Sunday, November 16, 2008

They sure don't make 'em like this anymore....


P1000139, originally uploaded by davethetemp.

This is our upstairs bedroom and you can see that there was a window that had been boarded up. You can see that the work had been done with castoff lumber.

There were a number of places in our house where the lumber in the walls was obviously scavenged from previous work. In many cases the lumber wasn't long enough and our contractor had to shore things up.

On our assessments, it says the house was built in 1916. Records show it was the first constructed in our development, by a developer trying to make good on his investments in a real estate market stalled out by the First World War. The Developer ended up moving into it for a couple years, waiting for the war to end and the market to heat up again. The earliest maps I can find show our house as one of four on our street. by 1924, all the houses on our street were in place.

Maybe scarcity of the war had left builders without choices. The insides of our walls a view into a time that forged Canadian identity.

Or maybe they were just crap builders.

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