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These days I spend a good deal of my time working on my old house, a foursquare built in 1914. We have added on a bit to the space for the kitchen (See the exterior). The kitchen was practically gutted when we bought it and we are trying to put in something of the sort that might have been there originally. We are doing the work ourselves, and hope eventually to restore the rest of the house as well. Much of the work has been done with handtools, though we have also used the electricity a bit to get the job done. 
The floorplan of our house is simlar to, but not identical with the floorplan for a kit house known as "the Rockwood" sold by Liberty Homes in the early 1930s and probably before. The general layout of the floors is the same, though the chimney is closer to the middle of the house, and there was originally a pantry or porch on the rear with a sleeping porch above. Thus the upstairs hallway would continue through the back closets and end with a door to that porch. And some of the space used by the Rockwood for the bathroom is devoted to a third stairway for a walk-up attic space. At some point early in the life of the house the kitchen was moved from the top right square of the lower floor into this porch/pantry whose interior floorspace it shared with a small bathroom. Some of the window and door placement details are also different. Our porch is obviously brick with a hip roof whereas the Rockwood did not have these features as you can see if you click this link to a large jpeg of the entire catalogue page. You can see that the entire porch is configured somewhat differently and that our house has wider eves which have been boxed in. Overall dimensions on ours are also a bit larger. Thus it is the basic approach to the floorplan that holds the similarities and I very much doubt that ours is actually a version of this kit. Rather, there are only so many ways to lay out a foursquare so that different designers will converge on similar designs. This page that will continue to evolve with time. It will eventually contain information and links to do with the restoration of our 1914 foursquare house, as well as to do with oldhouses in general. Right now you can see the kitchen cabinets. You can find an article on these cabinets in the January/February 2000 issue of Old House Chronicle. Just recently made available again, now at oldhousechronicle.net -- the old URL is no longer valid for the magazine. |
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