There is one large room in John Douglas's house that is not like the others.
Freshly painted, the front bedroom downstairs was added on a little more than a year ago for his wife, Virginia, who was in the hospital. She died before she ever got to use her new bedroom.
It used to be a porch.
The two-story yellow house with brown trim, slightly obscured by a semi-circle of crepe myrtles, faces the intersection of Carolina and Georgia avenues.
The front room is almost completely original, from the fireplace to the pine staircase.
Douglas said he did replace one wall at the rear of the room because of water damage.
"The rest of the room is just as it was," he said.
The "old kitchen," as Douglas calls it, was added on sometime after the house was built for the Hulse family in 1903.
He said he knows that because the nails are of a newer type than the cut nails that hold together the rest of the house.
Douglas' current project is to turn the old kitchen into a laundry room, which is now located on the second floor.
Virginia wanted it that way, but Douglas said he is afraid of water damage to the lower floor if it should leak.
Shortly after they moved into the house, the Douglases enclosed a small side porch and turned it into the kitchen. The upper cabinets are a few inches lower than standard, which allowed Virginia to easily reach them.
The window was converted into a built-in bookcase that now displays cookbooks and bric-a-brac.
The Douglases bought the house from the Melvin family in 1962.
At the time, the second floor had a wrap-around porch and floor-to-ceiling window that allowed access to it.
The couple had inherited some antique furniture from Douglas' uncle, and they decided to buy a large house to accommodate it.
He said the town was much smaller then.
"I could just pull out on Carolina (Avenue) without even looking," he said. "Now I get on Carolina and I can hardly get on Georgia."
Reach Lisa Kaylor at lisa.kaylor@northaugustatoday.com.
