I WOULD want to live in an earlier time! I'm just biding my time here until they figure out this whole time travel business so I can get back to where I belong - the 1920s! :)

Our post office is old like that. It's an old stone building. On the inside; it has bars on the windows, a BIG mural on the wall of Indians hunting deer or something....:0) The floors are pretty and the light fixtures are GORGEOUS! I should mosey on over & take some pictures.....:0)

The house I grew up in was built in the 1920's. My Grandfather was a businessman and had it built for himself and Grandma. Built in bookshelve cabinets with glass doors around the fireplace, Marble tile in the bathroom, cubbies and closets everywhere. A nilk box door in the kitchen. Also an ironing board that dropped out of a small closet. Huge wood columns in the living room. A "sun room." A mail slot in the front door. A "maid's room " on the first floor. Lots of stained glass. They sure knew luxury in those days.

Two ways you can view it. First, what we see as luxuries now even then was upscale building. Secondly, I'm sure that those people would have seen vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, washing machines & dryers, air conditioners, etc. as fantastic luxuries.

I'd love to have a house that looked like jannie's, but I sure am glad that I live in my own humble (to me) house today.

I agree with you, joann. I look at the old houses and the trim, mouldings, and extra embellishments and I marvel at how much time they put into building them. I love old houses. My house is old, but very plain but I am trying to be as true to the time as possible in the way I am fixing it up.

I love anything Victorian.

Rosemaryt, when all that time thing happens, may I go along with you?

I would be a child again, and I would like to live those days over again.

Sue

I might take the old house and another century -- if the maid came with it! LOL Make that 'maids', plural.

As I was 'making dinner' last night, it amazed me (again) that I can transform good food from frozen to table-ready in 30 mins. while I burn almost zero calories.

A steak defrosts in the microwave. I turn on the gas grill. I can serve four kinds of vegetables (mixed) after four minutes in the microwave. Frozen rolls are baked in 20 mins. I can dump greens out of a bag and throw in some olives and cherry tomatoes for salad.

I didn't raise and slaughter the steer, then have to eat it all before the meat spoiled. I didn't have to plant, weed, harvest, peel and wash four different vegetables and salad greens. I didn't have to haul wood for the stove, nor grill over an open fire, nor haul water to wash the vegetables and greens. The dishdrawer did my dishes -- no additional water to haul and heat, then lug to the door to discard. Some crumbs under the table? Out comes the central vac. Placemat dirty? It'll go into the automatic washing machine and be dried in the gas dryer.

I don't think I'd last long in another century. I'd be plumb worn out -- too tired to eat!

We may have an argument on our hands, Sue. The Victorian age was pre-electricity, pre-appliance and pre-19th Amendment. :-) Plus, the craftsman bungalow rose to favor in the early 1910s.

I'm going to jump into the portal right around 1924, and I hope to take my foreknowledge of market trends with me. Note to self: Invest in Leggs Pantyhose in the late 60s and Apple Computers in the early 80s. :)

You know what's funny, when I dream in my sleep, I'm in the 1920s. Too much time reading old books.

Rose

Here is a link that might be useful: Nothing beats a great pair of Leggs (youtube)

I often thought I would like to go back to the 20's, to be a flapper, wear fringe dresses, headache bands, go to speakeasies, drink bathtub gin and do the Charleston. Obviously I am romanticizing that era. LOL

Our town is built like that, lots of wonderful historic building and homes. Sitting in the courtroom at the courthouse just fills you with a sense of tranquility and wonder.

That said, give me modern medicine and conveniences over the old days, any time! One good toothache or case of appendicitis or a disease ought to convince anyone that THESE are the best of times. A drought in the old days could mean death. A heat wave- horrible. Laundry? CHORE!!!! Grocery stores? Few and far between. Travel? Not done easily, that's for sure, especially here in the Ozarks. Nope, I'm staying right here, I'm too spoiled to live like that. Plus, I'd have frozen to death as a baby, no doubt.

My 170 year old house has plenty of charm but the closets are tiny if there are any . The 40 windows have beautiful moldings, and the winding staircase is lovely. This was a farmhouse, built by brothers with trees cut down from this land which was then 7 or 8 acres. They were not rich. One was a blacksmith and the other the town's wagon maker. Every clapboard on the house out side is one tiny bit narrower than the preceding one giving the sense of height. It's well proportioned with it's Greek Revival small front porch, and one wonders why builders today can't get proportions right with their grand McMansions. The original random floor boards thru out the house still stand after all these years, and the three fireplaces all work. That said, there is no way I'd give up what conveniences I have today to go back to that innocent period. Our great grandmothers worked HARD, and we have it so much better. While I wouldn't go back to 1840 when the house was built, I'd go to the 1940's ..loved the clothes, cars, and innocence of childhood.

Oh, as I said, I wouldn't go back. I have medical issues - I'd be dead in two days without modern medicine.

For those of you dreaming of living in the past, check out the PBS specials on you tube. It's not time travel but pretty darn close.

Here is a link that might be useful: Victorian House

Here's where it gets interesting.
The Mom lasted 3 days before she broke down in tears.

