Quaint fixrupper in rustic, natural setting

We’re looking at an abandoned and deteriorating house. The story started on Corndancer Dot Com’s photo of the week page. If you want to see the first part of the story, a cool thing to do, click here. Looking at the house, near Beulah, Arkansas on state highway 33, you can see a wave in the roof and an obliterated corner.

The house with four front gables was, one would presume, a point of pride for its owner. The right hand side of the house probably will not survive this winter.

The side door reveals that the back part of the house was added to the original structure

Like many rural southern homes, this one had “add-ons.” Looking in the side door, one can see a former exterior wall on the left and in the foreground. Additions were normally made to the sides or back of the house. The exterior wall apparently enclosed a back porch. Homeowners either did not want to be closer to the road or spoil the front appearance of their home.

This door was probably the first to be vandalized, I suspect the door glass was broken by human hand and not by the forces of nature.

The house was heated with wood. Just to the left of the back door is a side window through which the flue for a wood heater ran. The metal flange is homemade and began its life as something other than a window flange for a wood heater flue. But it was the right size and available. It appears that the hole through which the flue ran was made with using a cutting torch, a common tool in agricultural environments.

The exhaust flue for the wood fired heater in the house passed through this homemade metal flange. The old heater is still in the house, as seen in the picture below.

I looked through the hole in the window flange and saw the old stove still in the room. A rusty remnant of the elbow by which the exhaust flue attached to the stove is still in attached to the stove. The stove is not the venerable and virtually indestructible cast-iron potbelly variety, but is a cheaper sheet metal stove. The hole in the window flange let the camera look into the room (below).

I put my camera through the flue hole in the window to shoot the stove and rusted out elbow. The window to the right opens to the enclosed back porch. A couple of unused sticks of stove wood are among the litter on the floor. Why did they leave the recliners?

Looking at the room with the stove from a window on the other side of the house, you can see more details of how the setup worked. The walls of this room are finished in the puke green color popular in the early 60s. Exposed wiring shows the house was built after romex became the standard for residential and commercial electric service wiring over the two conductor and ceramic insulator method common to many older structures.

Through a dirty kitchen window, you can see the kitchen sink falling from the wall.

Thanks for dropping by.

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