And The City Says...
Paint your secret staircase! Alright, it's not really a secret. There are no fun hidden doors, but it does sound cooler that way. I'm not really sure what it is there for. Anyone with knowledge of old houses, please enlighten me. The bottom door is in the kitchen, it leads up to the upstairs bathroom and a bedroom (closed up and formerly my kitchen when it was an apartment.) Then at last it leads up to the attic. The only use I get out of it is spending a day in bed after I fall down the stairs.(Those of you who know me well, know I'm not kidding.) Seriously this has to be at about the bottom of the top 100 things we need to do around here. When we bought the house, the walls in here were peeling and cracked. A year ago, for another inspection, we scraped them down, filled the cracks, and gave it a quick coat of paint (most of it anyway). It was a quick, cheap way to "fix" it to pass inspection. Well during the previous inspection, the inspector wasn't satisfied so we have another chance to mark it off our list at our next inspection this Thursday. Mark is working (as usual) as I sit here typing.
Attic Door
Paint your secret staircase! Alright, it's not really a secret. There are no fun hidden doors, but it does sound cooler that way. I'm not really sure what it is there for. Anyone with knowledge of old houses, please enlighten me. The bottom door is in the kitchen, it leads up to the upstairs bathroom and a bedroom (closed up and formerly my kitchen when it was an apartment.) Then at last it leads up to the attic. The only use I get out of it is spending a day in bed after I fall down the stairs.(Those of you who know me well, know I'm not kidding.) Seriously this has to be at about the bottom of the top 100 things we need to do around here. When we bought the house, the walls in here were peeling and cracked. A year ago, for another inspection, we scraped them down, filled the cracks, and gave it a quick coat of paint (most of it anyway). It was a quick, cheap way to "fix" it to pass inspection. Well during the previous inspection, the inspector wasn't satisfied so we have another chance to mark it off our list at our next inspection this Thursday. Mark is working (as usual) as I sit here typing.
Attic Door
I thought it was interest how they used "blank" corner trim throughout this staircase around all the doors and both windows. The rest of the trim in the house is the type with concentric circles.
Door to Nowhere (once a bedroom, then a kitchen, next a nursery)
Stairs I love to fall down
posted by Shawni at 6:36 PM
7 Comments:
I too have a second staircase that goes from my kitchen to the upstairs bathroom. Since I don't think anyone in my house ever had servants I believe it is a back way into the attic (which can be reached through the bathroom. The previous owners converted the attic into living space as they made the upstairs into an apartment but this back area originally would have been an attic. There is also a scuttle hole in the closet leading into the attic attic but you wouldn't want to put anything up there unless you wanted it never to be found again. It's really only good for filling up with insulation. My aunt said that back in the day, during the winter months, women would carry the wet laundry up the back stairs and hang it in the attic to dry and that this was fairly common in places where it got cold. I was satisfied with her answer.
This sounds like a friends house.
I believe they said it was a room
for a: maid, housekeeper or cook.
Wish I could afford a housekeeper
much less have a room and
bathroom for one!!!
Julie
Thank you both for your comments! I can definately see it being used to haul wet laundry, not by me, but here in NY it is cold enough to warrant it. I wish I had another bathroom, but the one it is connected to is the only full size bathroom in the house. I'm not sure it was set up for a maid. However, the rest of the bedrooms are set up so that unless you go through one of the bedrooms (our office) you would use the back staircase as the primary entry and have an alternative entry to the full bath.
Back stairs were common on big homes of this time. Mine has one as well that leads from the kitchen to that back of the upstairs hall, and then another stairwell leads to the attic. It was common to have them lined with bead board. Whether they were used by maids or not I think that is what they were designed for. The bead board would have protected the plaster walls from mop buckets and coal buckets. Children were probably relegated to the backstairs as well. Remember there were no electric vacuums in 1890.
Thank you Greg once again for your insight. I always look forward to your answers to my questions. I admire your knowledge of old houses. I feel bad for the women and children who carried stuff down those stairs. I have fallen down them more than once myself.
You should also realize that your bathroom was most likely a bedroom in 1890. Most houses did not have indoor plumbing until after 1910 and many still had outhouses up into the 1940s.
The stairs were most likely for a live in servant who would have been given the room and the attic for living space. When the servant class became obsolete after WWI due to higher paying factory jobs, the bedroom was the least used room and ideal for conversion into a bathroom.
You could line the steps with sheet metal and make a slide! Useful on laundry day!
Wow I didn't think of it being anything other than a bathroom. It is soooo tiny. Then again, I really would love to get my hands on the original layout. We keep finding things that make us think they are out of place. For instance, there are two closets in the bedroom my husband and I use, but my closet has a new wall in the back of it making us think it was somehow ajoined to another room. Also, in the bedroom it would have joined, the "main" door is more narrow than the rest and the trim pieces of the moulding are cut in half. Hmmmmm.... Thank you Greg!
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