twin house

I think I found another twin this week.  I’m starting to wonder if I’m trying too hard to find similarities where they don’t exist, but I’m convinced this is a heavily-modded version of our house.  It looks like they flipped the bow and chimney to the right side, and of course, the elephant in the room is that it has a full porch.  Our dormers are swoopier than all the look-alikes, but the placement and sizing is identical.   It’s too similar to just be a coincidence. You can see the other copies here and here.

The third sibling

So much for the uniqueness of our house  Today I noticed that a house a mere two blocks away and that I’ve passed by thousands of times is basically the same as ours.  Like the other twin, it sits on a flat lot, so it doesn’t give the same “street feel” as ours, meaning it didn’t jump out at us as a copy.  It is very interesting to see how each house has the same basic plan but varies widely in the details.  Both of the twins have single-gabled dormers on the side, while ours has the unusual double-gable.  Since both twins have multi-paned windows, it makes us wonder if ours did, too.  I suspect not, since our remaining original windows in our house were not, but many of our windows were stripped out in the 60’s and replaced with non-opening glass.  8/2009: we found another look-alike.

Front view of twin #2

The windows are very different than ours

While we were walking Chloe over to a friend’s birthday party last Saturday, an orange house caught my eye.  It must have been some of the architectural details that got my attention, but there was something more to it.  It took me a few seconds to realize that I was looking at our own house!  Well, not literally, but it was clearly based on the same plans as ours.  I pointed it out to Steph, and after a few seconds she saw the similarities, too.

The overall footprint and shape is the same, although ours appears to possibly be a little longer in the back.  It has the same basic roofline with four dormers, but the roofs on the dormers are quite a bit different than ours.  The twin appears to have been a little fancier, at least on the exterior, with lots of multi-paned windows.  However, since most of our windows were removed back in the 60’s, we can’t be sure what our original living/dining/kitchen windows looked like.  Also, this house has well-preserved rafter tails, whereas most of ours have been chopped off over the years.

The irony is that the twin is only a block and a half from our old house and only 12 blocks from our current house.  In the four years that we’ve owned this house, we’ve been by this orange twin countless times and never noticed that it was a copy of ours.  Our next step is to meet whomever lives in it, so that we can see how the interior compares.  Finding this house destroys my theory that ours was one-of-a-kind, but it was kind of exciting to find out that it has a sibling that it never knew about.

6/2009 update: we found another twin, only 3 blocks away from us.  8/2009: yet another.

Our house, from the front

Twin house, from the front

Our house, from the back

Twin house, from the back