HOUSE AND GARDEN 
J 
ANL'ARY, 1912 
With a new house you can get your view, your breeze, your heating, 
lighting and plumbing and the arrangement of your rooms exactly 
as you want them 
In the new house you can have all the comforts and conveniences — 
those ingenious contrivances that help to eliminate drudgery and 
save strength 
house only. The living-rooms were apt to be small and the con¬ 
nection of dining-room and kitchen, when they were not the 
same room, was direct, with a single door. 
x\ll these things were a direct and logical outgrowth of the 
conditions under which they had their growth. They were per¬ 
fectly adapted to the life that went on in them under the existing 
state of development. But to put a modern city family, with 
its demands for such things as bathrooms and butlers’ pantries, 
piazzas and views, and which has servants, with the attendant 
separation in the household which they bring, into such a house, 
will necessitate a great stretching and twisting of these old 
buildings. When we are through it will usually be found that 
we have got what we wanted only at a great^'sacrifice of space 
and directness. * • 
It may be a physical possibility f0;bmld oil pia^iza'^* turd bed¬ 
rooms into bathrooms, knock dpivfl partitions, and insbcSl l,rea*ting 
and plumbing systems. remov^’TDarns or turn the house ,hrqfund; 
but when we have finished, what have we? We have as a fiybrid, 
half new, half old, with none pf th^.stj'png points.of’.either. , We 
have still an old house; old frame, ol(^**]^9oV»..DUl(^in]lneys« The 
interest on the money we have saved iij *buyiiig *t1ie .old place will 
hardly serve to keep it in repair. The renewals will begin as 
soon as the carpenters are out of the house and will never cease. 
The quaintness and charm, the delicate intangible essence of a 
bygone age. cannot survive such rough usage. We cannot alter 
the statue and preserve the lichen. We shall have added so much 
new, sharp, clean work side by side with the old—new sills next 
battered trim, fresh clapboards here and there among the old, 
and pieces of new roof with its neat flat shingles, that the effect 
of age is destroyed. On the inside we shall have to contend with 
such things as sloping floors, and heating and plumbing pipes 
showing in the rooms instead of being in the walls out of sight. 
Our plumbing-pipes may not be decorative, but at least they 
will work, but with our heating we shall not be so sure even of 
that virtue. Your farmer kept warm by means of a sufficient 
number of red-hot, air tight, stoves, but just how many tons of 
radiators is their equivalent we dislike to think. The old build¬ 
ing has not been buffeted for years by the four winds of heaven 
without opening a crack here and there, for we might say here 
as a parenthesis that there is a mistaken idea in some quarters 
that the old work was stronger and better built than such work 
is to-day. We hear much talk of the great honest oak beams 
and girts of our old homesteads. True, they are there, but while 
the main corner posts and principal cross-girders are unneces¬ 
sarily large the timbers between, that correspond to our floor 
joists, are very much too small. Without discussing the merits 
of the old scheme of framing, there can be no doubt about the 
clumsy, unscientific proportioning of the timbers to the loads 
they were called upon to carry. We see the result in the shaki¬ 
ness of the old floors, which is not due to any unsoundness of the 
timbers, but solely to their lack of size and consequent strength. 
Neither have we a more successful solution if we resolve to be 
less drastic and take things as we find them, and live as the 
original owners did. 
There are those who dislike the jar of being pried out of the 
rut which they have grown to fit. This is the twentieth century, 
If you can find a site with trees and will plant vines and shrubs at 
once, your new house need not seem strange in its setting for long 
and city people who have grown up and hardened into a system 
in which bathrooms and cooks, radiators and electric lights, play 
a large part, find it a shock to be hurled back into the eighteenth. 
They feel helpless. The mechanical part of everyday existence 
which was formerly automatic now requires a conscious effort. 
Putting aside the question of convenience for the moment, 
there is one other matter that we will touch upon as delicately as 
may be. An old house has often fallen upon evil days and its 
roll of occupants have sometimes included those who were some¬ 
what careless in their personal habits, so that the inhabitants 
whom they introduced live after them. To have an old house so 
infested is a serious thing with more fastidious owners, and to 
eject such tenants is no easy task. There is the other danger, 
perhaps more remote, of the house having harbored some con¬ 
tagious disease and never having been thoroughly disinfected. 
