My family’s house from my early childhood was anything but modern.
It was a tiny farmhouse built in the 1940s on a 200-acre stretch of land that my grandfather acquired many years later as an investment property.
Part of the land was leased out to a hauling and gravel company. There were areas of the land rich in rock and it was mined considerably up to the early 1980s. A few years later, my parents, along with my older sister, moved to the small house and called it home for the next eight years. When I arrived, they had only been at the old farmhouse for about a year and a half, but it felt like we had been there for eternity in my young and undeveloped mind. Being able to explore so much land in your own backyard was an absolute dream for a young boy. But, inside the house wasn’t so great. I never complained about the thrift store furniture, or the 70s-era shag carpeting. What I hated more than anything was the poor ventilation in that home. For a few years, we used the fireplace as a sole source of heat because the gas furnace was inoperable. Once we had enough money for a new one, we used both heat sources side by side. Unfortunately, the ductwork was always leaky so much of the heat from the furnace was lost as a result. When it came to summer weather, we only had a single window air conditioner for the entire house. We learned to position old box fans in varying places throughout the house—mostly in doorways—to simulate the effect of a central ventilation system. It didn’t replace a standard home heating and cooling system with air registers and the like, but it improved what little we had at our disposal at the time.