So you suspect, or you're sure, that this front porch used to go across the whole width of the house right?
Oh yes, that's the way it was originally built.
And so when they enlarged it in the 70's they closed in most of the porch and put the bump on the other side of the house.
Doubled the size of the living room.
It's got a great front hall closet, there's no doubt about that.
But you got to admit it doesn't read like an 1897 house when you walk in here.
These architectural features are straight out of the seventies.
Oh yes, it's all very clean, slick.
They took out all the moldings.
Can I take your coat?
Sure.
They took out the moldings.
They put in feature like the ceiling, the drop ceiling up there with the lighting.
I mean, to me, that's kind of is very commercial looking.
It's not very residential at all.
And, there are all sorts of other things that just don't set right with me, like mirrors and the lack of moldings.
then the lack of chair rails, no detailing at all in here.
That's right, they stripped it all out, and I think it's been part of the project here to put it back.
That floor, you know, the quarry tile floor inside the house; again it just doesn't look right for a Victorian or a shingle style, or a house of this vintage.
No, it's not something you'd find here.
And yet, the scale of the room is great.
It's about 24 by 22, that's a big room.
Yes, the original room went along this wall here, which was the old outside wall.
And then back this way, and this was the porch and then they had this bump-out portion here.
Between the porch and the bump-out, they almost doubled the size of the room.
But that would have meant the original room had the fireplace off center, almost in the corner of the room.
That's right, and that was very characteristic of houses at this time.
If you look at work that these architects have done in other houses you will see the fireplace in the corner, usually back to back with the other fireplace.
In the next room?
In the next room, at an angle.
After all, it was just a practical piece of equipment, it was heating, right?
That's right.
Now I understand the steel beam over my head here that was added in order to carry the upper floors, so we can't really do anything to change that.
We need to keep this ceiling dropped 6 inches to hide that beam.
But can we do anything about this lighting that goes around the whole perimeter?
It looks like a, like you know, really commercial space.
Well, you might want to eliminate that.
Those bulbs are incandescent.
They are very expensive to replace, almost 15 dollars apiece.
Really?
Maybe you want to just continue the ceiling out to the edge, and put a crown molding in which would have been in the space and original .
That would be a great idea.
Let's take a look at the den.
The house is really four rooms on the ground floor.
Dining room, living room, den and kitchen.
So this room is fourteen by sixteen, and again, here you've got the masonry mass on the other side and you've got the fireplace at an angle into the room.
Yes, projecting out so the heat and the appearance of the fireplace is dead center into this room.
Yeah I like it at the angle.
You know the shelving in here is nice, but if somebody collects art and architecture books like I do.
You really don't have any room here.
They are only about nine inches deep, so that I could see redesigning this, rebuilding this.
Yeah, you'd need a shelf that's somewhere between fourteen to sixteen inches deep to handle art and architecture books.
That kind of a library, yeah.
And then through here, you connect back into the front hall.
You know, Greg, there's real evident different difference in the flooring material here, isn't there?
Yes, this is original floor which is hard pine.
In the dining room.
In the dining room.
And then when they, major changes was done to the house in the 70s, they redid the hall and the living room in strip oak.
Mm-hmm.
Well, the room, the dining room again, it's not a big room, but it's got this interesting plan really, where again, the same kind of angled placement of the fireplace, which is balanced on this side.
Have you look closely at this hutch?
This is a very nice piece of woodwork.
It's buried under many layers of paint right now, but if this could be restored, it really could be quite a nice piece.
At one time, as you can see from this stop, there were doors, probably glazed , in the top of this hutch and I think we want to think about re-creating those.
It's a detail worth restoring.
Let's look at this nineteen 1970's kitchen.
Well, Bob, actually, this kitchen is probably a lot earlier than 1970.
I'd guess more like the 50's.
Walnut plastic laminate was a very popular material in the fifties.
Fifties and sixties probably, yeah.
There certainly is a lot of it here.
Now this looks like it s original 1897 glass doors?
Oh yeah, it certainly is.
Look at the glass it has the same purple like the glass on the outside windows has.
This could have been butler's pantry territory right off the dining room.
There is a wall right here.
But these cabinets probably went down to the floor on either side.
So the plan is pretty unusual though cause you walk in, you've got counters.
You've got peninsulas.
You've got this right in the middle of the room, which.
To me, it looks a little bit like Casper the Friendly Ghost, doesn't it?
You know, the shape?
Well, it is sort of a very fifties-type design.
You can seat a lot of people there, I guess.
Yeah.
And look at that.
Well, this is certainly fifties industrial design.
This is a streamlined look.
I like it.
It's neat.
But it's probably a good 40 year old stove.
And one oven and then they added added two more ovens here, huh?
These?
Yes, I would guess that those are replacements.
One interesting thing about old houses getting kitchens retrofitted into them, even in the 1950s is that they can really do some goofball stuff; like putting the counters at three feet height up against windows that go all the way nearly to two feet off the floor.
