Re: If I may ...
Everett,
I'll drop you a note in a week or two, current time restraints prevent from typing too much on here. Here's some real quick stuff, I don't have time to cite properly but your findings will be similar to what I've written below and it is pretty basic stuff. This should give you a start.
Most homes with a few rooms to them would feature formal and informal areas. Informal would be generally to the rear of the house and incorporate a kitchen, sitting room/back parlor, bedrooms, and etc. Formal rooms would typically be in the front of the house and would consist of a parlor, dining room, and in some middle class to upper class homes a guest bedroom. Guests were generally kept in the formal areas while visiting and when they were without guests, the family resided in the informal areas to the rear of the home...usually using the dining room for meals and placing the parlor off limits to kids and such.
Middle Class parlors typically would have had wall to wall seamed carpeting (ingrain and etc.), fancy parlor furniture consisting of chairs, a couch, tables, rich decorations, and usually a fireplace. The sitting room would have more out of date furniture, maybe a rag wool rug, and be generally more comfortable...think a modern day family room. Kitchens would have small cast iron stoves generally for cooking, sometimes a splatter painted wood floor to hide dirt, and the walls and/or woodwork were typically a blue color of some sort or if there were servants a more industrial color like "institution green or gray." A large kitchen table served as a work surface generally.
Woodwork in formal areas was typically grained to appear like walnut or other fancy woods in middle class homes. Informal area woodwork were generally just painted. Woodwork was mostly just moldings that went around the door frame...often times different from the later Victorian stuff we are used to seeing in old homes or modern restoration catalogs.
There's a ton out there on furniture resources. Check around antique dealer sources and such...lots of material.
There seems to be fair bit of variationto interiors in smaller homes. Some features include plain woodwork, limited formal areas if any at all, shared bedrooms, and etc.
Cooking on a hearth in bake kettles (dutch ovens) would have been pretty outdated, still done in the middle part of the nineteenth century with some poorer folks but most people would have had stoves of some sort in the kitchen. They would not have been the big monsters of the late nineteenth century/early twentieth century with warming shelves and etc. These were typically smaller.
More later, hope this gets you started.
Darrek Orwig
Everett,
I'll drop you a note in a week or two, current time restraints prevent from typing too much on here. Here's some real quick stuff, I don't have time to cite properly but your findings will be similar to what I've written below and it is pretty basic stuff. This should give you a start.
Most homes with a few rooms to them would feature formal and informal areas. Informal would be generally to the rear of the house and incorporate a kitchen, sitting room/back parlor, bedrooms, and etc. Formal rooms would typically be in the front of the house and would consist of a parlor, dining room, and in some middle class to upper class homes a guest bedroom. Guests were generally kept in the formal areas while visiting and when they were without guests, the family resided in the informal areas to the rear of the home...usually using the dining room for meals and placing the parlor off limits to kids and such.
Middle Class parlors typically would have had wall to wall seamed carpeting (ingrain and etc.), fancy parlor furniture consisting of chairs, a couch, tables, rich decorations, and usually a fireplace. The sitting room would have more out of date furniture, maybe a rag wool rug, and be generally more comfortable...think a modern day family room. Kitchens would have small cast iron stoves generally for cooking, sometimes a splatter painted wood floor to hide dirt, and the walls and/or woodwork were typically a blue color of some sort or if there were servants a more industrial color like "institution green or gray." A large kitchen table served as a work surface generally.
Woodwork in formal areas was typically grained to appear like walnut or other fancy woods in middle class homes. Informal area woodwork were generally just painted. Woodwork was mostly just moldings that went around the door frame...often times different from the later Victorian stuff we are used to seeing in old homes or modern restoration catalogs.
There's a ton out there on furniture resources. Check around antique dealer sources and such...lots of material.
There seems to be fair bit of variationto interiors in smaller homes. Some features include plain woodwork, limited formal areas if any at all, shared bedrooms, and etc.
Cooking on a hearth in bake kettles (dutch ovens) would have been pretty outdated, still done in the middle part of the nineteenth century with some poorer folks but most people would have had stoves of some sort in the kitchen. They would not have been the big monsters of the late nineteenth century/early twentieth century with warming shelves and etc. These were typically smaller.
More later, hope this gets you started.
Darrek Orwig
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