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Weasel Acres

weasel acres

Here we go. I promised McGoo I’d rustle up a pitcher. This is Weasel Acres, several years back. I don’t think publishing this picture reveals enough information to hunt me down like a dog. Ummm…does it? If I’m wrong, just…please don’t hunt me down like a dog. Kthxbai.

This is a classic Cape Cod house (usually abbreviated to ‘Cape house’ hereabouts). Not a style I grew up with, of course, but one I’ve grown fond of. A Cape house is a cottage, generally a story-and-a-half high, with a steeply pitched front roof, a sloping back roof and a dormer stuck out the back. They’re small — under 2,000 square feet. The gabled windows are a 20th C addition.

Mine was built in the Spring of 1942. How do I know? A surveyor told me what to look for: you lift the porcelain cover on the back of the toilet and fine the date stamped in the tank. They don’t stockpile toilets, so the house will have been built within a couple of months of that date.

It wasn’t my first choice. The house I yearned for was in Pawtucket (where all the horriblest limericks come from); a long, low one-story house with a Dutch roof. It had silly classical columns and swirly stucco walls in the livingroom, and the master bathroom had a basin sink and tiles in vivid porcelain purples and greens. It was the most startling and improbably ugly house I have ever seen. I fell in love with it instantly. Sad to say, my offer was rejected.

That still smarts.

January 10, 2008 — 9:17 pm
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