This week I've been looking at images of dilapidated houses. I'm trying to decide what type of dilapidated house I want to build for the diorama. What the house looks like will set the tone for the diorama and drive the story. The choices range from full blown Gothic to a small country dwelling. A large Gothic structure with gargoyle goblins has a lot of appeal, but it has been done so often as to be a cliche'. (blog does not allow for accent marks, so did the best I could here.) I'm more incline to attempt to portray the setting as a normal setting in which horrors are afoot, as in the ghost stories I blogged about earlier. However, no decision has been made at this point. All options are open.
I was looking at images of dilapidated houses to try to get a feel for what I wanted to include as far as how to portray the degeneration of the property: peeling paint, sagging roof, water damage, etc. From these images, I could see things that I know will make the building look more realistic. For example, how the paint stays on better just under the eaves, while the lower part of the building has lost more paint; or how water stains are more extensive at the bottom of a sheet of plywood, and wicks up in streaks.
I was surprised to find that many of the pictures of abandoned homes online were actually mansions from an earlier era. My husband and I drive through the Virginia countryside a lot. We see many homes that have been abandoned. For the most part they are old country farmhouses. I'd say that it is rare to see an abandoned mansion in this area. Once in a while we see an old log cabin or log barn. Frequently all that is left of a building is a stone foundation or a chimney. Sometimes you can see that a new home has been build on the property and the old house left to fall down on its own. I'm sure it is expensive to tear down a house, but why live with an eyesore in front of your nice new home?
I have always wondered about why a house was left to die rather than being repaired. Did someone die and no one was left to care for the house? Had all the people moved away because there were no jobs in the area and left the house to fall in disrepair until it was so far gone that it was not worth saving? Did people have to leave because of a drought and the well ran dry? If only the house could talk, I'm sure that it would have a story to tell.
I found that many people who posted the images had similar thoughts. One blogger wrote so eloquently that I wish that I had bookmarked his site so I could link to it. After going through so many pages of pictures and reading so many blogs, I'm not sure how long it would take me to find it again. I'd like to quote this blogger, although I can only credit him as a fellow blogger. He was blogging about one of the most beautiful abandoned mansions that I could imagine. He said some thing to the effect that he imagined how "strong and proud they must have felt to have had that home built; ...if only they had had the spirit to pick up a hammer." I think he portrayed a feeling as best as it could be expressed. How could such a lovely mansion have just been left to fall to pieces? I wonder how it is that so many buildings have just been left to rot away. Could not a single person be found that would love the building enough to fix it up again? I guess the answer in the long run is that it is just too expensive. Neighborhoods change or job availability changes and the people move on because they have to, not necessarily because they want to move away.
I've found that this is not just a local phenomenon. The abandoned property story is an international event not a local one. From here to the far side of the world, there are abandoned buildings everywhere. Check out some of the pictures of the abandoned houses around Chernobyl to see something really creepy. All in all, it is making me wonder how much lead paint, asbestos, and radiation are actually floating around out in the atmosphere. (To digress for a moment: my husband was reading something about the Chernobyl area the other day: the radiation from the meltdown had killed off a lot of the bacteria and fungi that normally break down vegetation. All the wood that has fallen remains there and is not rotting. There are concerns of what will happen if or when a forest fire should start with all that radioactive material going up in smoke and getting into the atmosphere.)
Lest my blog posts inspire anyone to go out looking at or photographing abandoned houses I thought I should end this blog post with a cautionary tale. A number of the blog posts I'd read stated that when they drove up to the abandoned house to take photographs that they soon had either the police or property owners drive up and order them off the property. This would indicate that many of the properties are not as abandoned as they would appear. There are often eyes close enough to see, or there may be an alarm set up somewhere that sends a message when someone is detected. Just be aware that this is a possibility.
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