Almost 30 years ago

In 1985 a group of people dedicated to the preservation and recognition of the Springfield neighborhood in Jacksonville kicked off a huge undertaking: surveying and cataloging every historic structure in Springfield for the application for National Historic District.

Springfield Heritage Education Center, short "SHEC", is working on making these masterfiles and photographs accessable on their webpage, along with more history, anecdotes and photographs of Springfield through the ages.

Check out the webpage here.

If you like to learn more historic tidbits about our neighborhood and find historical houses and neighborhoods generally squeal-worthy, sign up for their monthly newsletter!

While I haven't been able to get my hands on our house's master file just yet, I was able to find the picture taken in 1985 for the historic district application. Woot!

There it is, our little old house. While the years haven't been too kind to the exterior paint job and it doesn't look as fresh and new anymore, it hasn't changed a lot. The wrought-iron railing had already replaced the original wooden railing (which is a bummer since I was hoping to maybe find a picture with the old railing intact), the Crape Myrtle and funny-looking loquats hadn't been planted yet, the door to the right was much uglier than today's replacement (Thank God for small blessings!) and the clump of lilies at the step-up to the front yard was already planted. Would you believe that these lilies have been there for almost 30 years?? I certainly didn't (and now I feel somewhat bad about wanting to move them).

Other than that, our little house looks like our little house.

After mooning over the old photograph for a ...ahem,while, I did discover one little detail that had me squealing with excitement. I missed it at first, but you know, you have to get a little up close and personal.

Closer.
Closer still.

Do you see it?

Oh MY GOD! Leaded glass sidelights!

While our original entry door, bereft of its transom window, was already on the left side of the house, almost 30 years ago it had leaded glass sidelights! Aren't they beautiful??

Not only are they beautiful and I'm excited to have a picture of its past beauty, but this picture will be great proof of how the door originally looked like when we apply for the permission (Certificate of Appropriateness," short COA) to restore it. Woot!

I feel like dancing. How about you?

Hitting the nail on the head

I want a house that has got over all its troubles. I don't want to spend the rest of my life bringing up a young and inexperienced house.
- Jerome K. Jerome

Right now we're poly-ed out of most of our house. The remaining wood floors at the Darling Duckling have been stained and today the first coat of polyurethane went on - that means the downstairs hallway and library and stairs and upstairs hall are off limits right now. More time for packing up stuff, I guess, even though we fell funny after not swinging a paint brush for several days now.

If you could see the stack of boxes that is our current library you would have no doubt that we are avid readers. All three of us. 40-something liquor store boxes are pretty much a dead give-away. No, really. Good thing we have a great public library system here in Jacksonville - that way we don't run out of reading material what with all of our books packed up. One of the books I picked up and enjoyed greatly was/is

Renovating old houses - bringing new life to vintage homes
George Nash
The Taunton Press
ISBN 1-56158-535-1

It is jam-packed with great information and DIY advice including instructions on how to repair old windows, terminology and and and. And best of all, it comes with a number of really neat old house quotes and an introduction that I feel best manages to capture why we feel about old houses the way we do and what makes people come together and fight for their preservation like "SOS Preservation".

Excerpt from "Renovating old houses - bringing new life to vintage homes" by George Nash

"People who work with and live in old houses use fuzzy words like feel, aura and essence to justify their obsession. These are aesthetic categories that attempt to describe the perception of beauty, the way so many old houses almost seem to live a life of their own, breathing in slow, subtle rhythms of shifting lines and weathering wood.
As do all living things, a house achieves a delicate equilibrium, a precariously maintained and constantly changing relationship to time, the seasons and its people. It responds to the care (or neglect) given it - growing, changing, adding windows and doors, sprouting porches and sheds as the years progress.
And when its people depart, a house begins to die. The process occurs with a grace, beauty and terrible simplicity. The tilt and sag of the walls, the weathered shades of clapboard and peeling paint, the tired angles of the roof, all give mute expression to the ebb and flow of the lives once harbored within..."

Ghosts of Christmasses past

As you might have noticed (and can read up on it here and here), we do have our hands quite full bringing our Ugly Duckling up to speed, code and swan-like beauty even before moving in and for quite a while after, too. These are just the basic projects like new paint, fresh floors, a new kitchen and a laundry room so we don't scare everybody around us.

Yet, while we're busily chipping away at our current to-do-list, there are plenty of ideas and wild hairs stirring up a storm in our minds on how to bring back more of our Ugly Duckling's vintage charm and beauty.

There is, for one, the staircase. When we re-opened the wall we also opened the view into the hung ceiling and the side of the staircase. While the bottom newel post is no longer in its place, there is the tell tale notch in the step indicating where it once was anchored. The bull nose of the first tread fell victim to the duplex-ification and was simply hacked off in a straight line to meet the separating wall.

And yet, there is the original trim, hidden away from sight, leading a Sleeping Beauty kind of life in our walls, waiting for us to find the time and budget to restore it.

[Original trim of our stair case]

Then there is the door. Our Ugly Duckling is still in possession if its original entry door with sidelights, and it's a beautiful door even though the transom window is missing. It is, however, not in its original position. Our guess is that the owner who first turned the house into a Duplex lived downstairs and wanted the fancier door. Thus, the big door was moved to its current location on the left and became the entry to the downstairs apartment, and a normal-sized door was added in its place for access to the upstairs.

