3 Weird Quirks of My American House 

A couple of addendums (because I made this video on little sleep in between moving. Don't recommend). 1. Upon further inspection, the phone nook probably wasn't a phone nook, but a door chime unit. Phone nooks were usually smaller than this, apparently. 2. We suspect the coal chute predates our house and may have once been a sidewalk coal chute. These were occasionally used in the nineteenth century and looked liked sewer lids, as opposed to a typical coal chute built on the side of the building.

I'm convinced that Laurence purchased this house more for content than living quarters.

You got the "fancy" version of the basement toilet. Often they were just in the middle of the basement with no walls around them! They were also installed as a relief valve of sorts so that if the sewer backed up it would come out of the toilet in the basement, saving the main floor from becoming a sewage mess.

I guarantee you the CURVED-END cabinet with the pink countertop in the laundry room used to be the original countertop and cabinets from the kitchen. My grandmother had a curved-end unit exactly like that in her kitchen. She displayed ceramic chickens and roosters on the half-circle shelves.

That particular nook you showed at 3:45 was actually for the doorbell chimes. You still have a doorbell in there up at the top, but it's a slightly more modern one where the bell is small and entirely contained inside. I'm lucky in that my house which, coincidentally was also built in 1942, still has the original chimes. They sound so much nicer than their modern equivalent. They look cool too!

Because of the war, almost no homes were built in 1942. You have a rare item.

In the late ‘90s, I had a third-floor studio apartment in a storefront building that was built in the early 1900s. When I moved in, I couldn’t figure out what the purpose was of the second (permanently-locked) door from the main hallway into the apartment. That door, which was several inches narrower than the standard door, was just to the right of the functional entry door and it would have opened into the kitchen, or to be more precise, where the refrigerator was. It took me several weeks to realize that that door was perfectly situated for an old-fashioned icebox to get its regular delivery of a block of ice! The iceman would have had to walk up the two flights of stairs with the block of ice, opened that narrow door, then opened the back of the icebox and placed the ice inside.

I grew up in an 1890s row house in Hyde Park on the Southside. Instead of a little niche for the phone, we had a closet under the staircase with a small table and a bench to sit on where you could talk privately. Almost like an in-home phone booth.

That two basin basement sink was the laundry facility before the washer and dryer became everyday household items. I can’t tell from the short glimpse we got of it, but if it is made of stone, it is likely soapstone and is therefore a “feature” that some might want to preserve.

I grew up in a large home built in 1903. It featured a large concrete water cistern in the basement! My father somehow cut through the very thick concrete wall and installed electricity and shelves. We used it as a canning room and storage for root vegetables.

The niche in your hallway is meant for a long chime doorbell or tubular doorbell. The wiring is still being used as that is where the replaced doorbell is. If you take the cover off you will see 2 xylophone type bells. You might even have another doorbell button by your back door. Two rings for the front and one for the back, wired into the same device.

Maison Laurence brings back a lot of memories. From the ages of 0 to 8 years I lived in a house that was built in the 1920s. It had a coal chute and furnace that was an endless source of fascination and illicit fun. I remember opening the small furnace door to inspect the red hot coals and sneaking into basement to toss in small objects to watch them burn (aren’t all small children pyromaniacs?). From age 9 to 12 we lived in another house that had fuel oil delivered about once a month. A tanker truck backed into driveway and a long hose was unspooled to pump oil into a large tank located in the basement. Not as interesting as the coal furnace but still a source of entertainment for a pre-teen boy. Since then every house I have lived in is heated by natural gas, which is essentially invisible and boring - unless there is a gas leak that threatens to blow up the house or the entire neighborhood.

My parent's really liked the idea behind what you just described regarding the basement set-up in Pittsburgh. When my parents designed their house to be built, they made sure to include a full bathroom in the basement (toilet, sink, & shower) so that they could do that very thing. But they also designed it so that the house sat on top of the two garages and the back door of the house goes through the garage and through the basement BEFORE entering the house. My mom loves yard work, so this way she could get all dirty and then get clean in the basement (including using the laundry area) before heading upstairs to the main part of the house. They built their house in 1995.

