AsaHunt1830Farmhouse

The entrance to the Asa Hunt House is not really at the front, it’s around the side.

You know how it is: most folks pull in the driveway and walk in the side door. That’s especially true of our kids’ friends, who come and go at all hours of the day and night. If a large crowd is in the house, the driveway fills up with cars, forcing latecomers to just pull into the grass. But they all come in the side door to the mud room, which leads to the kitchen, which is where the fun has always been.

And it was in the kitchen where the fire started. It burned everything in there, and then tried to make its way into the rest of the house. But there’s a large chimney that blocked it from going straight into the adjacent dining room. So the fire headed in another direction toward that side door, over into that mud room, and then smiled when it saw a way upstairs via our back staircase. It was most of the way up to the second floor when the firefighters killed it.

Now, about that staircase. Back in 2000, when we saw the house for the first time, we were both intrigued and somewhat horrified to discover that the back staircase of the house, which leads up to the back bedrooms and bathroom, was as much a ladder as it was a staircase. It was twelve steep steps up to the top, and the last two of these were actually cut into the second floor hallway. In other words, as you walk that upstairs back hall, you had to step carefully around or over a drop down into the top two stairs – measuring about 18″ out of a total hall width of 30″ – or risk taking a misstep and ending up on your head in the mud room below.

With that old staircase burned and destroyed, we started making plans for replacing it. At first we thought we’d just put it right back the way it was. But then our now-grown-24-year-old son confessed, “Do you know how many of my drunken high school friends have fallen down that staircase?”

That sealed it. We brought in a local architect familiar with old houses. He considered all kinds of ambitious revisions, and then finally concluded we just needed to make the steep staircase EVEN STEEPER. Take out one riser, he said…make it just 11 steps instead of 12, he said…you’ll hardly notice, he promised.

We took his advice. He drew the plans. The township approved them. We gave them to our general contractor, who scratched his head. He gave them to a fabricator who scratched his head, and revised them. We paid the deposit. The fabrication began. We waited. And then we went on vacation. The staircase arrived. Our contractor finagled it into place. We came home from vacation. We pulled into the driveway. We opened the side door. We swallowed hard and entered the mud room.

It was perfect. Looking up, you couldn’t even tell the difference. Walking up and down it, even with it covered in slippery protective plastic, you didn’t even need a handrail. And at the top, our crazy back hall now had twice the treading surface as before.

Over the past weeks, we’ve gone up and down it carrying awkward piles of lumber, 5 gallon buckets filled with water, and heavy tools. And it is doing its job just fine.

Now we just have to design and install a handrail. And then figure out how to utilize the funky empty space underneath it. Then design some cabinets and install them. And finish the rest of the mud room, as well as the rest of the house.

In the meantime, we look forward to lots of cars in the driveway, the side door opening and closing at all hours of the day and night, folks walking in unannounced, and lots of footsteps going up and down our crazy stairs.