"Heapin' Helpin' of Hospitality"

Most houses have quirks, and the older ones are the quirkiest. There are the things people have left behind, and parts of homes that have been altered to suit a particular need. For instance, when Neighbor J and Neighbor B used to live next door to me in the duplex, they found someone's secret stash of foot fetish magazines in a crawl space. Someone was getting their foot fun on, and leaving the evidence in the ceiling rafters, ya'll. You'd think that a foot lover would, if they had any sort of poetic aptitude, hide that stuff in the floorboards instead of in the ceiling, was my thought on the matter.

When I was house-hunting, I saw a house that looked alarmingly amateurish in its construction, where each room was built oddly on a different level. So, from the entrance hall, you stepped two steps up into the living room, and then stepped four steps down into the kitchen. You proceed to the first bedroom (seven steps up) and beyond to a laundry room (three more steps up). What made this house even more odd was that the ceilings were all one height, and so sometimes your head would almost touch the top of the room, and other times it was a regular high ceiling.

My favorite house quirk that I saw during this whole endeavor was a two story 1920s era home. On the second floor, there was a nice bedroom with a closet. I opened the door to the closet, and discovered that there was a 2 x 3 hole cut neatly into the back of the closet wall. The view from this hole looked out onto the staircase that came from below. So, if this was your bedroom, you could stand inside your closet and peer out this hole to watch the other residents of the house traipse up and down the stairs, and they would probably not be the wiser. This hole was also curiously framed. As in, there was a picture frame encasing the hole, so the implication of this view was that you were looking out onto a picturesque tableau of stair-walkers. From inside a closet. Tres creepy.

Well, my new house has its own little quirk, which part of me loves and another part of me can't wait to get rid of. I have an unfinished laundry/utility room, which basically just has the washer/dryer, breaker box, and lots o' pantry-ish built-in cabinets. One of these cabinet doors is, well, a door. Like a full-size, entry-and-exit-for-people door that you have on your bathroom, with a doorknob instead of a handle. The only difference between a regular door and this door is that this door is built in to the wall sideways. So it looks like there is a sideways door running the length of one wall. How odd, right? Well, it gets better. When I turned the doorknob, the door folded out, and I discovered that it is a twin size, homemade murphy bed. It reminds me of the kind of beds they used to have in trains in old murder mystery movies. Not only is it a bed, but there is a rusty set of mattress springs affixed to this door. Just springs. Glued onto the door. No actual mattress, or space for a mattress. Like all you could really do with this is maybe tie a thin cloth pad to the rusty metal springs and curl up for some zzz's that way. Um, in the cement-walled unfinished utility room. Ahhh, relaxing. So cozy.

I can't help but wonder what this crazy bed was used for. Did prior residents actually think this was a suitable guest room? Did they make Grandma sleep in there when she visited? Poor Grandma. Although, I know Granny wanted a root cellar dug into the back yard on the Beverly Hillbillies to make her feel more at home and it didn't matter that she had a huge mansion for her, um, roots (?). She felt the most comfortable with her root cellar. So I can only hope that the karma in my new house doesn't include making Granny sleep somewhere she didn't want to sleep. Because that would be too sad. At any rate, the bed's got to go. I just can't abide.

Ya'll come back now, hear?

Kiss the rings, I'm out.
Librarian Girl