Here is a link that might be useful: Part 10

No time to check out the You Tube. I love the old victorians, but having been raised in a drafty old farm house, with small closets and small rooms, I appreciate what we have now. It was family built and my GD was a master craftsman but it was never brought up to modern standards except for the bathrooms and kitchen. Money back then was used to care for the stock, so the barns were huge, and the family understood that.

I love the craftsmanship that seems to have been lost. What is really sad to me is seeing so many beautiful old buildings being razed and being replaced by chrome glass and stucco.

Last time I visited the street I was born on in San Francisco someone had put vinyl siding on my childhood home. I wanted to cry.

DotMom...I want to hang out with you! We'd get arrested...and have such wonderful tales to (not) tell our great-grand daughters! LOL

Wildchild..Worse than that , about ten years ago we went to the town where we lived right after college and marriage. We knew the address but couldn't locate it. It was a tall lovely Victorian, and we lived downstairs. Then I found the school which I remembered across the street and looked over and it was an empty parking lot. Same thing happened to my grandmother house. It was a lovely brick circa 1840 and in this decade the Methodist church across the alley from the house bought it and tore it down for a church parking lot.

On the upside, my county is building a new courthouse in the city where I live. For the law library, they are using a beautiful old brick church building that they moved from a nearby site.

I was raised in a small 4 room farm house. It had no closets, but 2 chimneys: one in the living room and one in the kitchen. These were utilitarian half-chimneys. They sat on a braced self beginning 2/3 up the wall and continued upward through the roof. It was single storey house, so the chimneys were about 10 ft tall. The fuel of choice was wood. A couple of years during the first part of WW2, we burned mostly coal for heating, but returned to all wood because the price of coal escalated during the war.

Electricity did not come to the farms in that area until 1947. Before that event, it was an ice-box during the summer with a water drain and kerosene lamps. Clothes ironing was accomplished with a set of flat irons heated on the kitchen stove - very hot work in summer.

That place would have been almost unliveable were it not for two porches on either side of the kitchen. One was party enclosed and served as a place to store necessities that spilled over from the house. The open porch was used to for stacking a few days supply of fire wood for both stoves. When the wood stack ran low, it was my job to go to the wood pile and split more wood for the kitchen stove and to bring in larger pieces for the heating stove.

There was no running water. All water was pumped from a cistern and the well. The well water was very "hard" whereas the cistern water (collected rain) was 'soft'. We never gave any thought about the roofing materials and how those may affect the collected rain water. In a few cases, the valley ways on the roof were made of lead sheet and was a source of low level lead posioning.

Picking black berries and canning those was no picnic, and was other food processing. There fruits from the ochard to can and vegtables from a large garden. The graden was almost one acre in size - that's a big area to hoe.

We children did have moments of play. We used our imagination to fill in for missing items. In a way, that was a benefit because we could create the most wonderful toys to our liking. Playing in the garden dirt and sand bars in the creek were enjoyed. We picked blossoms from weeds to create play decorations. Toy bows and arrows were crafted from whatever we could get our hands on. Kites were constructed using stiff, dried hollow weeds for the sticks and newspaper for the covering. The whole affair was put together with flour paste. (A little flour and water makes a paste suitable for gluing paper. Its cheep, too.)

We were so poor that we did not know how poor we were. But with huge efforts, we did eat well and life progressed fairly well until a medical emergency hit. There was no money and no insurance for this. A medical emergency that could be easily handled in today's home was a financial disaster back then. Our farm was 10 miles out of town. Just transporting an injuried person to the doctor's office was a problem with broken down, old vehicles. There was a period in my life when a horse and buggy was the most reliable transportation we had.

I remember two medical emergiences that were tough for the family. One was when I came home from school and found mom laying on the couch in the living room. She had a broken ankle, and was hoping it was a bad sprain, but knew better. The scond time, mom developed a fistula that required her to travel to a clinic in another state for treatment that lasted 2 weeks. This one was a financial disaster.

We kids toughed it out through colds, whooping cough, mumps, and measles. For two years, we lived through a polio scare. Some of our friends came down with that terrible disease. Later, I recall attending high school with two classmates who had been severely affected by polio.

Times were simplier then, but I have no desire to return except for a visit. For cost savings and reduction of lumber content, the interior of todays homes have reduced lumber content. Also, new interior design was aimed at labor cost reduction. That cost reduction process began during WW2 and accelerated afterward as soldier boys returned home to set up homes. Inflation kicked in witha vengence and continues today. For example, a new 4 door car, with a V8, manual transmission and no frills could be purchased for about $1 per pound. A Ford sedan was $2200 to $3000 and the heavier Buick was $3000 to $4000.

Ah, but we have just *lived* through a BOOM -- and now, just as followed the 1920's, we have BUST. (Not nearly as severe! I wouldn't want The Great Depression to look forward to!)

My late mother was a 'flapper' and I have the photos to prove it! Her dad had one of the first Fords -- lots of photos of men standing proudly beside their 'machines'! She was also the sole support of her mother and ailing father through the Depression. She lived through the early deaths of her grandmother and uncle from TB, WWI, the Spanish Flu, on into the Depression and WWII.

I think I'll 'stay put'. (I'd have been dead many times over in another era: pyloric stenosis, infections, kidney surgery, and no Advair back then either.)