What is a girl to do? I spent a few hours this sunny Sunday morning digging in. While the plans don't notate the type of wood flooring or type of tile as some folks from the Brownstoner thread found on their old drawings, I did run into some interesting tidbits.
We used to have a dumb waiter [DW] right next to the kitchen. Across from the Dumb Waiter was a strange symbol and a notation for a Drip Pan. Turns out the space was built specifically to hold an icebox. There was even a closet over the space for additional storage.
There are some faint lines following the interior of the walls in the "Dining Room", "Hall", and "Parlor". From what remains in two of the three rooms, it seems it was a notation for coved ceilings.
A few items are now sadly missing. One of which was a leaded glass window between the "Bedroom" and "Dining Room" next to the door. It was also noted that the window above the vestibule door was leaded glass as well.
The dining room also has a notation for a "plate shelf". This detail is very absent as almost all of the trim work and wood was stripped from the dining room. I did find a tiny scrap of wall paper under the trim around the window when I took it down. It will be interesting to see if anything else pops up when we take down the drywall covering the plaster.
Most interesting to me was that the heating system in the house was always a duct system. There are wall ducts throughout the plan marked as [HR] Heat Register.
It was interesting to note that the second floor apartment originally had a door off of their kitchen that went out onto a balcony (plan not shown) and that our back porch is on the original footings. With the state it is in, I wouldn't be surprised if the wood is as old as the house too.
Other short hand notations that I ran across that perhaps aren't quite as interesting or fully understood:
[WT] Wash Tub : kitchen sink/laundry sink
[WC] Water Closet : toilet
[B] Bin? : storage bin for coal?
[RH] and [HR] Range H?
I got a property card for my grandmother's house at 297 Maujer Street. In the column marked 'conveyance' there was a date, 06/09/87. I assume that June 1, 1887? The next dates are 06/12/61, 11/29/61, and 02/07/69 which is the date my grandmother bought the house. Unfortunately their was a fire and the house was razed soon after. I asked someone at the DOB if the floor plans or blueprints were still available but he said when a property is razed the old documents are thrown out.
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