Emerging from hiatus, and a request

UPDATE: Dimensions were wrong, and a typo led me on a wild goose chase. Please read the posts tagged "aladdin sherman".

It's been 4 years of near-total inactivity here, but there wasn't much to report. We've been on hiatus, my husband has been deployed a few times, and we are finally getting to get back to work on the old girl.

I've spent the intervening time researching things and making plans, and I have figured out a number of things about this house. Not one of those things, and none of my extensive research, has given me anything like an answer as to which architect or kit company she came from. Not a bit, despite having practically had a love affair with the online texts section of the Internet Archive, and spending way too much time with Google Books. So, in the spirit of warming up a cold project and slowly getting it into gear, I am going to ask you for some help. Here's my question for you:

Does anyone out there recognize this floorplan? I have yet to find a house with a 28 x 48 26 x 48 footprint with a 28x40 26 x 40 cellar/foundation. I made a few rough scale drawings of what the house looked like before three different additions were tacked (or frankensteined, in the case of the dining room bay) on, and before the porch was closed in and roofers removed the vent gable. I think I ought to have drawn the steps wider, but I have no idea what the original steps might have looked like.

Here's the only photo I have been able to find prior to the changes to the porch:

What we do know:

• The county tax assessor has a single sheet of manila with a tiny photo stapled to it, which I have been told dates from the late 1960s or early 1970s. The build date on the house, according to this document, is 1925. However, as records are incomplete, I have been told that could simply be a sale date, or the date the property record was recorded in the county office. Nobody knows.
• The younger daughter (Edith Heppe) of the family that built it visited the late former owner of the home about 15 years ago, and a statement about the house was written down from her childhood memories. We have this statement and I have transcribed it here. 
• Mrs. Heppe remembered it was built by her father, and her parents moved to Centralia in 1921, so it had to have been built before that time. 
• It's got Sears hardware throughout, and all the original millwork is directly out of the Sears millwork catalog. 
• It originally looked rather like an Aladdin, if you go by that little black and white photo. But it does not match any recognizable Aladdin plan, or even a footprint of any similar style of home, that I have yet found. Also, the interior millwork and hardware and NOT Aladdin.
• I've found a similar footprint in Wards and Chicago House Wrecking company catalogs, but nothing like this plan or style in combination with the footprint.
• It's got an odd arrangement of den/living room/dining room that is indicative of an earlier house, so really, the latest I would put it at is 1914.

In other news, I finally know what to do with the back bedroom. More on that, and the kitchen remodel, later.

Lock, set, mismatch.

So, things have been quiet on the home improvement front lately. I've done a couple of little touch-up jobs, like scraping away the weird grout bits that I didn't wipe off properly when i grouted the bath, but nothing really worth discussing. This week we have ambitious plans to clear and finish the dining room, but that may have to wait a couple of weeks.

What I did get done was to make the exterior cellar door secure. Warning - excessive use of parentheses follows.

The door concerned is an old, wood and plate glass door, similar to the original front door, but an obviously inferior model. It has, until now, had a rim latch with a little "lock" lever on it, and no other lock. This level of "security" was "reinforced" by a lovely old wooden screen door with a hook latch. Nothing here that would deter a casual vandal, let alone an intent burglar. Fortunately, this is a small town, and pretty safe, so it really wasn't that big of a deal. Til now.

However, I grew up in the city and have the requisite skittishness of someone who grew up with deadbolts on every door. There have been a few sleepless nights over that security hole. Then our insurance agent mentioned that having deadbolts on every entry would lower our insurance premium - so we bought new locks for every exterior door. And didn't install them. Well, okay, we installed them. One at a time, over a period of MONTHS. The new front door got one, and the back door got one, and the cellar door ... didn't.

Tangentially, we had removed the perfectly good, but ugly and unnecessary, aluminum storm windows from the formerly exterior interior windows on the now-enclosed front porch (that's quite a sentence). This gave us three entire storm windows to stick in the cellar. The only glass window in the house that had no protection from hail, or other weatherizing of any kind, was the plate glass cellar door. I had an epiphany, and decided to mount one of the spare storms over the glass panel on this door.

After installing the storm window over the glass panel (It's no prizewinner, looks wise, but I think I can pretty it up with some paint or mouldings.), I finally mounted the plain silver deadbolt we'd bought almost a year ago. That was an exercise in Making It Work - the door had been trimmed on the latch side to fit the frame, probably 80 years ago, and was almost too narrow to mount the lock without damaging the door or the glass. I ended up cutting a much smaller hole than called for by the lock's installation instructions, just large enough to fit the lock's mounting screws through, cutting the tube hole, then using my Dremel's drill saw to carve out just enough space to fit the end of the tube latch into the door. I love my Dremel.

Mounting the the strikeplate on the frame was a pain, as usual, but I managed, after only three false starts. There is now double glass and a deadbolt on the cellar door, along with its old and and ugly, but reliable, rim-mount knob set.

The dear old wooden screen door is coming off, and it will probably get replaced with the old modern storm door (also removed from the now-interior front door), for an extra layer of weather safety. We'll be refinishing the wooden screen door and mounting it on the back screen porch, probably when I get the screencloth put up on the naked screen mounting strips.

On the military front, Chris is finally processed back in. And barely in time - our savings ran out last month, we had to borrow from my mother to get by. He'd taken a leave of absence from work when he was asked to return to active duty, but we had no idea it might take six months, only one month of which was due to Chris training for his physical. Well, everything is okay now, and we're just waiting for orders.

I don't know how I'm going to face moving if we have to. We're just getting started.

Thank You

I'd like to thank the folks at Houseblogs.net and Bearfort Lodge for their support.

However, as Bearfort Lodge says, please don't just think of us. There must be more families like us, trying to build or rebuild homes and lives while loved ones are deployed (or keeping going after they've lost someone). Blue Star Mothers and Fisher House are good places to start, or just go directly to military families in your community and offer to help out, if you can. More resources are here.

And, also, don't forget people who have lost homes and family members to disasters or accidents. These people are also in our communities. Need is everywhere. Every little bit helps, and being good neighbors is the very best place to start. Please visit Habitat for Humanity and Modest Needs, or ask your church or local community groups where you can be of service.

Thanks from us and ours, again. The world may be smaller, but that just means our neighborhood gets bigger every day. I have some of the best neighbors in the world, and I mean that. That goes to my local community, too - if I could pick a place to be alone while my husband is overseas, this is a great place to do it.