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1. Kate R on May 23, 2025 at 2:06 pm

   Really nice.

   When I was a kid, my grandparents owned an older two-story house built sometime in the early 20th. It had many features that you see in Craftsman homes – lots of woodwork, dark oak cabinetry with beveled glass panels, light fixtures in the living and dining room like the above – the whole nine yards. The basement had an old root cellar and some other features common in that era. Many people told them to upgrade the house accordingly and not ruin the historic features, but they literally tore out cabinets, painted over a lot of other woodwork, such as windows and sills, doors and jambs, and baseboards, removed old light fixtures, totally removed the old brick fireplace and created a stone wall containing a fireplace (it actually turned out beautifully and they recreated exactly that same stone fireplace in a new home they built later). That new fireplace was the only feature not completely ruined. It still makes me sick to think about it. I was only about 7 years old at the time and even then, I knew they shouldn’t have stripped the house of its best historical features. A few things they did preserve were some smaller features such as the old button light switches, the old bedroom and bathroom panel doors with crystal doorknobs, and a swinging door into the kitchen that had a wonderful round window that they always kept propped open. They enclosed the front porch that was quite similar to Craftsman style front porches in order to make that a sort of outside buffer from the intense cold of Iowa winters. They closed the inner stairwell to the second story bedrooms and bathroom and created a new stairwell accessible from the front porch in order to turn the upper floor into a private, rentable apartment. I’ve never told this sad story before – I’m now near my 72nd birthday, lol. I’m still loving old homes that I was exposed to regularly as a kid in the 1950s.

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