lived in your house/pad ? From: Donuel Moor Cottage sounds charming. I bet there is some old stone work from the times of the squire. I have a concrete and steel beam foundation with brick so it did well in the P wave (up & down) earthquake. |
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05 Jun 21 - 11:21 AM (#4108904) Subject: RE: BS: Who first lived in your house/pad ? From: Jack Campin Our current house was built around 1905 as part of a planned village for a massive new coal mine (for a long time the biggest mine in Scotland). The first occupant would have a miner and his family, but the house (and the mine, and the whole village) belonged to the Lothian Coal Company, which was the private possession of the Ker family, part of the vast estate they acquired from the Abbey of Newbattle (abbey in name, industrial/agricultural conglomerate in actuality) at the Reformation. Accordingly the title deeds are as feudal as it gets. The feu system has now mostly gone, but until a few years ago they said we couldn't grow vegetables in the front garden or operate a stationary engine. |
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05 Jun 21 - 12:03 PM (#4108913) Subject: RE: BS: Who first lived in your house/pad ? From: Steve Shaw Our house has two foot thick walls made with solid local sandstone. The roof is slated and half-hipped, and most of the houses the squire had built may be recognised by that fairly unusual feature. Also, many of his properties have entrances to their land with thick-set, pyramid-capped stone pillars. He had a lot of land round here and he left his mark, and everything was built to last. |
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06 Jun 21 - 07:54 PM (#4109112) Subject: RE: BS: Who first lived in your house/pad ? From: Jack Campin The house I lived in as a kid in New Zealand had a life that encapsulated a lot of history. My father was an architect and moved us from England to NZ in 1958, when I was 8. He may have used his training in town planning to pick the vacant section he bought - it was right at the edge of the suburb, with a bypass planned next to it. That meant he got a bit more land for the money. We lived in a B&B for a few months, then moved to the section, spread between a caravan, a portacabin and a tent (which had our stuff and the chemical toilet). My father spent six months slashing the gorse away with his uncle's East African sword and digging a house-sized hole. He ordered the house from a factory 30 miles away and it arrived on a truck to get plonked on the concrete piles he'd put in position. I went to school one day from the portacabin to come back with the house there. My father then spent years adding hand-built things to it - porch, verandah, carport and garage, trees, garden stuff and a pond. It didn't look at all like something that arrived on a truck by the time he finished. Then when he retired, planned to sell up and move back to England. Finalized everything, was loading the furniture into a removal van and died instantly from a heart attack while heaving an armchair. (My brother and I both had heart attacks at the same age). So, my mother sold up and moved away, splitting the section in half so the garden was taken up by a new house. Fast forward to a few years ago. My wife's younger son was getting married in Malaysia, so we decided to combine that with a visit to NZ. I looked on Google Street View and saw there was a backpacker hostel directly across the street from my old house, so we booked a few days there. I didn't expect what I saw. The whole suburb was now twice the density it had been thanks to homeowners doing what my mother had done. And our house was an unbelievable mess: the carport had been replaced with a new garage but they hadn't replaced the driveway so it went into it at a weird angle, there were sheets of roofing and boards missing from the verandah, polypropylene sacks threaded through the fence to stop people looking in, the feijoa tree my parents had planted overgrown to a size I didn't think was possible. And an unbelievable number of people visiting in cars all day long. My first guess was that it was a brothel but on seeing the lady of the house... no way. So I was totally mystified. I got the explanation after coming home. The place turned up for sale on a local real estate site. With a video of the interior. Every wall had been covered with laminate, right over the fireplace as well. I found out why people did that. NZ has a massive problem with "P", methamphetamine. Houses where it was made, dealt or smoked a lot got every porous surface contaminated with toxic levels of the stuff. There is a huge business of P-decontamination. The laminate was to cover up the original plasterboard which was toxically loaded with P. The visitors had been doing drug deals. All was not quite lost. My father specified rimu floorboards - this is a very hard and impervious native pine which is now almost unobtainable and very expensive. So the appropriate fix was to rescue the floorboards, then incinerate and dump the rest of the house. |
