The Eccentric House

As you might expect with a house that has been in existence for some time, the place has been altered somewhat over the years.

It was a little odd to start with, I have to say. The inhabitants of that corner of the Hexagon have the habit of building right up to their property line. Along that road, for some reason, all the property lines are at an angle to the main road. This results in eccentrically-shaped houses. One just up the road from us is distinctly triangular.

Ours I think initially was a square house of two  rooms, one above the other. You can see from other ones nearby that they all used to have an iron staircase going up the wall of the house, and if you look closely at the stonework at the back of ours, there are marks where this staircase used to go; the upstairs window was once a door which has been partially bricked up. Onto this at a later date were added two little outbuildings, one at each side; the stonework isn't keyed into the stonework of the main house, so was almost certainly not original. Perhaps they were sheds for animals or agricultural implements. And the outside staircase was removed and a twisty little one put in the corner of the kitchen. There was a door leading into the loft over the single-storey addition from the upstairs room. This door is still there, but is now stranded in mid-air over the staircase.

But then times changed and more room was needed. A door was knocked through from the kitchen to the single-storey addition. This room looks fairly square, but when you actually try putting furniture in, you find that the corners are far from being ninety degrees. I know no building is exactly square, but this one is seriously out.

On the other side, because of the angle of the property line, the outbuildings were built up to the property line, which made them triangular in shape, with the narrow end at the front or street side. So we have two triangular rooms. Upstairs is a little bedroom; you can just about get two single beds in, as long as you don't want anything else in there. Downstairs the room has been split in two; the wider end was a shower room, and the narrow end, windowless and with unfinished walls and floor, was a sort of glory hole with a tangled mass of pipework and a header tank for the central heating system.

And this is the way it stayed until recently.