I used to know a guy who owned an old house, may have been a log cabin....he said it was a listed historical house. Forty or fifty miles west of DC in Virginia. If I remember right, he brought in electric for lighting, wood stove for heat and a gas cooker.
A jack of all trades. He had run a Charter boat out of someplace in Florida, a pilot of cargo jets out of Baltimore, a corporate VP who apparently was hired primarily to manage a major draw-down in a major defense contractor - as soon as everyone was gone, he was fired himself.
When I moved here in 1990, after ALL those years, there was a couple of ancient silk-wrapped electric lines to which a million extension cords ran, NO indoor plumbing [outhouse hell] and a hand pump sticking up through the floor beside the “kitchen sink”.
There was a dry stone cistern that we had to pay to fill every two weeks and the only thing to heat the kitchen/cook on was a huge Oriole cookstove.
I had to heat buckets of water and dump it into a galvanized cow tub to take a bath.
Lived like that for two years, here.
The old part of the house had a 2 1/2 story huge brick chimney and woodstove literally built right on the middle of the living room floor with no jacks under it.
When we tore it down, you could lay a pop can in one corner of the room and it would roll like hell across the floor to the dip in the middle and was going so fast, it kept rolling to the opposite corner.
Bizarrely, the chimney was FULL of old snuff tins.
Hundreds of them.
No idea what was up with that.
The bricks [and “plaster” on the walls, covered with that wretched calcimine “paint”] were mud and cow hair.
18th century “technology”.
Then, somewhere in the past, somebody went stupid and dug out a “root cellar” for themselves, when the house is cedar logs literally sitting on big rocks as a “foundation”.
Talk about a dumb move.
When we started to try and “modernize” it some, we found a trap door in the kitchen floor and it was right over a dried out well about 15 feet deep.
There was a sheet of plywood over it and my stupid ex left the plywood off one night.
We came back the next day and a rabbit had fallen in.
So he and his brothers lowered me down on a 5 gallon spackle buckle with a flashlight to save the bunny.
I was slowly twirling the whole way down, watching all the holes and crevice in the stone work, just waiting for a Copperhead to jump out and nail me.
Saved that bunny, though.
Gah.
What memories.