I don't even know where to start with this one but I just read something interesting. Over the last year I must have measured the inside of the trouse a million times while trying to visualize the layout of my soon-to-be new paint office, but for the life of me I cannot recall what size it is. A couple of my neighbors have said they remember when the original trailer was placed in 1964 or 1965 so I googled "what size is a 1960s mobile home" and man, that was a rabbit hole. Here's a link to a fun article that makes me think it was 10' wide - Wikipedia says they were called a "ten-wide" - and if I had the copy of my town lister's card here with me I could make an educated guess on the length. Suffice it to say, trousification turned it into something else entirely with the addition of a "sunken living room" (as my sister likes to call it), two bedrooms, an office nook and an abnormally large bathroom. I have very little photographic evidence of the interior so to spice things up I'm going to supplement with more of the pictures I took when I first looked at this property in May of 2013.
Let's jump right in with the kitchen since that room was probably the most startling. Feast your eyes:
It was a marvel, and you can bet I absolutely kept the color of the cabinets. Later on in this journey you will see what this space looked like after my contractor's crew spent a day on preliminary demo.
The original dining room space, to the right of the front door (kitchen is to the left) is what I used as my main art space - Studio A. If you've been following my blog for a while you may recognize these next pictures - they are from February of 2018.
Again, that yellow is original but stepping down into the living room, I DID paint the purple wall.
I also painted everything hanging on that purple wall. Fun fact: the gold couch was one of the first pieces of furniture my grandparents bought when they moved back to the States from Colombia in 1960.
For reference, here is that same wall in May 2013.
Turning around and looking at the other side of the living room:
Yowza. This is what became Studio C, the area where I had my alcohol inks and later my oil and cold wax. This summer all the art supplies got relegated elsewhere because it became my quarantine home office.
Another fun fact: this table is one of the first things
I bought when I moved to Montana a hundred years ago.
Moving on to the lighter purple area you can see in the background, that was another trouse add-on. The original owners had bookshelves built in and used it as an office.
I had a small desk there also, but at the near end of the bookshelves. It became my library gym (picture taken in December 2018).
Directly behind where I stood to take that picture was the first of two bedrooms. Here's the original and yes, an 80+ year old couple had a bright orange bedroom, bless their little hearts.
(Did they also have glow in the dark stars on the ceiling? The VERY low ceiling? Yes they did.) Thru that not-so-cleverly disguised door is the second bedroom. I took the door down and that's what I use as my painting table.
I don't have a picture of the laundry area (nothing to see here) but I saved the extra large bathroom for last. The only picture I have at hand of the original room is not great quality because it's from the listing, but I will post it anyway because it's worth it:
To borrow a phrase from some Youtubers I watch, LORDY DAY! You can't see from this one picture but the room is big enough to have its own foyer. When I started messing around with fluid art I turned the bathroom into Studio B - I needed a space where I wasn't worried about paint flying around. Here are some more repeat pictures from February 2018:
Side note: the box on the floor has a small sculpting wheel inside and that's where the really messy paint action happened. Stuff like this:
But I digress. Here are pictures my mom took on September 13th.
Don't ask about all the Christmas ornaments - we can talk about that another time. Here's what my storage unit looked like on October 3rd:
I made one more trip so there's more junk in there now, and here are the contents of my garage:
Plus the bathtub - I took this picture after the crew pulled the clawfoot tub out for me. Quick tangent: my tub was born on May 2, 1949. Cool.
There you have it. I know that was a lot of awkward back and forth but hopefully you get an idea of how it all started, how it progressed, and how it ended. Emptying everything out was probably a hell of a lot easier for me than it was for the previous owners - they had a metric shit ton of stuff - but I still felt like the trouse had become one giant junk drawer, and I hate junk drawers. It's amazing how quickly things accumulate. Note to self: don't do that.
We haven't caught up to present day yet (teaser: yesterday morning I woke up to no water pressure) but it's about to get exciting.
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