How Old Is The House You Live In?

Working on my web directory job, I frequently come across bed and breakfasts, or even museum buildings, whose website brags about the building being more than a half-century old, and I think, what's the big deal about that? I was out of high school and working for a paper company by then. Most of the people I know live in houses that were built long before 1971. That's practically a new house.

Most of the houses in Millinocket were built more than a century ago and, for that matter, most of the houses in what is known as the New Development were built in the 1960s.

The mill owners chose the site for the Great Northern Paper Mill in the late 1800s, and it was the company itself that built most of the buildings in the old part of town, which is where I live. There was no town here before the mill. There were only a couple of farms. The people who were involved in the construction of the mill buildings were housed in an area now known as Shack Hill, but none of these shacks still exist.

Construction of what is now the old section of town began in the early 1900s, beginning with the commercial buildings and a few boarding houses, which still exist, on Penobscot Avenue, which serves as Millinocket's main street. The second street built was Katahdin Avenue, where I live.

I have an old postcard that shows early Katahdin Avenue before it was paved. The photo on the card shows a few other buildings that are under construction, but the only buildings that appear to have been completed were my house (which was probably a boarding house then) and the house across the street from me, which was clearly a boarding house.

My house was built in 1910. As it was built before there was a municipal government here, the town does not have a blueprint or a floorplan of my house. A few years ago, our code enforcement officer said that he was going to have to go through the house in order to complete a record of the building for the town office. I told him he'd need a warrant, which he never produced, the advantage being that I can do whatever I want to do on the inside of the house, or even in the back of the house, without a permit.

So, my house was built in 1910, which makes it about 111 years old. How old is your house?

 

My current house was built in the mid-1960s, so it's about 55-60 years old. I do not have a real survey for my 51 acres, just pols and rods compass-referenced from stones, stumps & dogwoods. This county was founded in 1742. There is a plaque not far from me that basically says "Patrick Henry Used to Live Here" when he was our rep in the House of Burgess. His original structure is long gone.

The house we moved to in Fairfax County (likewise founded in 1742) in the early 60s when I was a kid was built in the late 1800s (it was basic farm shelter, not an old southern palatial estate.) All of the framing was rough-cut, hand-hewn lumber. None of it was dimensional, and the studs were all twisted 90° between the floor and the ceiling. Plumbing and electrical were all added later (you could tell.) The plat for that 2 acres was similar to the one for my current place...no real survey. I think we were only the 3rd owner.

 

The house where we live now was built sometime in the 50’s, but it is newer than most of the houses around it. The original house was built on the other end of the lot, which stretches from one street to the next one. Now it is divided into two separate lots, and the original house was torn down about 15 years ago.
We are just outside of the Redstone Arsenal, and most of the house near here were probably built in the 40’s for officers from the arsenal.

The house in Idaho where I grew up was much older, maybe very early 1900’s ? It was originally one bedroom, and had a wood cook stove and heating stove. The only electricity that we had was 110, so we did not have an electric cooking stove or a washer/dryer, or anything that needed a 220 hookup.
Someone had added a back porch, which was then enclosed , making two smaller bedrooms in the back of the house, which was always freezing in the winter. I remember having those ice whorls on my bedroom window all winter.
By the time my folks bought the house in 1950, the heating was from an old oil-burning stove that looked like a wood stove, and only ran on low heat, or it rumbled and growled and threatened to explode.

All of the light fixtures, except for the living room and dining room , were the bare bulbs that hung down on a long electrical cord and were turned on with a little switch on the light bulb holder, similar to how a lamp turned on.
Out back was a cellar, which had double walls and was insulated in between with sawdust, probably from one of the nearby wood mills.
There was a barn and chicken coop in the back of the property, which was not unusual for homes in town back in those days. We had a lot of fruit trees, grape vines, raspberries,blackberries, and a rhubarb patch.

My mom probably would have had a vegetable garden, but she and Grandpa Bailey ran the small neighborhood grocery next door to our house; so she didn’t have any leftover time to garden, and we had plenty of food at the store.
We had lots of flowers, because those came back each year, and all we had to do was keep everything watered in the hot summer. My pony lived out back in a little corral by the barn.
It was a place that i loved, and am glad that I grew up there.


We had a lot of snow in the winter. This is a picture of me on the snow pile with Bonzo, our dog. You can barely see the garage roof sticking up through the snow behind me.