18 Comments on They Don’t Make’em Like That Anymore

  1. Well that triggered an old memory. When I was stationed in Georgia in the 70s, we would go swimming at the chalk mines (off limits) on weekends. On the drive there we would pass an old shotgun shack out in the middle of nowhere. I doubt the place had ever seen a drop of paint. No visible electric hookup. Usually an ancient black woman sitting on a rocking chair on the porch.

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  3. The cities that were once transit hubs in the 1800s are loaded with interesting houses and there are whole neighborhoods in some larger cities that are loaded with one or more of these styles.

    Most new homes today look pre-built to be trucked on site and fitted to a preformed slab or basement.

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  4. I don’t care about the style. I live in a house that has washer and dryer on the main floor. At my age, I can barely go up and down steps and I have help to go down the basement when needed.

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  7. Home design is a personal passion. My fav era is mid-twenties to mid-thirties when nearly all of the homes were built by experienced craftsmen who took a great deal of pride in what they were building. Ours is a 2 story, 1927 — what could loosely be described as — French Tudor revival. It was built as the early cusp of the modern movement in home building, with an emphasis on light, air flow and health. No, they sure don’t make ’em like they used to. Today’s homes are more often considered another commodity, like a car, with a “useful life.” Never heard of such a thing before. They’re made as cheaply as possible and all of them are completely white (with some shade of gray on certain walls), white quartz counter tops, etc. I think they appeal to young(er) home buyers who have zero design sense and no imagination.

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  8. I live in a craftsman style house built in 1918. It’s a beautiful 2 story older house on Spokane’s N. side of town in an older well established neighborhood.
    The house has ceiling beams running across the middle of the house separating the living and dining room, built in china cabinets, built in bookcases, an older brick fireplace with a mantle, a large wide-open porch on the front of the house and other quirky elements in it. My wife and I bought it in 1990 FOR $40,000 dollars from a friend of mine who needed a bigger house for his wife and 5 kids. My father-in-law who was a real estate agent at the time told us that he would have bought it we hadn’t bought it first. It was and still is a good house for us to raise our 3 kids and my youngest daughter still lives there with me in the upstairs and I’m not moving anytime soon. And even though I still owe money on the house my mortgage payments are relatively low. It needs some work but it’s a keeper since it’s been here about 107 years and counting. One of the things that it needs is to relocate my washer and dryer upstairs next to the kitchen so at 72 I can quit walking up and down the stairs to the basement, my son can help me with that. He also helped build me a brand-new composite deck off the back of the house last fall.

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  12. geoff the aardvark — I know your neighborhood, but I’ve forgotten the name. Wonderful homes there! Last time we drove through, though, the area was a little spotty, with homes which had been revived among ones that were down in the heels. I figured it would only be a matter of time before all of them were fixed up.

    Another wonderful neighborhood of early 1900’s homes is located in a suburb of Vancouver, B.C. It is named “First Shaughnessy”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaughnessy,_Vancouver It was developed by the president of the Canadian railroad. Amazing, stately, old homes.

    Wherever we travel — large town and small — we always search out where the “Burghermeisters” built their shacks. It’s a lot of fun.

    We’re blessed to live in an area of Seattle which has so many fine examples of early to 1930’s home architecture.

    If you’re at all interested, I know a woman who writes house biographies. She combines her expertise in early home design/construction/history with genealogy of the home’s occupants — from first building permit to present occupants, and publishes it in a bound form. We’re just now having our home’s biography written by her.

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  15. I live in the Logan/Garfield neighborhood of NW Spokane. A little bit to the S. of where I live is an old neighborhood affectionately known as felony flats where a lot of the neer’do wells live W. of the Spokane County courthouse in one of the older neighborhoods in town which was originally settled by a lot of the wealthier residents of Spokane 100 years or so ago especially along the bluff along the Spokane river. In between are a lot of run-down old houses where a lot of the local riff raff live. But things are changing with the new development of Kendall Yards a mixed development of middle-income housing and small businesses where the old mainline railroad tracks use to run thru that part of town up until the early 1970’s and is just N. of the Spokane river and across from downtown. The gentrification of that neighborhood is pushing a lot of the lower income people out which is both a good and a bad thing.

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  16. Dayton, Washington a small town in SE Wash. state on the road to Walla Walla has a large variety of older Victorian homes that have been very well kept up over the past 100 years or so. It’s a very unique pretty little town. I used to deliver flowers there on occasion.

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  18. I always wanted a dome house sine I saw a Whole Earth Catalog when I was 12, now I want ti to be made out of cement so it’s tornado and fire proof

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