Are you sure that is a coal chute? We called that a catch basin. Our coal chute was a metal door on the side of the house. Love your channel and congrats on the house!

Just a side note, you can get a lid for the back of the toilet that has a sink and runs off the toilet inlet so you don't have to run plumbing.

Very nice woodwork in your American house, Laurence. I grew up in a late-1930s vintage house in suburban Detroit. The house had a coal chute on the side of the front porch that led to a 'coal bin,' a separate room off the basement. My dad got up at ungodly hours to shovel coal into the furnace. One of the greatest thrills of my life, as about a 4 year-old, was looking out the front windows and seeing a huge dump truck back up onto the front lawn to put coal down the chute for winter. We also had a single toilet in the basement, nowhere near as nice as yours, which my mother always called the 'lavatory.' Also in the basement was the basket that held the dirty clothes to be laundered, that had been put down the 'clothes chute'--and there were beautifully crafted little access doors to the chute on the first and second floors, By the laundry area we had these two sinks, side-by-side, and heavy-duty to the point of being industrial, which Mother called the 'stationary tubs.' In the SE corner of the basement was a little 8X8 room that was the fruit cellar. On the first floor, the place also had a bell-shaped cut-out in the wall between the kitchen and dining room, which served as our phone niche, although my mother called it the phone alcove. And speaking of chutes the place of course had a 'milk chute' where the local dairy, Johnson's, would deliver milk and eggs, etc. I've been living in Southern California for 45 years now, and hadn't thought about that place in years. They don't make them like that anymore. Do they still put vestibules in houses? That place had a kinda nice one, now that I think about it, with a big closet for heavy winter coats. And how many houses are built today with a sunroom AND a 'breakfast room?' That place had both. This was not anything more than a typical middle class suburban home back then. Growing up I just took it for granted, and never gave it much thought, but your coal chute really jogged my memory.

My grandmother on my fathers side of the family had a house in Parma, Ohio which also had a Coal Chute, yet where the coal was poured into was a fairly large bunker which was later made into a Storm Cellar. You might want to consider getting the plans to your house from your city and/or county planning office to actually see just how big it might actually be. And whether or not it could actually be utilized as an additional room if it actually exists...

I thought it was a 30s/40s house based on the woodwork and some of the other details. Older houses like yours are usually built really solid. Edit: As another commenter pointed out, your washer and dryer are elevated, you might want to watch and see how much water your basement typically takes on. If you've got a sump pump/basement drainage system, you may want to make sure that your pump is in good working order before you put too many items on the basement floor.

Growing up the old coal shoot was our escape hatch from parental control. We eventually got smart enough to really clean it out and line with cardboard so we did not escape covered in soot. You may also have an old milk shoot where the milk man left your fresh bottles of milk but most of those are covered up or removed.

The house I owned was built in 1918 by a russian gentleman for his 2 spinster sisters. It had a coal room and a chute in the the wall for the coal. It also had a blocked off chimney that was built into the wall for a giant coal stove. Every room had a door to keep heat in only the spaces you wanted. I think I counted 12. It still had a claw foot tub in the bathroom. The kitchen had cupboards that were all the way up to the 12 foot ceiling. Old houses are amazing! They had character. Nothing like the generic ones they make now.

The house I grew up in, in PA, had a coal chute, coal bin the size of a small full bathroom, and a coal furnace that was used into the 80s. It was pretty exciting as a kid to stand in the basement and watch the coal slide down from the truck into the bin. My neighbor had a shower in the basement. Valuable for people who do dirty jobs.

I think what you are calling a phone niche is actually a spot to place the door chimes, a doorbell setup using long brass cylinders hanging in that tall niche. A box at the top connected to the electric doorbell and little hammers would hit the chimes. Phone niches tended to be only about a foot tall.

