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Monday, April 27, 2015

House Dream

Rengstorff House, Mountain View, California, 1867. 
This is not exactly right, but the overall look and setting matches my dream remarkably well.
My parents have purchased a big, old house. White, three stories, with a flat roof. It sits on a large lot, perhaps even a corner lot. The previous residents have left some things. Nothing substantial, and not evenly distributed. A bedroom on the second floor (the mom's room, I suspect) has a couple rows of open topped boxes stacked along one wall. They don't appear to hold anything very interesting, clothes perhaps. A bathroom on the second floor has been stripped of everything, including the toilet and the sink. The bathtub is still there. There is plaster dust and dirt scattered on the ceramic tile floor. The tiles are those small, hexagons that used to be so prevalent, about one inch across. I come across a high chair sitting in the middle of the entrance on the main floor. It's old, made of wood. It looks sturdy. It's finished with a thick, dark varnish. I'm wondering why we have it. Did the previous residents leave it here? Or did we bring it with us? Then I remember someone in our family is due to deliver a baby, so, yes, we are going to need this.
    I'm wondering where I am going to stay so I head upstairs to see how many bedrooms this place has. In the right front corner of the house is a second staircase going down. Just past the stairs is a bathroom, and in the back corner of the bathroom is an opening to something. I go look, and find an opening that lets you look down into another bathroom half a story lower down. There is another stairway on the other side of the bathroom that connects the two.
    I'm wondering about the condition of this place. My dad, in this dream, is getting on (in real life he passed away several years ago).  Has anyone taken a look at the roof? Flat roofs, it seems, suffer neglect until they start leaking, and then it's a big crisis.
    The interior decoration is from another era, or maybe just a higher class. In other words, it has been decorated. It is not a model of sterility that you get from new houses. Some rooms are carpeted, some have bare wood floors. In one room (a bathroom?) the carpet has a floral pattern. The walls are decorated with moldings, though most of the walls are painted white.
   I never did find out how many bedrooms there were.

P.S. I just realized what the problem is with flat roofs: you can't see them from the ground. If you want to know condition of the roof, you have to actually climb up there, and who wants to do that? With a conventional pitched roof you can see the surface of the roof, or at least some of it, so you can see if you have a serious problem.

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