Thursday, January 13, 2011

This Old "Sloping" House

It's a known fact that a lot of older homes and buildings (especially ones pushing 100 years and older) are going to have issues with being level. I'm not sure if it's because of the foundations settling over time or maybe simply the construction standards back then.

Well, the upstairs of our home has a noticeably "non-horizontal" feeling to it. Below is a picture of the stairs going up to the kids' rooms. It's a little hard to tell in this picture as I think I was tilting my camera to be even with the stairs but if you look close, you can see they slant to the right.....

You can also see how scuffed and worn they are. It's one of the kids' chores to wipe down the stairs but it's so hard to really get the built up dust down in those old grooves.....

I thought a quick, new coat of paint would freshen things up a bit. Looks a lot cleaner now. Here, you see the slant is more noticeable.....


Maybe we should have put the next couple of pictures up as videos but I think you'll get the idea. We have a great ol' time putting a marble down at the side of the room and then watching it immediately take off, building up speed to go clear across the room. Here, the kids demonstrate for the camera after their showers and before going to bed last night.....

Ellie adds the face for dramatic effect....very unlike her. :-)


So, are we going to fix the issue? Heck no. Dustin brought up the possibility one time and we talked about it......... for about 3 1/2 seconds. We quickly came to the conclusion that there would be no reason to fix except for aesthetics. Besides, it's part of the charm of living in a 100 year old home, right?