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This is the very reason I love my old house so much. It was custom built in 1962 and it was a one-owner home all its life. I purchased it four years ago, and it looked untouched by time. I'm an architectural historian, so I really do love the originality.
I "gilded the lily" a bit by doing the walls in the kitchen and bath. Those little dots were hand-painted by moi. Lot of fun.
The plumbing fixtures in kitchens and baths are all original. We had to do some repairs on the toilets recently, but as long as they're uncracked, they'll live forever!
Didn't you mention in a recent post that you were moving? Why? How can you leave this house?
Aside from the unused condition (what's up with that, by the way?) it looks pretty similar to my house, which was built in 1958, when I bought it in 2002. I like it but there are a lot of features that are impractical today.
A friend of mine once owned a house with a blender built into the counter. Cool feature, although I doubt it would get enough use to be worth it.
I do like the laundry chute. My wife would like to get one, but current codes requiring a fire barrier between floors make it impracticable.
That "time capsule" house looks like it was never lived in at all, almost as if it were a museum exhibit of some type.
We just bought a house late last year which hadn't been lived in for twenty seven years. Houses deteriorate significantly when they aren't lived in. Plastic crumbles to dust, fabrics are all stiff, plumbing is rusted solid, electrical is scary, etc. The house we bought also had termites so that really compounded things. It had been lived in before the people left, though.
It was built in the mid-40's. Lived in until the mid to late '80's. Then the owner got a job on another island and meant to come back so they left a lot of stuff in the house. For whatever reason, they never moved back although nearby extended family (who still live in a nicer house down the street) used the house as a guest house occasionally from what I've heard. Utilities (power and water) were removed in the early 90's so that's pretty much the end of even guest house use.
Here's what 27 years of not being lived in looks like, although in this case there were termites involved:
So, I'm guessing he didn't just open the door and find it all perfect and pristine like it is in the pictures. Although it's pretty "nifty keen" in the pictures.
The kitchen colors and appliances in the pictures he posted look late 50's or really early 60's, although the layout is much older than that. We have the same layout of kitchen sink centered in window with rounded shelves on either side and some sort of lowered valance above and this one is from the mid-40's.
This picture doesn't show the boxed in valance since it had been eaten by termites, but it was original installation. The upper half of the window trim hasn't ever been painted so it was boxed in before the kitchen was painted. I'm probably going to pull the false valance ceiling down and just put a wood trim bar across the area and a light fixture up there. Or do something anyway, so the whole window trim will be visible, having half the window trim covered by a false ceiling just seems too weird. There is also a cabinet by the door where the cabinet encroaches on the window trim. That just bothers me for some reason, it doesn't seem "right" somehow.
So, the colors of the pictures he posted are 50's / early 60's but the layout is much older than that. Chrome trim and Formica were around before the 50's. Rounded window shelves and that upper wooden valance are from an earlier era.
There you go. Proof that there are a lot of people in America with so much money that they don't know what to do with. This guy is probably loaded and went and bought many houses to rent-out and completely forgot about this one letting his lawyers and "assistants" take care of the taxes that were probably automatically deducted from his bank account and his assistants took care of the upkeep. What a freak-of-American-nature the owner of this place is. Only in 'merka, where you will have many perfectly good, EMPTY houses and millions of people homeless. What is up with that?
The kitchen colors and appliances in the pictures he posted look late 50's or really early 60's, although the layout is much older than that. We have the same layout of kitchen sink centered in window with rounded shelves on either side and some sort of lowered valance above and this one is from the mid-40's.
My house was built in 1962 and has the exact same layout, with the sink below the window, valance above and rounded shelves (as seen below). As an architectural historian, I'd say the kitchen featured in the original post is classic mid-to-late 1950s. IMHO, of course.
Here are some images from a 1959 Home Improvement magazine.
Nathan Chandler posted pictures to sell his kitchen on Flickr. This is no ordinary kitchen, though. The house itself was built in 1956, and the kitchen is equipped with vintage GE appliances. The extraordinary part? The house hasn't been occupied and the appliances have never been used!
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