Hearing coal being delivered is definitely a nostalgic sound from my childhood. I remember my dad having to get up in the middle of a cold winter night and going down to the furnace room to throw a few more shovels of coal on the fire. The other feature many old houses had was a built-in ironing board in the kitchen. Probably some younger viewers are going to think "What's an ironing board?" Love your channel, congrats to you and Tara on the purchase of your lovely home, and I've been a subscriber to Brit Box for two years now.

American 'foursquare' houses built around the turn of the century (two story brick houses with a full cellar, attic with two dormers, one to the front one to the side, full open front porch, small open rear porch), typically had two small rooms under the front porch. One was called the 'root cellar' where root vegtables like potatoes, turnips, carrots, onions and apples as well as preserved foods were stored and a 'coal cellar' which has a small hinged cast iron door for coal to be delivered through via a chute from the bed of the coal truck.

I grew up in a 200 year old home in New England. When the house was first built it was a simple square box and over the years new sections were added. We definitely had a new fangled phone niche; I spent my teenage years laying on the floor in front of it with my feet up against the wall talking on the phone. Of course you couldn’t go farther away than the length of the phone chord, lol!

We had coal miners all over where I live in Illinois and our house (built in 1947) also has an outside door leading to the basement, lone toilet with a utility sink at one end and there was a tub at the other end that we removed. All of this out in the open, no walls, no door. We cracked up laughing the first time we toured the house and walked down the interior basement stairs to see a toilet just at the bottom all exposed and in it's glory!

That phone niche is actually the place that the door bell chimes were mounted (I had the same thing in my house). In the period in which this house was built, the door chime was a set of tubular bells with a striker unit at the top of it (it looks like it was replaced by a modern bell). Then it looks like it was modified to also house a phone.

I lived in a Home in New Rochelle New York it was built in the late 1910s early 1920s. The homes in that area now sell well over $1 million so you have an idea of what the neighborhood was like. There was a lone toilet in the basement. It was designed to be used by the gardeners or any workmen in the house. I guess they didn’t have to wash their hands or could use the hose outside. The maids room had its own separate bathroom.

The laundry tub (sink) was actually to wash clothes in - before there were automatic washers. My Mom told me that one side was for soapy water, the other to rinse.

Apparently they had the telephone niche in Britain as well. I’m sure you have seen episodes of keeping up appearances where Hyacinth always ran out to the hall to answer the phone and admire her Royal Daulton figurine she displayed there.

Actor Harrison Ford grew up in Chicago and in an interview many decades ago stated that he remembered trucks dropping off piles of coal onto the sidewalk for each home or apartment building on his street. Later in the day, a man would come along and shovel the coal off the sidewalk and into the coal chutes. Ford said that inspired him with its simplicity of a man with a job (manual labor), one thing to do and doing it. (paraphrasing) He knew despite wanting to be an actor, he needed something to fall back on when times were tough so he became a carpenter - self taught. He got the role of Han Solo because he was building a door for Francis Ford Coppola's office and ran into George Lucas. Lucas didn't want actor's he'd already worked with before in Star Wars, but asked Ford to help in casting by sitting in for auditions with other actors. The rest is history, all because of coal (chutes).

Many factory workers and coal miners had the basement shower. It's also a "thing" for farmers, and the best was the "walk in basement" as the ideal arrangement so everything came off and went directly into a "mud sink".

Coal chutes were pretty common from that time. We used our coal room as a cellar for canned vegetables from the garden.

I grew up in Chicago and still live here (after having been gone for over 15 years). I'm 99% certain that what is in your backyard is not a coal chute but a manhole cover for access to the sewage line out of your house. Coal chutes in Chicago were typically on the lower portion of the foundation and usually found in the 'gangway'. What you have is typical of most Chicago backyards where there is an access hole to the sewage system. It even looks like it says 'SEWAGE' on the manhole cover.

