Hi Everyone,
I recently visited a Victorian Style Farmhouse, at The Village, Church Farm, Skegness.
This farmhouse has been left just as it was originally lived in. A time where people would make do and mend, a time of hard slog keeping a house clean with just using different brushes and brooms.
This is the kitchen, here we see a cast iron range, fueled by coal. A very dirty business cleaning it out! A fire would be kept burning most of the day, which would heat the oven and hob and boil all your water. Most people would make their own bread and even make soap from the coal ashes. A kettle on the hob would be kept boiling most of the day. The main cleaning ingredient used was vinegar and bicarbonate of soda which is still good for cleaning in our time.
Mondays were always washdays, often called "Blue Monday" as it took a full day to do the washing. Also, they used a whitening soap in a blue cover called "dolly blue". The night before wash day, you would soak all your dirtiest clothes overnight. in the morning you would spend a lot of your time boiling water before you could start. We see here the tubs where the washing would be washed and the tools they would use to agitate the washing. Any really dirty clothes were washed against a scrub board in the left-hand corner. Everything had to be rinsed twice and then put through a mangle to get as much water out as possible. Here the washing has been hung up in the outhouse to dry if the weather was bad outside. Some houses would have a rack on a pulley system in the kitchen which would be lifted up to the ceiling for drying clothes. Clothes would be ironed whilst still slightly damp. with a flat iron which had been heated on the hob.![Image142.jpg]
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Here is a typical dining room. Homemade rugs on the floor made from rags, nothing ever was thrown out but re-used to make other things. Lighting was made by an oil lamp.![Image147.jpg]
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This was a typical bedroom, with a homemade patchwork quilt on the bed. There was no bathroom in this house so if you needed the toilet in the middle of the night you would have to use the potty (goes under) which was kept under the bed. In the morning you would have to empty this, and the toilet would be outside in a shed at the end of your garden. To have a bath, a tin bath would be put in the kitchen and filled with water. All the family would use this bath water and it would be a quick in and quick out! The baby would be washed last and hence the saying " Do not throw the baby out with the bathwater".
Here is the children's bedroom." Children should be seen and not heard", was a common saying in these times and so you see a variety of toys on display in the bedroom.
Here we have the Nannys bedroom in a side loft space. Very small and compact, but workable. This is at the side of the children`s bedroom.
I personally would not want to go back to living this way, but it is good to know how others used to live!
Anyway, I hope you have enjoyed this tour around this Farmhouse. This is my first post so hopefully, it will be alright.
All images are my own, all blog my own thoughts. Thank you for viewing!!