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06 Jun 21 - 09:05 PM (#4109118) Subject: RE: BS: Who first lived in your house/pad ? From: Rapparee The house was built in 1968 and has two or three owners (not counting me) since then. I'd like to get my hands on one of them -- the guy who thought he (probably not a she around here) could do electrical wiring, for instance. Or why a double-opening freezer was buried under part of the back deck/porch (gone now, both that part and the freezer). |
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07 Jun 21 - 02:36 AM (#4109133) Subject: RE: BS: Who first lived in your house/pad ? From: Helen Rapparee, a female owner of our old weatherboard house - now demolished - decided to knock out the back wall of the kitchen and extend it into the old lean-to laundry which was down a couple of steps. Unfortunately the wooden floorboards extending over that part were never shored up so it was like bouncing on a trampoline. She also took out a wall between the kitchen and sitting room but never bothered to put some boards over it so there was a big floor to ceiling gap and the wind used to come up from under the house and whistle through the room. When I say "she" I mean she probably got one of her inexpert home handyman-type friends to do it. I know what the house used to be like in the '70's because I lived in it as a student. Also, when we had the old garage demolished there was a pit in the middle of the floor, like in a mechanic's workshop. It was filled with concrete. I always wondered whether that was where the bodies were buried. The demolition guys just dug a bigger hole and buried the big block of concrete and covered it up so if there were bodies, they are still there under the slab of the new garage. LOL |
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07 Jun 21 - 02:41 AM (#4109134) Subject: RE: BS: Who first lived in your house/pad ? From: Helen Which reminds me of this news story from a few years back: "...police said they uncovered an elaborate hydroponic cannabis growing set-up beneath a working spa bath, operated via a hydraulics system , at a remote property at Elands." Unfortunately there were children on the property and at least one was being mistreated. |
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07 Jun 21 - 04:51 AM (#4109140) Subject: RE: BS: Who first lived in your house/pad ? From: Dave the Gnome We have always known who lived in our houses as Mrs G is interested in that sort of thing. Nothing of real note but for a very unfortunate incident in our second house. The son of the person who had it built tried to commit suicide by gassing himself in the kitchen. Left a suicide note and everything. For whatever reason he either changed his mind or did not suceed. Turned of the gas. Then, seemingly, lit a cigarette... He didn't survive and the back wall of the house had to be rebuilt! |
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07 Jun 21 - 07:09 AM (#4109156) Subject: RE: BS: Who first lived in your house/pad ? From: Sandra in Sydney I live in a 4 storey apartment block built in 1918. It & the mirror-copy next door replaced 4 inner city terraces houses, There are two 1-bedroom apartments on each side of each building with a 2-bedroom apartment across the back of each one giving us a courtyard between the blocks. Most of my street contains early modern/deco apartment blocks, with only a few more recent ones. My area was the first in Sydney where 4-10 storey apartment blocks replaced terrace houses, & has long been one of the most densely populated areas in Sydney - even today when lots of Sydney are now covered in multi storey monstrosities. In the late 70s apartments in my building were sold off & I was the second person to own this one (1981). I am the oldest inhabitant, I bought when ordinary workers could buy property, now only rich folk live in my area & lots of other inner city areas. Before the building was renovated it was very down market & some druggies had set a fire in the basement!! It was painted & carpetted in 1991, & needs painting inside & out, & new lino in the foyer. Good 1991 carpet & antique (1918) lino! sandra |
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07 Jun 21 - 11:42 AM (#4109186) Subject: RE: BS: Who first lived in your house/pad ? From: Jack Campin Something that came to mind over our New Zealand house: can you ever access a building's criminal record? A list of all the crimes that have ever been committed in it? |
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07 Jun 21 - 11:53 AM (#4109189) Subject: RE: BS: Who first lived in your house/pad ? From: Stilly River Sage There is a series of maps made for fire insurance companies in the late 1800s into the early-to-mid-1900s called the Sanborn Fire Maps. The key to the Fort Worth area shows the southern-most street as Rosedale in 1926; this is seven miles north of my part of town (not actually Fort Worth, but an enclave established in 1950). The closest I get to my property is that the creek in my back yard is year round and runs through the SW section of town, so there are two panels that show Sycamore Creek. |