We didn't have a toilet in the basement but we did have a shower. It was just a shower head attached to overhead pipes and you stood on a wooden pallet. Nothing else. No curtain, no enclosure. We also had the coal chute on the side of the building. I was always disappointed if I wasn't there for the delivery. We kids would "help" our grandfather shovel coal into the furnace with our own little shovels. Sweet memories.

So, many homes in the northeast also have this “toilet room” in the basement - my house included. There is also something called the Pittsburgh Toilet, which is a basement toilet with no surrounding walls… just a toilet floating free in the middle of the basement. I’ve found examples of this as far as Delaware. So while (or whilst) not unique to Pittsburgh, the Pittsburgh Toilet did originate in Pittsburgh.

The midwest basement toilet is called a "Half bathroom". (where you get the zillow "1.5 bathrooms" thing). The water and sewer drain pipes from the upper floors just happened to be running along this empty area to it made sense to put a spare toilet there, just in case someone in the house had to go. I was born in the 1980s and my (1920s) house only had one shower and one toilet, except for the emergency one in the basement. Morning showering in a Midwest winter with 5 family members and one hot water tank was a special memory. Your shower is no longer than 300 seconds unless you were very selfish :)

The woodwork in your home is beautiful!

My grandparents bought a house in 1970. It was a 2bed, 1bath with a one-room attic and one-room basement. By the time they sold it in the late 1980s, the attic was 2 bedrooms and a bathroom, and the basement was a craft kitchen, a workshop, a spare bedroom, a toilet and shower, and a storage room.

Older homes also used to have a large metal bucket that sat in the ground with a foot activated lid. It was usually in your backyard or on the side of your house. You’d put your kitchen scraps in it and a local farmer would come around and collect it for pigs, chickens, or compost. We dug ours up a few years back, but my neighbor still has theirs.

I lived in a house that was built in the mid 1800s. It had a small room, about 7'× 10', off the living room with a door that had the top half glass. I figured it was for funeral vewings because the bottom of the door was hand carved with a wreath. There was a small graveyard on the property.

OOOOOHHHHH Laurance, My grandfather built his house in Pittsburgh in the early 40s, and in the basement a lone toilet under the stairs and the huge laundry sinks. There was also a root cellar under the front porch.

Two things from old houses: 1.coolers, which were small cubby holes with one side exposed to the outside air for food, back in the days when you would not want to put hot items in the icebox in order to not waste your ice. 2. Dedicated recessed outlets high up on the wall for electric clocks.

Coal chutes were quite common in the UK. In fact, Jules of "Joolz guides" points them out on his walking tours of London.

You may want to get your house tested for Radon. Here in the Midwest older homes May have naturally occurring Radon.

The first house I owned, built and purchased in the mid 90's, had a phone niche near the front door. We used it to store keys and random crap like pens, pencils, safety pins, clothespins, rubber bands, etc.

A bathroom with just a toilet is called a "half bath". When you see a house advertised as "2.5 baths", that means there's 2 full bathrooms and one of those with just a toilet. Houses with them are still being built, though in a minority of new builds.

I noticed another feature common in many old American homes. The washer and dryer are sitting on a raised platform. A lot of cellars have everything placed several inches above the floor for when the basement floods. It prevents damage to expensive appliances.

Our 1906 basement in Northern Illinois has a defunct old toilet, shower, and nearby laundry tubs. We’ve also a wall mount pulldown ironing board. And the round metal lid near our back door covers the old cistern, disconnected long before we moved it.

This is wonderful 😃 you're like a better version of the History channel... entertaining. Seriously this is really interesting to learn about old houses. Such rich history. Thanks for sharing your home with us. That spot was purrrrfect for your kitty 🐈‍⬛

I love it, yes our house, built in Homewood, IL, in 1929, also had a basement toilet, shower and open laundry area. It was also so spooky we kids never locked each other in the basement.