So you get these pockets back in here.
Well, I think the reason this happened is that they didn't want to change the windows on the outside of the house.
They realized that they shouldn't change the front facade.
Um-hum.
At the same time, they decided to push the cabinets up against the outside wall.
Yeah.
Resulting in a sort of strange juxtaposition.
Well I think it's time for everything to leave.
I think so, 40 years is about enough for one kitchen.
The space is good too, because if you go from back here to over there, you're close to thirty feet.
And it's almost sixteen feet wide, so you have a very large area you can produce a new kitchen.
Lots of fun to design.
Let's go take a look upstairs.
The staircase in this house is pretty generous.
I mean, we can walk two abreast up it.
Yes, that was very characteristic of these houses; a very wide stair, lots of light, and this one goes up to the third floor, which is unusual.
And the spindles change.
I mean there's an order of spindles on the staircase and then they're turned differently here.
They almost create a screen.
It's really one of the most elaborate parts of the design of the interior in it, and it's spacious enough that you know, you don't feel cramped when you get here.
You've got three small bedrooms on that side and then you got the master bedroom here.
Which is not a big room.
It's maybe sixteen feet, kind of, because you've got a jog there, maybe almost twelve.
And this is something we might want to think about widening.
Maybe taking this wall out and pushing it back a foot or so.
And taking over the space in the little bedroom that's over there.
Right.
And what about something like this when you got these closets that-
These closets you can take out.
They're really not serving much of a purpose then you just have the roof line in the room and the floor plate goes all the way through, making the room appear much larger than if the closet was here.
Yeah.
And you'd have enough floor space that you could have a chair, an easy chair or something like that.
What have you been doing over here?
Well, I've been looking at the floor to see what condition it's in.
It's squeaky and it's pretty heavily damaged with a carpet installation and maybe you want to think about replacing it.
I love the fireplace behind it here.
That is very nice.
Again, at an angle as we've seen in two or three of the rooms.
Well, listen I know you're measuring so I'll let you get on with your job, I'm gonna go find Riley.
Ok thanks.
Well we know that this third floor was used as a rental space, probably since the 1940's, and there's one little bedroom, a bathroom, kind of a closet with a shower, rooms all over the place.
But this room is unusual for a third floor attic because it has its own fireplace and it has a large, beautiful window and it has a whole wall of original built in bookshelves.
We can tell they're original because the moldings on them all match up to what we see in the rest of the house.
And of course a very unusual dormer arrangement with this triple window up here.
I know that Riley is around here some place.
But, anyway, we did find out that the original builder of the house, a Professor Pickering, probably had this room laid out as his private study.
Let's see if we can find Riley.
As I was saying though, there's storage rooms everywhere in this place.
I mean there are nothing but . . .
Hi Robbie.
Hey Bob.
I was just, so how are you doing?
Good.
I was just saying, there's nothing but storage rooms, and storage rooms, and you come in from in there.
What's in there?
Well I was just looking to see just what's structural and what isn't.
Yeah?
And this is dead space back here.
But this is a structural wall.
This is right where the break in the gambrel roof is that you can see outside.
So whatever we do up here, this wall needs to be kept in some form or fashion.
Yes.
Right.
What's this?
I found this inside.
This is an old directions for the wallboard that's on here.
1924 patent.
Yeah, and it tells you just how To put it on.
So that may indicate there was a remodel here in the 20's.
That's right, you know it.
Well, have you looked around... you think there is a possibility of tearing down a lot of these other walls?
I mean, there's a storage room there, there's another storage room here.
I know that there's another bedroom here that's not a bad size, but then another storage room in here.
Hey, what's unbelievable to me is you go in here, and this storage room has it's own storage room that you can go into, and it's just never ending.
I know some of these walls definitely can come down.
Greg was talking about trying to create one huge family room space up here.
Well that would be nice.
Have you looked up there yet?
No.
That's where I'm headed next.
So, what's it look like up there, is there like a ridge pole that goes from front to back?
Well uh, yeah there is.
We've got a lot more space up here.
We do have a ridge pole, we've got some rafters that are really in good shape, the whole place looks very sound structurally.
clean, dimensional lumber, right?
It sure is, yeah.
No, it looks good.
It looks like a lot of possibilities.
All right, and there's insulation up there, right?
There's insulation for the ceiling, yes.
Yeah.
Come on down.
Okay.
I mean do you think, it's gonna be an easy job to take down a lot of the ceilings then?
Yeah , I think most of the walls and ceilings can come down, and what's going to determine the big cost is whether, what kind of look you want.
Rock is nothing, just, you know, I would say cathedral ceiling.
To sheet rock it.
Well we'll have to study that.
Okay.
We're gonna break for some.
messages, and when we come back, we'll be touring Cambridge, so stick around.
