This painting is unusual among Vermeer's works in that it depicts an everyday scene of an ordinary house. Cracked bricks and crumbling white exterior walls are precisely depicted. Children are playing and a woman is working on her knitting in the doorway. The woman in the back center is cleaning. The drainage channel she is cleaning extends to the front. This painting was painted in Delft, Holland, where Vermeer's aunt lived with her children in the house on the right from about 1645 until her death in 1670.The present location of this painting is said to look like this.