These are the places where I spend my days:

Stone House … An 18th century Pennsylvania limestone farmhouse, renovated to my knowledge in the 1920s, 1960s and 1980s, likely many earlier times.  Nice old noisy steam radiators, eats fuel oil like a fat man at a cruise ship buffet. Has some land, about five acres. My childhood home. I keep a room here and rent two others plus a bedroom/ bathroom suite, a cottage and an attic apartment.

Brick house … A red brick and frame farmhouse put up just before the Civil War, added on probably just after.  Two of everything — two three-bedroom houses, two sewer lines, two water lines, two electrical services, two voracious oil burning furnaces, each with its own 275-gallon tank.  On the edge of a small town. Half of this is my primary residence. The one-acre yard is nicely fenced for my old dog. I rent rooms in the other half.

Student ghetto … two side-by-side duplexes two blocks from a college campus.  Probably built as 19th century workers’ houses for a long-gone iron foundry, renovated around 1980 to eradicate any traces of architectural character.  Faux wood paneling, suspended ceilings with institutional 2×4 cardboard panels, fluorescent lighting, linoleum and indoor-outdoor carpet floors, flat hollow luan doors easily smashed by drunken frat boys.  Decor so outdated that the only place today’s students might have ever seen it is in grandma’s basement, unless they grew up in a mobile home. Four three-bedroom units.