Give your log (or any other) Home a House Log!
(Page 2 of 3)
July/August 1981
By Catherine Allen
GETTING TO WORK
RELATED CONTENT
The first page of a house log should be reserved for information describing the precise location of the dwelling. If your home is situated in a rural area, note the lot and concession number, the township, and the county. An urban residence should be pin-pointed by lot, street number, town or city, and county. In addition to providing data about the site, the initial page should include the following statement: This log is to remain in the house and should be updated by future occupants!
The body of the book will be devoted to two topics. The first is a record of the construction of the building . . . the second is the history of its inhabitants.
THE BUILDING OF THE BUILDING
The amount of construction information available will, of course, vary from house to house. After all, an owner-built home from the turn of the century will likely have fewer surviving records from its early days than will a house put up in our age of endless forms and bureaucratic paperwork.
If possible, though, you should document the date of construction, the name of the architect and/or builder, the dates and descriptions of any significant alterations, and the materials used to build and remodel the residence (and where they were procured . . . since such data can be quite interesting to future inhabitants, especially if some of the components were gathered from the land on which the home is located). You'll also want to try to include sketches of the floor plan (perhaps the original blueprints are still available), as well as design drawings of any major changes made over the years.
Finally, it's both interesting and potentially valuable to put scale diagrams of waterlines, sewage systems, and the like in your logbook. If you do, at some time in the distant future when—for example—e drainage pipe buried by the side of the house blocks up and causes the basement to flood, the occupants of the house will be able to locate the trouble spot quickly and easily.
RESIDENT ROOTS
Information about the people who have lived in your house should include such facts as names, dates of birth and death, marriages, occupations, and so forth . .. and be as complete as possible for all the families that have lived in the residence.