I am 70 years old, and I can remember our coal fired furnace. When coal was delivered by dump truck, they stuck a chute through one of those little basement windows and filled the corner with a large pile of coal. I remember being taught to remove "clinkers" (rocks that looked like coal but refused to burn) and shovel coal into the hopper. Probably about the time I turned 5 (1957) we switched over to an oil furnace. That required a big tank under one of the flower beds.

The little niche in the wall also was to house the doorbell chimes on the wall above. They hung down on the wall in the niche. My home in Detroit had all of these features too!

My grandmother‘s house on the north side of Chicago had similar features: it had a cast-iron door on the side wall that went into a wooden coal bin; there was a similar door on the porch for the iceman to put ice into the icebox; and it had a bathroom with a sink and shower in the basement along with the washer and dryer; she also had a tiny 3 ft. Square closet with a clothes chute in it that she used as a telephone booth so she could close the door and have private conversations on the telephone.

That finished window in your rec room in the basement is truthfully an unusual quirk... most rooms wouldn't have such a great feature in the basement, and looks original

Lawrence, you could always install a "tank sink" for handwashing. It is literally a cold water sink that replaces the lid on top of the toilet's tank. They are used extensively in Japan, are available for purchase online, and popular for very tiny bathroom spaces. The water in the toilet tank is potable/clean water, and these sinks can limit freshwater use.

The basement laundry room, toilet, utility sink +/- shower is usually what I think of today as a "mud room" more so than a "vestibule", though in my experience it's now more common to be in that location vs. the basement. Glad to see the blue sofa made it! 😁

If your house from this time period didn't have a Phone Niche, you might have a specific piece of furniture in place of one called a Gossip Bench. There were many variations but they all followed the same , basic layout. It was a bench seat with shelf for your telephone and a storage area for Telephone Directories beneath it. Was this just a thing here in the US or did the memo on this item make it across the pond?

We lived in a house in Sacramento, built in the 1970's, that had a toilet off the laundry room. There was a wash basin in the laundry room. Very convenient when you're doing chores, have to go, and the other bathrooms are on the other side of the house. This house also had a "mother-in-law" attachment, entered from the laundry room, with a combination living/dining/kitchen, and a separate bedroom and full bath.

I've been told that one of the main reasons for a toilet in the basement was because iron was in short supply during and after the war to make the drain pipes. The closer to the street the less iron required.

That big sink looks perfect for cleaning brushes after oil painting.

Your state of Illinois still is a major coal producer. It has large reserves of bituminous coal that are needed for steel production (hence Gary, IN). This type of coal is pretty good for home heating, so it was very natural that it would be used for both in your part of the Midwest.

House I grew up in was built in 1948. No phone niche, but the basement had a "coal room," which never had coal delivered to it because we had a whole-house gas furnace in the basement which was HUGE. The coal room was an unused remnant still used in the blueprint for these cape cod houses. We played in the basement quite a bit, but believe me, the coal room was very scary and I wouldn't go into it by myself, LOL! The chute was a large rectangular metal piece that opened towards the foundation of the house.

I live ina small rural town in Illinois, about a 3 1/2 hour drive south from Chicago. About 2 years ago they actually dug up the sidewalks so that they could fill in all the coal chutes on the main shopping district streets. It was kind of amazing to see when they pulled up the sidewalks and you could see the rooms that had been blocked off and not changed for decades.

a 1942 house, good buy. Some of the best built homes. America had just entered WWII and new construction of houses was stopped except when needed for the war. A 1942 house was the last they worked on and well built because they had time before being laid off.

I love the woodwork in your new home. I love hearing about the quirks of older homes. It's very interesting how things that were so important then doesn't always exist in our times now.

I miss grandparents house i grew up in. Had a laundry chute, milk door, coal door our chute was slanted, what I was told was called a secondary servants stairway, a balcony, fireplaces, and a dedicated entry foyer. God i miss that house it was so cool.

