Tag Archives: house

Analyze This

Dreams

Another house dream. This time I awoke in a strange bedroom — the four of us were sleeping in our bed, like the old days when we semi-practiced “the family bed”. I remember getting up and saying to the kids — “you’re too big for the family bed. You need to move into your own rooms” and walking them down the hall to their new bedrooms.

Andrew’s was right next to our bedroom and I pointed at the closed door and “said that’s your room”. Clare’s was harder to find, but then I remembered it was at the end of the hall. We walked in and noted it was small, but she’d be able to fit her furniture in it.

I walked back to Andrew’s room and saw that the previous owners left all the furniture, including a bed with sheets and blankets and a large console TV. Andrew was pleased with the TV and didn’t mind sleeping on someone else’s bed.

When we walked downstairs a house party was being thrown for us. My mom was in the kitchen cooking and supervising while friends and neighbors either helped out or enjoyed each others’ company. I can’t say I recognized anyone but my mom, but in the dream I seemed to know them.

Suddenly I realized we’d moved and I ran outside to take a photo of the new house to send to my mom (forgetting she was at the party). When I looked at the house I was disappointed. It was not as nice as our old house, and seemed smaller from the outside. It actually looked like a two story beach house — weathered shingles and all. Walking on the small lot, I noticed the grass was stiff and sparse and the soil was mostly sand. It could have been a house at the beach, except there was no real water anywhere — except for a run-off pond in a neighbor’s back yard. We had bought an ugly beach house in the middle of an ugly subdivision.

Walking back into the house I noted that the kitchen was bigger than ours and exclaimed, “Yay! Counter space.”

There were nooks and crannies in the house but not fun ones. One was a room that could have been on a Navy ship that held nothing but a painted metal staircase leading to the fuse box. It also was damp, with water dripping from the ceiling. We found some old science experiments near the fuse box. The floor was moist sand.

At one point I realized we’d bought the house from a woman who used to be married to a friend of Dean’s and I remembered having been in the house when she owned it and lived in it with her two children. I remembered having been in the kids’ rooms. I wondered why she’d left so much furniture in the house, but after knowing she’d owned it, I felt better about living there.

Secret Room, Secret Dreams

Musings, , ,

As mentioned before, I like dreams about unexplored areas of houses. I’ve dreamed about new houses with labyrinth-like layouts and about finding secret places in our current house. So, when we discovered that we might have a secret room under our screened-in porch, I was intrigued.

Our house was built shortly after World War II in an area of Bethesda called Huntington Terrace. The street on which the house was built hosts several other homes that look similar to ours — a typical brick center hall colonial common in this area. What is unique about the homes is that the home directly opposite is exactly the same — a reverse mirror-image, but no two other homes are the exact same. Another unique quality of several of the homes was an excavated “secret” room under the screened in porch. At least two neighbors broke through the cinder block in the basement to find an extra 1000+ cubic feet of space. At least two others broke through from the outside and created outside storage.

When we first heard about the room under the porch we joked about opening it up and making a root / wine cellar out of it. We also joked (as did several of our friends) that we may find a body in the room. I didn’t really think seriously about it until we looked at the across the street neighbor’s extra room when the house was on the market. Dean went back at least once to look at the room and not long after that we called the man who refinished our attic (my current office) and asked if he could do the job of breaking through the wall and making a door to our room that we now were sure existed. He wasn’t so sure, but gave us a reasonable estimate price and said he’d call when he had time. Months went by, but he eventually called and said he could start work on a Monday in August.

In anticipation I snapped a few shots:

Basement where the door would go
Basement where the door would go
From the outside
From the outside
Porch
Shot of the porch

On Monday at 9:00 am sharp, Peter and his assistant, Eric, arrived to start work. They quickly set up and while Peter brought things in from the truck, Eric started chipping away at the cinder block of the laundry room wall. Checking out the wall The first chip Making the hole

It didn’t take long for Eric to chip through both sides of the cinder block. He asked for a flashlight and we took our first look into the room
DSC_0318.JPG DSC_0320.JPG

Instead of 61 year old air we saw dry dirt. Peter and Eric both tried to push a crowbar into the dirt, hoping it was not packed into the space, but it wouldn’t give. I called Dean and told him the news. We didn’t have an excavated secret room. Instead we had a room full of dirt that hadn’t seen the light of day in over 60 years.

Peter and Eric did find air instead of dirt directly under the porch, but the porch is only about 4 feet above ground.

Dean did some musing for about a day and a half about how he and Andrew could excavate the dirt through the laundry room and out the basement door but calculations came to far too may work hours to make it a reality.

As you can imagine we were all disappointed. I thought I’d get a wine / root cellar. Dean hoped for some extra space so he could set up his workbench inside instead of having to store it outside under the addition. We’re over it now, but it sure would have been nice.

We wondered why some of the houses on our street had excavated rooms and others did not. I recently found an old Washington Post advertisement about our street and it seems that the homes on the opposite side of the street were finished first. I think that by the time the builder got to our house he figured that there was no need to remove the earth from the area under the porch. Little did he know that his decision would make some future owners kind of sad.

In hindsight I wonder if not knowing would have been best. It was always kind of cool to think that there was a room on the other side of the laundry room wall,  just waiting to be uncovered. Now that we know it is just a space filled with dry old soil, it’s taken away a small, but delicious, mystery.

Another house dream

Dreams

So last night / this morning I had another dream about moving into another house. This time, however, the house was pretty normal — brand new, in fact. I was secretly pleased that it was brand new, although I profess to only like older homes. This time, also, we had not sold our current house, and were just checking the new house out by spending a couple of nights in the new house to see if we liked it.

We didn’t have any strong feelings about the house, one way or the other, so figured, why not… It was in Alexandria, Virginia — where we lived before Bethesda; and we discovered, after spending two nights at the house, it was built right next to the George Washington Masonic Memorial. I’d recently been thinking about that place because I thought the steps would be great practice for our trip to Ireland where we were planning on visiting Skellig Michael, an island that, if you walk up 600 steps, you’ll get to visit an ancient monastery.

We’d just decided on buying the house when I noticed that it was not only adjacent to the Memorial, but built in the middle of a cemetery. In fact, looking out one of the windows, I saw several very old tombstones. At first I thought that Clare would love it — being all into haunted places and all. Then I realized that I couldn’t live there because it was obvious that the builders had dug up graves to build the house.

Not sure where that dream came from, but it seems as if we’ve learned our lesson — don’t buy a house without touring the whole thing.