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07 Jun 21 - 03:40 PM (#4109218) Subject: RE: BS: Who first lived in your house/pad ? From: Helen I used to live in a three storey stone terrace house on the hill in Newcastle, overlooking the harbour. It was built in 1888. At the time when my friends and I lived there it was owned by an amazing artist named Margaret Olley . I met her a couple of times. We had to call her Miss Olley and not Margaret. The story goes that when she was a lot younger she won a major art prize and bought rental properties over the years which meant she could continue to paint her beautiful art without having to worry about her living expenses. I think this painting is of the basement room in another terrace house two doors down. The room was similar to my bedroom at the house we lived in - although mine looked a lot less fancy - but Miss Olley lived in the basement and the room shown in the painting for a long time and then she moved to Sydney. This was the view from the top back room of either our terrace house or the one Miss Olley lived in: Newcastle Harbour |
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07 Jun 21 - 05:49 PM (#4109249) Subject: RE: BS: Who first lived in your house/pad ? From: JennieG Helen, the 'basement room' link didn't work for me. What an amazing thing to have known Margaret Olley, even just slightly! |
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07 Jun 21 - 05:58 PM (#4109250) Subject: RE: BS: Who first lived in your house/pad ? From: Helen Hi Jennie, the Mudcat blicky linkmaker didn't like the long website address. Here it is: https://www.newcastle.edu.au/newsroom/community-and-alumni/the-university-gallery/margaret-olley-work-to-be-exhibited-at-orange-regional-gallery Yes, I feel privileged to have met her and to have lived in one of her houses. I love her style of painting and the interiors and still lifes that she painted. I knew nothing about her before I lived in that house. The other Australian female artist whose work I love is Grace Cossington Smith. |
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07 Jun 21 - 06:46 PM (#4109264) Subject: RE: BS: Who first lived in your house/pad ? From: Tattie Bogle Ours is very boring! We are only the second occupants of our house which was built in around 1977. We moved in in 1986 just at the end of that 10-year housebuilders’ guarantee. Several things that could have been put right but only discovered them after the 10 years was up! The vendors only moved up the road about half a mile and are still there. Anyway, that’s half of our lifetime in one house: before that, we thought 6 years was a long time! |
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07 Jun 21 - 07:33 PM (#4109271) Subject: RE: BS: Who first lived in your house/pad ? From: JennieG Oh, I like that painting. Yes, Grace Cossington-Smith - saw an exhibition of her works several years ago at the NGA in Canberra. Our house is newer than yours, Tattie Bogle, having been built in 1992. We bought it from the original owner in 2010.......and yes, there were some things needing to be fixed here too! We lived in our previous house in the Big Smoke for 23 years, before that we were in a house not far away for ten years. Three years before that in a unit, and that is the sum total of houses Himself and I have lived in together - I lived in several different places before we moved in together, but he moved from his parents' house. |
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08 Jun 21 - 05:55 AM (#4109314) Subject: RE: BS: Who first lived in your house/pad ? From: JHW 'most of the houses the squire had built'. I like this story and always admire estate houses BUT as when visiting stately homes prefer to think of those who really built them rather than those who commissioned them. Not usualy documented. If I see a derelict farmhand home I picture him building it and living there with pride possibly in hard circumstances. |
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08 Jun 21 - 09:46 AM (#4109330) Subject: RE: BS: Who first lived in your house/pad ? From: Rapparee The Sanborn fire maps can be interesting. Those for Pocatello list "Female Boarding House" for several dwellings in what was called then "The Walled City" because of the fence around the area. Seems like the local ladies didn't like seeing or socializing with the "ladies." One place to look for interesting historical data on the ancestry of a house are old police records if such still exist and youn can get to them. Naturally, since about the 1990s most cop shops have gone to computerized record keeping, but the old books make fascinating reading if you can get to them. I've seen ones for here! The first crime in Pocatello, Idaho in the Twentieth Century -- 12:07 a.m., January 1, 1901 -- wasn't murder, mayhem, drunkenness, rape, arson, a gunfight on Main Street! No! It was a drunk who was caught stealing coal from the Union Pacific Railroad yards! |