Making a House a Home

Excitement grew as I contemplated having my very own house instead of the small, furnished apartment we lived in. My Dad was a carpenter and Uncle John hired him to repair the old windows and he installed a doorframe from the living room into the south room that would be our bedroom so that we could have a door to shut. The framework was boxed in to create shelves on both sides of the doors into the bedroom and from the living room into the kitchen also.

With the room measurements we picked out wallpaper for each room. We met with the local Baptist preacher who was also a paperhanger and he gave us a price for doing it all. However when the time came to settle up, his price was more than what we had calculated, however we settled on a compromise and paid him for the job.

We accepted donated furniture from all the family. We had Grandmother Johnston’s old round oak table

 and a set of four  chairs.

 Some were held together with bailing wire but we didn’t mind.

Our son Ken, age 16 months, was given the old family high chair that had been used by all the old Johnston children. Uncle John, Judson (Big), Isabel, Bill, Tom and Jake! I’m sure Morris and his brothers Bill and Richard had all used it when visiting Grandma and Grandpa Johnston too.

 We managed to scrimp together $25.00 and bought a bedroom suite from Duncan’s Furniture at Arcadia, Ks. It was a Walnut veneer set with a high backed bed, a chest of drawers and a dressing table with mirror.

Morris put in a pitcher pump over an old sink just inside the east door into the kitchen. It had no drain, just a bucket under the sink to catch the water you might dump down it. Of course someone had to carry the water OUT that ran down the drain into that bucket, so that kept us from using too much water. After all, we only had a cistern that caught rainwater from off the roof of the house. This water ran down through a filter that was made of sand, charcoal and rock, then into the old well just east of the porch.

I don’t know how we could have made it without all the help we got from our families. Both my Mom and Morris’s Mom gave us a kitchen cabinet.

 

 Morris’s Mom gave us a small apartment sized electric cook store. The wallpaper we had picked out for the kitchen was a red plaid and I made bright red curtains with black rickrack for the windows. We bought a black and red squared linoleum for the floor. How bright and clean it looked.

Our baby was due the last of April and I had a cold the last of March and my doctor, Dr. Gregory from Webb City, thought I best not travel back to our home in Kansas City, so I stayed with my folks at Nashville, Missouri  while Morris went back to Kansas City to finish working and packing our belongings up for the move to the ranch.

Anticipation grew as I knew we could not move into our little home on the prairie house until this baby arrive and our family had prepared it for us!