Tuell-McKee Funeral Home

You've all heard about it, and now you'll finally get to see it! (unless of course you lived here at some point and have already seen it!) However, I believe most of the people who read this blog are far away and have never had the pleasure.



David and I took the girls to see the old homestead a few weeks ago when we were in Tacoma. This is the funeral home we lived in for 2 years. When we moved in as caretakers, Scotlyn was only 9 months. We had Lindsay while we lived there and finally decided to call it quits when Scotlyn started saying "night-night" to the "residents"! (Oh, yeah. And David was starting school in Bellingham 2 hours away, so I guess that's part of the reason we left!)



Our duties included answering phones after hours (all night long and 24 hours on the weekends), cleaning the whole business area (the entire downstairs [chapel, offices, family room, urn display, caskets] had to be dusted, vacuumed, and occasionally oiled (cuz it was old and therefore it was REAL wood!)) It was a large area overall, but we got pretty good at it! We also had to clean the prep room. That's where they "prep" the bodies for viewing and/or burial. They clean, embalm, set the facial features, and every once in a while, there would be an autopsy preformed there instead of the medical examiners' office. Those smell truly awful, but it's totally interesting, too!



Anyway, there were things we didn't like about living there, but for the most part it was a great experience. Our compensation for all that we did was this fabulous, huge apartment upstairs above the funeral home. Our rent & utilities (except phone and cable) were paid in full. The entire upstairs of the funeral home minus the room on the far right end were ours for FREE! One downside was that the girls had to be extremely quiet during business hours - especially if there was a visitation or a service going on. Also, the "backyard" was an enormous parking lot and the "front yard" was the front of a business that didn't benefit from having the children playing on the lawn - and it was on a very busy Tacoma street!



So, please enjoy these pictures from our family's past and be glad that YOUR house doesn't smell like formaldehyde!!! ;o)
Here is the front of the building on 6th St. in Tacoma. It was built in the early 1900's. All the windows across the top floor are our apartment except for the one on the far right. That was the casket display room. It had a second entrance and stairway, so it wasnt directly connected by a door or anything to our space. That would have been fun, huh?! It was beautifully designed with built in shelves on either side of the living room, an arched entrance to the formal dining area and built in storage and curios in the dining room itself. AND a little door in the wall in our bedroom so that when the business phone in the hallway rang in the middle of the night we could reach through the door and get it without having to run through the house!
That is the front door used for business to get into the main part of the funeral home. If you went in the front door and immediately turned left, there was an office and through that office you could go through another door to get to our apartment. We also had our own private front entrance which you will see in a minute.
There's our front door. Inside it had a small entryway and then went up a BILLION steep stairs to get to our apartment up top. Really great that over the period of time we were there we had not one but TWO crawlers - YIKES! Thank goodness for baby gates!