My grandma's house had the basement toilet, sink, and shower that were just sectioned off with a shower curtain that could be moved on the track to cover the shower or the toilet, but not both at the same time.

Ironically the lone toilet in the basement was always referred to as the Pittsburgh toilet and a lot of times it was just there. No walls or anything, just off in the corner or near the stack.

My house was built around 1895-1900. It has a basement added after the house was built, and in the middle of the basement for the world and it’s wife to see…..is a toilet. 🤔

When we lived in Pittsburgh our house did indeed have the side-entrance-down-to-the-basement facilities you described. But it was in a middle-class neighborhood where homes would be far beyond the means of steel mill workers. We were told that back in the days of the steel mills the air pollution was so bad that even office workers would have to change clothes and wash up in the basement to get rid of all the soot and coal dust they'd accumulated during the day.

I grew up in Eastern Washington and lived in a house built in 1902 or 1903. We had a coal room in the basement and I would go down with my dad when he would shovel the coal. Then on the 2nd floor at the top of the stairs was a very small toilet only "toilet room". I can hardly fathom it now. It was a great house to play hide and seek in though. Lots of fond memories❤

That was interesting about the coal chute. I also loved the way your cat took over the phone niche. LOL Thanks!

That your kitty is able to leap up into the phone niche is the whole reason why I find cats to be the bomb. Cats are so cool. They can even make their way up to the top of a door and perch on the inch and a half that the top of the door affords them. I love cats, and I even love wondering where they are and finding them in a cabinet or some other Interesting place❤

My home was remodeled around 1942. At that time the owners only had an outhouse. The son's wife was pregnant and they didn't want her running outside, especially at night. They converted two closets to add toilets only. Only later adding a sink and shower to one; removing the second once they had funds. I found that many homes in this rural area had these. Here, at least, it was lack of money that only allowed toilets to be put in. Most still had hand pumps outside or in the kitchen to wash up.

I grew up in an old farm house with a coal chute which my dad changed over to oil....so instead of coal delivered to the basement, oil was delivered to a huge metal oil containment tank. Along with the coal chute was an oil chute! Our home had radiators....I still like steam radiated heat the best. Instead of heating my entire house, I use a portable radiator taken to where I am located. BTW - older homes had lots of doors to contain heat in an area. They also were constructed to have "breezeways" where doors were left open for the wind to come thru and cool the home in warmer months....This gave way to a new invention....screen doors.

Growing up in NZ, it was actually common for the loo to be in a room by itself. Usually the bathroom (with the basin plus a tub and/or shower) was nearby, and in fact my grandparents had a place where the shower was also in its own room - apparently washing your hands after the deed was done was not as much of a thing back then.

For a couple of years when I was a kid, my family lived in a house that was built in the mid-1700's (yes, in the US) and we used a massive old fireplace to help heat the place. We did this by burning huge chunks of coal, and we kept a coal skuttle ready filled nearby. (And, yes, I am older than dirt) I have no doubt that this is now impossible.

Pennsylvania guy here, we have a toilet shower and sink (old) around in the basement. Also a lot of basements here have coal cellars, small rooms that held coal. Usually they stuck oil tanks in after changing from coal.

I am 68 years old and I remember as a kid even in the early/mid 1960s houses with a coal chute. The coal truck had a wooden chute on it and would dump it down into the basement via an outside coal chute. There was usually a wooden bin that the coal would fill up in (in the basement)......the coal bin located not too far from the furnace so you didn't have to walk too far to get a shovel of coal. If you fill those old coal furnaces and "bank" the coal correctly it should run all night during the winter months.

I have watched many episodes of the British show "Home Under the Hammer" that feature lots of homes with a separate toilet room and bath or shower room. There is rarely a sink in the toilet room.

Too bad you didn't get the quirky milk door. It's a niche on the outside where the milkman would leave your order and where you would leave the empties. I have heard that some houses had an interior door so you wouldn't have to go outside but I've never seen one of those. The milk door was a handy hiding place because parents never thought to look there lol.

