ABANDONED HOUSE REDUX

The other evening I paid another visit to an abandoned house near our home, which has been the subject of a couple of previous posts.  Of course, there is a steel cable with red flags attached strung across the overgrown driveway leading to the house.  This in addition to the No Trespassing signs posted around the property.  But they are obscured by the foliage that has grown up and I decided that no one really cared.  The signs were there just to protect the owner against lawsuits if someone got hurt on the property.  Don't you think?  Anyway, they made me think but didn't deter me.

To refresh the viewer's memory, here is another photo of the exterior.

This place would make a great setting for a supernatural thriller or a teen slasher movie.  I love it.  I took this shot from a very low angle (maybe a foot off the ground) to accent the grown of the weeds in the front yard and to emphasize the structure's isolation.  It was late evening and the sun was nicely lighting up the north side of the house.

I have taken plenty of photos of the exterior, and this time I wanted to see what might be available inside.  If anything, the weeds were even higher than they appear in the above shot--in many cases over my head--so it was a chore just to get my camera to the front porch.

 I did note that there was paint peeling off one of the front doors.  Here are a couple of those shots.

And here is a closeup of a portion of this second shot.

Not very interesting, really, but at least the resolution is great.  It's a little difficult to determine how many layers of paint there were.  There appears to be a base layer of stain that was blue and then a number of layers of white paint.

The inside of the house had been thoroughly gutted.  For the most part, there was little left beyond the studs.  The plaster had been removed, as had the wiring, ductwork, and plumbing.  This house is ready for demolition, as it is obvious that the future of this piece of land will be commercial, not residential.  Continuing with the theme of peeling paint, there was one small section of plaster remaining, a curved section that had also been painted a number of times.

My questions are, When did this paint start to fail?  Were people still living here?  How long has this place been vacant?  Did the lack of heat, air conditioning, etc. hasten that deterioration?

This house has an upstairs, but I wasn't brave (or foolish) enough to go upstairs, even though there might have been something of interest up there.  Maybe another time.  Here is a shot of the stairs.  Sunset was approaching, and it was quite dark, even though it doesn't look it here.  This was a 20-second exposure.

What did catch my attention was a built-in cabinet in what must have been the kitchen, one of the very few items remaining in the house.

The section on the left had hinges on the bottom, indicating that it must have been a bin of some sort. Again, the obvious question is, When people were living here were these cabinets in as bad shape as they appear now?  If not, how did they get so beat up?

I realized at some point that I could simply shut the door of the section to the right, so I did.

And here is another shot from a different angle that takes advantage of the light streaming in from the west-facing window to the right.

In these shots I did not mind that a portion of the cabinets were in shadow.  In fact, I think the shadows add to the emotional quality of the images.  There is a story to tell.

Taken with my Nikon D7000 with Tamron 90 mm macro lens and Nikkor 24-120 mm f/4 lens.