Third Time's a Charm?

Well, here I go again – I am embarking on my third renovation project. The first was a cottagey-bungalow home I bought in 1998, and the second was the 25,000 square-foot building I currently work in. Today, in less than an hour from this writing, I am going to do the ‘walk through’ on my new house. New only in the sense that it is new to me. I close Monday, November 30, 2009 on an American Four-Square house, built in 1924, in a lovely Western New York village.


Here’s what I know about this house. It is very unattractive from the outside right now. It needs a new roof, eventually I will have to remove the dark brown, sun faded aluminum siding, figure out what the original surfaces were (probably clapboard, or clapboard and cedar shake), and determine what to do with them now. It has a storefront addition on one side that is currently boarded up and used for storage. The yard/landscaping has been neglected for years aside from regular lawn mowing.

However… it is the interior of the house that seduced me even before I went in with my realtor. The photos in the
online listing showed stunning wainscoting in the dining room, beautiful wood columns between the dining room, living room and sitting room… oak floors downstairs, a gorgeous wooden newel post and stairs to the second floor, and two leaded glass windows.

The huge dining room window has a window seat with storage drawers beneath.

The kitchen appears to be mostly 1924 original, although the appliances are slightly updated. Upstairs, the
three bedrooms are all good sized rooms with good sized closets, and what appears to be fairly hammered pine floors (nothing a sander can’t take care of).

The bathroom is large, and while I will have to take sit-showers until I am able to completely remodel it and move the bathtub out from under the window, I can live with that since I have found the pleasures of Lush bath bombs. (And I have a sneaking feeling that hot baths will become more and more a necessary part of my routine very soon.)


There are some ‘mechanical issues’ – i.e., electrical stuff to sort out, and some other things that came out in the inspection, and I will need to correct some water damage, and address roof drain, and downspout routing issues.
But my favorite part of this
house is the fact that it has been owned by three generations of one family,
and it suffers mostly from neglect rather than abuse (or worse yet, misdirected ‘updating’ – translation: no one was stupid enough to paint all that beautiful woodwork!

I spent the better part of two months stripping all the woodwork in my previous house, so my personal opinion is that anyone who paints that beautiful old woodwork should be shot on sight. But I digress.) Neglect, as long as it does not become structural, is fairly easy to correct. Abuse… well that can snowball on you in a heartbeat (she says from experience…)


From my previous renovations, I have refined my theory about such ventures. I call it my 2X Theory of Renovation, and it goes like this: it always takes twice as long and costs at least twice as much as you expect. I hold no illusions that this will be any different, but any project such as this should always be a labor of love, and we all know that anything or anyone we love… well they never quite do what we expect all the time, and they quite
often frustrate us, no end. And so it goes.


As soon as I close, I will begin posting photos of the house. The BEFORES, if you will. And as I tackle each
project, I will blog and post photos of the process. When I was doing the previous renovations, my parents lived out of state, so I took photos each week, got them developed (ah, the pre-digital camera era!), then scribbled info on the back of each one.

I would mail these off to them so they could see just what they started. At the end of my house renovation, my mom presented me with two beautiful scrapbooks off all my photos and all my notes carefully typed and attached beside each corresponding picture. Even though I later sold the house, those scrapbooks mean a great deal to me, and the people I’ve shown them to, surprisingly, absolutely loved them. So this blog will hopefully do somewhat
the same thing.

I often joke that I was born and raised on a construction site. It’s not totally accurate, but my dad did have
the kitchen ripped apart when I was young, and I believe he also had a bedroom and bathroom 1/2 demolished. Instead of locking me up in a playpen (which would only have made me scream bloody murder), he taught me which tools were which, and from my earliest memories, we worked side-by-side on whatever project he had dreamed up.

When I was in high school, he decided to build his own house, and I was pretty involved in that process as well. So it’s no wonder that I’m a lunatic about renovations and general building stuff. When I moved out of state, my dad took me shopping and bought me a complete set of my own tools as a ‘going away’ present. So there ya go.



Anyway, my parents live about 2-1/2 blocks from the house I bought – in fact I am squatting in their guest
room until my house is ready for occupancy – so I no longer need to send them photos of the progress. But I do have friends, and on-line pals who might like to verify their own sanity by telling themselves, well, at least I’m not as crazy as SHE is!



Well, I’m off to the walk-through, so wish me luck!



K


Originally posted November 27, 2009