This 91-Year-Old Lady's Home Looks Normal From the Outside – The Inside Will Blow You Away

Earl's bar in the basement

In the winter of 1965, Earl spent every weekend in the basement. When he came back up in the spring, he had built a bar. The walls are knotty pine boards, golden and shiny. The bar has a padded red vinyl front with brass studs and five red stools on chrome legs. Behind it are glass shelves with old cocktail glasses, a soda siphon, and a bowl of matchbooks from restaurants that closed long ago. Earl's bowling trophies stand in a row on a shelf. The floor is red and black tile, laid like a checkerboard.

In the corner is a card table where Dorothy and Earl played euchre with the neighbors every Friday for forty years. Next to it stand an old record player and a stack of records: Patsy Cline, Dean Martin, Perry Como. "Every New Year's Eve the whole street came down those stairs," Dorothy says. "Earl made the drinks, and I made the little sausages. We danced right here until one in the morning."

People ask her why they never remodeled. Dorothy shrugs. "Why would we? Nothing was broke," she says. "Earl and I liked it. That was enough." She is not sad to leave, she says, because she is going to live with her daughter, and because so many people want to see her house just the way she kept it. She has only one wish for whoever buys it: keep Earl's bar. Would you keep this house exactly the way Dorothy left it, or would you change it?