THE HOMELIKE HOUSE.
BY SUSAN HAYES WARD.
CHAPTER IV.—THE BEDROOM.
“The Pilgrim they laid in a large upper chamber whose windows opened towards the sunrising; the name of the chamber was Peace, where he slept till break of day, and then he awoke and sang.”—John Bunyan.
It is impossible to treat of house furnishing and decoration without some allusion to what hygiene requires of the house builder. In the properly constructed house the bedroom will be light, airy, and if possible, sunny, like the pilgrim’s chamber. The bedroom windows should not be so heavily hung with curtains as to obstruct the free passage of air. Thin curtains of chintz or muslin are better for sleeping rooms than heavily lined damask or cretonne, as sunlight and pure air are bedroom essentials.
The cheapest and most convenient treatment for the wall is paper hanging; but Dr. Richardson, the well known English writer of house and health papers, inveighs against wall paper upon bedroom walls, and specially against the practice of papering one layer over another, on the ground that germs of disease are liable to be cased up behind wall paper, and to remain a source of danger in after years. No doubt a painted or washable surface is best from a hygienic point of view, but with proper care paper can be risked.
Light, airy patterns are preferable, of varying tints, but the same general color as the ground, for the bedroom should never be gloomy, and the less sunshine it gets from without the more sunny should be the paper that decks its walls. Violent contrasts in color, and spotty or staring designs are a source of irritating annoyance to the sick. Let the purchaser, in selecting wall paper, stand at a distance of a dozen feet or so and look with half closed eyes, and he will get much more of the general effect, and will see more as the invalid will who may occupy the room when the paper is hung.
Then, in the matter of drainage and plumbing, there has been a great overturning in the past few years. People began to discover, about ten years ago, that their modern improvements were followed by a long train of sore throats, diphtheria, and typhoid fevers, and the wise householder was led to study the various systems of pipes and drains. Thanks to our boards of health, and to the efforts and writings of such men as Col. Waring, much has been done to improve and perfect the drainage of city houses, but in spite of the advance that has been made in this direction, modern conveniences often prove in the end to be inconvenient, if not pernicious, and the fewer set washbowls and water closets with which our houses are furnished the safer we may feel. With faucets for hot and cold water on each floor from which to replenish the water jugs, no reasonable servant could complain of the extra drudgery, much less the sensible woman who “does her own work,” and all could sleep sounder at night without fear of being haunted by any of those frightful demons of the drain pipe which were represented in a number of Harper’s Weekly some years ago, as issuing from a set washbowl and hovering over the innocent slumberer.