Originally posted by Brian Hoyt:
I bet they never imagined how coveted wood floors would be today.
On the other hand, I bet they also never imagined what horrors would be found in 30 year old carpet...
I liked carpet until I got into this business and saw the unimaginable terror that lurks in carpet after even a few short years of relative good care. Now I consider carpet to be right there with bad ideas like flat roofs, mullets, and DIY rewiring jobs.
Concerning the OP's question - Color has to do with indoor bowel movements. Seriously!
When plumbing moved indoors, it was met with some degree of skepticism by the general public. Home builders would advertise "CLEAN AND SANITARY WHITE!"
You see, white was considered to be "Sterile" and "Clean"... it also happened to be an easy enough pigment.
(Notice that prior to about 1920, any kind of wall color was basically wallpaper. Really awesome, really expensive wall paper. White, lead based paint was simply too available and too durable not to use as a primary building component. If you ever get the chance to see some old-school wall paper up close and personal, take the opportunity to notice how completely badass it is and how thoroughly it kicks modern wall paper in the nads. The raised lettering. The tasteful thickness of it. My god... is that a water mark?)
The green and yellow colors you see so often that historically come after the white were that color because, again, the pigments were available in a postwar America. (Bear in mind, most houses we typically deal with are going to be built after the 1910's and 1920's... and renovated sometime after the war during the housing boom)
After the public got used to the idea of taking a **** indoors, and various advancements in microbiology happened (To say nothing of advancements in manufacturing), people started realizing that they could have colors other than white in their bathrooms. Pink, blue, and teal were popular art-deco colors in the post-atomic age and naturally, folks just had to have a pink toilet. Or a blue toilet. Heck, cars now came in a variety of non-black colors... why not toilets and vanities?
Then, along came Wilsonart and suddenly the atomic ranch exploded into a whole sea of new building materials... formica, plastics, Congoleum, Vinyl, and so on. Wilsonart made a point of creating groovy, awesome-looking colors and patterns to satisfy an increasingly consumerist society.
Now - in the early days, you often saw stained trim. That had to do with quality of lumber. Back when the world was new, getting awesome quality lumber was a no brainer. (Once upon a time, Sears and Alladin offered kit houses with the promise of a dollar refund for every knot hole you found. Try getting a lumber company to do that now! ... Also, Heart Pine floors were once not so uncommon. Nowadays, you'd pay through the nose for reclaimed, once-used heart pine flooring)
So anyway, with awesome quality lumber comes awesome-quality, stain-grade trim. Stain was generally easier to lay hands on (Or simply make) than paint, so a lot of the time trim was stained instead of painted.
Also, staining was less of an issue as far as cuts go... a strictly average carpenter in 1925 would pass today as a master carpenter... so coped joints were a no-brainer, and stain is easy on tight joints.