That looks like a sewer cover for your septic system. Coal chutes in Illinois were either in walls or what might now be a small window.

@7:00 My grandmother told me stories from her childhood. In the late 1910s and twenties, she and all the other kids would race to the railyards to pick up as mutch of the coal that fell off the trains as they could carry. Normally, crews came through to clean it up and put back. The railyard guards would turn their backs while the kids were doing it, any adults got an ass whoopin if they got caught.

I grew up in a house with a coal chute and a coal bin. My grandfather shoveled coal as needed during the winter. It would get pretty cold in the house overnight.

My grandfather was a NYC subway track layer. That was a DIRTY job, he’d come home looking like the tin-man from Wizard of Oz only darker silver because of all the steel dust. He actually didn’t wash his work clothes at home out of fear it would break the washer, so he took those to a laundromat once a week.

The 1948 house I grew up in had a shower and commode in the basement (no sink!). My father's cousin built it that way so he and his boys could come in from working on the farm and take a shower before they went upstairs for a meal. My mother-in-law's house (1954) had a phone niche in the hallway, and my grandparents' house (1950) had a coal chute. They lived in coal mining country and there was just about no other heating source but coal.

At 4:23 that was for the big door bell chimes. Some are still around and it was considered very classy. At 7:32 that most likely was the port for home fuel oil delivery, not a coal chute. The oil tank was removed when the furnace was converted to natural gas, most likely in the mid-1950s. Homes heated by coal are older and you can usually tell where the coal bin was in the basement. My mom hated when coal was delivered because the dust came through the floors and gave everything a blue haze..

That could be a phone nook but due to its narrowness and height I think it's more likely for doorbell entry chimes. They would be three long chimes hanging down and that was the doorbell.

Congratulations on your "new" home! I live in Chicago, and I think what you are referring to as a coal chute, is actually a catch basin (storm drain).

I'm from Chicago and at 5 yrs old my family moved into a huge and very old house. At that point our furnace took gas or oil. A big truck would come and hook up a huge hose to the side of the house. But, there was still a huge pile of coal on the floor down there in the basement. The basement also had a bathroom too. This house had a kitchen and bathroom on the 3nd floor with a separate back stairway. There was also a very nice alcove, all oak with benches where we had the phone.

In a Farm house built in 1881, it has butler's quarters and dumb waiters. Beautiful original bathtub cast legs.

I love older homes, I adore those doors with horizontal panels especially. My house was built in 2000 and the walls are thin and the doors are common and boring.

Ohhh! That must be why they're called Pittsburgh toilets. At least that's what my friend called it when I showed her the random toilet I have downstairs in my basement in my 1939 Michigan house. I assumed it had something to do with stopping the basement from flooding. But thank you for clearing that up.

Here in the Midwest the basement toilet and shower were common, but it has nothing to do with steel workers. The houses were originally built with nothing in the basement, but the basement DID have a drain in case of water incursion. People would just install a shower-head above the drain as a ghetto way to get another shower in the house. Same with the toilet. It as just a way to add amenities with almost no cost.

Another quirk you may find is actually on both the inside and outside of your house, next to the back door. If it hasn’t been removed and covered up, you’ll probably find what’s called a “milk door”, used to deliver milk in that era. We owned a home in Rockford that had one - sealed on the outside, but the interior shelf made a perfect place for keys. We actually found the original lead-lined box for it while digging through a box that was left in the garage.

That actor will always be Mr. Darcy. The End.

One characteristic of older houses is the presence of doors separating the kitchen from the dining room. I actually had to remove some from my son's new condo. Which is "new" in the same way as this house.

I love older homes they have so much character, i love houses as early as the 1880’s.

My gran's house, in England, had a coal chute. The coal man delivered every two weeks. The chute dropped into "the coal shed" where we would take the scuttle out to the shed and fill it daily. There was no central heating in the house until my cousin inherited the house and put in a furnace in 1986!