Phil mused that the old transom window might still be in place, just covered up by siding and hidden in the odd space between original ceiling and hung second ceiling. Since removing the wall separating the staircase from downstairs had left an opening in the ceiling, I scaled a stepladder and stuck my hand with the camera into the space. There's no way I could poke my head in there, but the camera fit just fine and so I snapped away blindly curious what I'd find.

The pictures revealed that Phil had been right all along: this is where our big door belongs, and while the transom window is gone, it's not forgotten. Its ghost is still there

[Opening in the wall where the transom window used to be]

[Ghostly impression - outline of trim around transom window, and funky wallpaper]

I know I'm weird but seeing the ghostly outline of where the trim used to be excites me! It's almost as if those old houses are patiently biding their time, waiting and hoping for somebody to come along to take care of them, to then gently nudge and whisper "Look here ...see how pretty I once was?"or "This is how I once looked like ... please make it right again".

Yeah, alright, that isn't coming out right. Put that way it sounds right out creepy.
Sheesh ...

Anyways, our Ugly Duckling is far from creepy. She's a little old lady who seems to be enjoying the attention and care she's getting and slowly, almost shyly she's giving away a few more of her secrets. So far, the changes with the biggest impact have been those that brought our house closer to the way it had once been, and while we aren't going for 100% historical accuracy in our house we are on the look-out for staircase spindles and transom windows.

But first ... more painting!

I'm floored

And madly in love to boot.

This week our fabulous contractor team started working on refinishing the downstairs floors in preparation for the arrival of our kitchen on Monday. Since I didn't make it over to our Ugly Duckling on Monday (you know, playing catch-up with laundry, dishes and general household cleaning chores left over from the weekend) I dropped in Tuesday to the glorious sight of this

[Hallway looking into the livingroom]

And this
[Future library with door to downstairs half bath]

And this[Original entrance at not-original location in Livingroom]

Glorious heart pine floors sanded down and cleaned of years of grime, grease, stain and poly. Again, a rather unexpected touch of beauty in our modest old house. This type of floor was rather difficult to come by at the time when the Ugly Duckling was built, and it certainly wasn't an inexpensive choice [at least, that's what I gathered from this site here http://www.heartwoodpine.com/why-heart-pine/]

[Pretty & Funky grain]

The stain we'll be using is "Dark Walnut" by Minwax and a satin poly for a slightly glossy finish. We'd originally agreed on "English Chestnut" but our contractor warned us that the reddish heartwood pine floors would turn that color into something closer to orange than a warm reddish brown. We tested it on a damaged board and it looks great, and when I swung by the house today, Mrs Gloria had tried it on one of the stair treads and boy, what a fantastic color did that turn out to be!

I can't wait to see the end result!

A thing for knobs

The more time we spend with the Ugly Duckling, the more she reveals little things to us. There are things that need to be taken care of (the stack), things that need to be "babysat" (the roof) and things that simply need some freshening up and cleaning (everything else) but every once in a while, amid this truckload of work, I discover those little details that make this house special to me 9and so far has proven to be rather elusive on camera - maybe the house is simply photo shy, who knows?).

While painting the little man's cave I noticed that his door knob was different from any other I'd seen. At first passing glance I thought it was simply caked on paint until I looked closer. Under layers of paint, a delicate filigree pattern was hiding in plain sight.

[Before]

[After]

Isn't it pretty? I simply reached for the deglosser and gently wiped down the front of the knob, and the paint wiped off fairly easily. It's a beautiful Eastlake style pattern. Of course, there's not one to match this one in the whole house and while I still have to snap pictures of a few more knobs to document all of the different styles, here're two more to entertain you in the meantime

Guest Bedroom

Master Bedroom

Babysteps

Today was the official first day of our rehab: after returning home from work we met with our General Contractor over at the Ugly Duckling for a final walk-through and to create a plan of action. We have 45 days to bring the Ugly Duckling up to par to pass the 4-point inspection for roof, electric, plumbing and HVAC required by our insurance, and fortunately our contractor team from Glory Homes Inc is optimistic that we will meet this deadline just fine (especially since we're shooting for 30 days max and have told the sub-contractors that ...heh).

We signed some more paperwork necessary for building permits and certificate of appropriateness since we're in a historic district, took some more pictures, scribbled on walls and mused over and pointed out original features and how to bring them back so that our Ugly Duckling can go from this

to this!

Sometimes you have to kiss a frog to get a Prince

I have jokingly said that I won't show Before pictures of the Ugly Duckling unless I have a few After to go with it, and well, truth be told, it's not really so much of a joke than the knowledge that a lot of people just have problems seeing the sheer potential in a house that is old and has been neglected for a number of years, not to mention vacant.

Houses need owners and this is especially true for historic homes. They are imbued with character and spirit but they need the love and care of an owner to show their full potential.

Yeah, I know, it's the cheesy infatuated ramblings of a historic house nut and while I might be biased (and I admit to it happily) I'll leave you with this video created by a neigbor that might convince you that while biased I might be right after all ;o)

Enjoy!

[blogspot didn't let me embbed the video so here's an old-fashioned link]
Kiss a Frog - Get a Prince