Looking around our house

Our house has four rooms: living room, kitchen and two bedrooms. We also have a breezeway sort of place and a bathroom.In the old days there were two bedrooms upstairs but when we arrived here there was only one.  Also in the old days there were three rooms on the first floor which we turned into one big living room, and that is pretty much where we live.  Especially in the winter.  Our house is 1300 square feet.   The original house is the living room, the bedroom above it, and the kitchen.  There's a stone cellar beneath the kitchen, also original.  The original house was built in the 1850s.  The addition was put on sometime in the early twentieth century, I guess -- it's just another old house that got moved here from somewhere else on the island.  We made some changes in the addition but not so much in the original house. 

The living room was a narrow front room, with two small bedrooms behind it. Now it's all one room. One amazing thing about the living room is the moulding below the windows. Someone -- probably William Perry, who built the house -- cared a great deal to add this lovely detail in the front room. Greg replicated the moulding beneath the back windows, and continued the chair rail around the room.  So he gave the whole big room the original "front parlour" look.  We also took down the wooden ceiling and left the exposed beams. They wouldn't have had exposed beams in the 1850s but it gives the room some height and allows warmth to float upstairs into our otherwise unheated bedroom.   Since it's all one big room, the morning light pours in the eastern windows and the afternoon light pours in the western ones.  That's Elizabeth Hyde's shepherd crook hanging on the new centre beam.  The beam is a tale in itself.

Here's our bedroom. The Goulden family, who owned the house after the Perrys, had seven sons and four daughters.  I think the sons slept up here.  Greg mostly just painted up here, but he also made additional doors into the kneewall so we could have storage space.  The quilt on the bed was Elizabeth Hyde's. It was made by a woman in Lockeport, I think. The blue desk is the teacher's desk from the McNutt's Island school.  Some of the teachers wrote their names inside the desk drawer.   

We feel a great deal of continuity with all the families who lived here before us -- the Perrys, the Gouldens, the Demings, and Elizabeth and her children.  It is somehow still their house, too.