[OOC][PLOT][ARC 1] Planning for Season 1 - The Retcon

[Bob Schroeck]

Oh, and here's a bit about the LW residence that I did up at lunchtime:

The Old Dietmeier Place is a farmstead just past the furthest reaches of the actual "town" part of [[w:Lake Wobegon|Lake Wobegon]], Minnesota. At 400 acres it's definitely above average size for a farm in Minnesota, and in its center is the usual collection of farm buildings, including one of the largest residential buildings in Stearns County: the Dietmeier house. Most of it was built in the early decades of the 20th century, when the Dietmeier family was huge and sprawling and no less than three generations lived under its roof at the same time, but the oldest parts date back to the 1870s, when Lake Wobegon was first settled. When the Dietmeiers stopped building they ended up with a structure three stories tall, and more a hundred feet along its longest dimension. A wraparound porch surrounds almost the entire building, with a main entrance and two "back doors" as well as a cellar entrance.

It has been painted a brilliant white, with a deep green trim, shutters, and doors.

In addition to a master bedroom, the house has twelve other bedrooms (which can house as many as four persons if they're friendly), six full baths, an unfinished attic, and a stone-walled basement complete with a huge root cellar. It also has a massive kitchen and a dining room scaled to serve a group the size of the Dietmeier family in 1925 -- which is to say at least two dozen. All these facilities have been modernized and brought up to code by Phantomhive Properties, which also expanded the existing living and sitting rooms along with the kitchen and dining area into a larger, open-floorplan design, as well as adding a proper laundry room off the mudroom reached through one of the back doors. (Other facilities were also included in the new design, to be determined as story needs manifest, like a library or computer room. The future portal room, for instance, is in the basement, encased with its own thick concrete walls.)

In addition to the main house there is a bunkhouse that once provided quarters for the hired hands -- both permanent and migratory -- who were needed to run the farm in years when the Dietmeiers couldn't field a small army of family members. This, too has been remodeled and updated, providing quarters for up to another twelve persons in three "suitelets", along with two more full baths.

Not far away from the house and bunkhouse are the old "working buildings" of the farm, starting with the large barn, now refitted as a training facility for the displacees in residence (or "danger room" as the manager prefers to call it). It, too, has a cellar, in which a shooting range has been installed. The adjacent silo has been repaired and reinforced, although it has not yet been given a new purpose. Assorted other outbuildings dot the central yard; all have been repaired and refurbished, even if, like the silo, they have no immediate purpose as part of the residence.