Happy Turkey Day!

Happy Turkey Day, Everyone!

We are lucky to have my parents visiting, and this is both a blessing and a challenge. I am thrilled to report that no one is sleeping on a futon or camping out. But also, we have a lot going on and are trying to combine work on the house and sightseeing and neiother siughtseeing nor work on the house is quite as good as it probably could be as we shift between them. More as we have it -- our final task will be to decorate the house for Bellefonte's upcoming Victorian Christmas celebration.

The Weekend Update

Since we now own the house, we've been scrambling like crazy to get some things done.

Specifically, this weekend, we:

1. Bought new appliances to replace the disgusting and non-functional ones in the "good" kitchen of 231.
2. Cut away at plaster and pulled wires to make fixtures, including fans, possible in the public rooms of 233 -- this was a major undertaking, and Chris looked like a coal miner with his head lamp and face full of plaster dust. Time was of the essence, because the plasterers and sheetrockers were set to move in Monday morning and anything not done couldn't be done after they came. Late into the evening, Chris was up on a ladder working away.
3. We did take a short trip to Home Depot, though, to buy $200 of wire to make all the electrical upgrades and replacements possible. And there the gods smiled upon us. We really, really need light fixtures and at Home Depot I found a discontinued and very large chandelier for $89. It goes in as soon as we have ceilings. As does this one.
4. Scraped the heck out of some wallpaper. And learned some very interesting information, such as that the original wallpaper was on the ceiling as well as walls. Yegods.

Homeowners Again!

Yay, we're homeowners again!

Not much to add, except to note that now that we actually own the house, we will be working on it. I feel the need to mention a little of our renovation/restoration philosophy. That is, if it can be removed, we get the best we can right now. Which is to say not necessarily the optimal thing, historically-speaking. We live in this place and we'll be renting it -- it's not a house museum -- and while I'd love to get the perfect vintage thingamabob we have so many thingamabobs to get that in some cases we're simply finding something that looks more or less appropriate to fill in for now.

More as we know it --

Imaging Offers Options

Technology shifts paradigms, and the recent laser imaging featured on the pages of the New York Times is no exception. The Scottish team's imaging has provided a means to virtually reconstruct damaged edifices and measure the unmeasurable. It is, supposedly, superior to all the technology that was use before it.

However, I am a cynic, and I am specifically cynical that the laser technology is not plagued by some of the same challenges that apply to more traditional methods of envisioning and measuring historic structures. After all, the first measurements derived from observation were derived hundreds of years ago, and those can be highly accurate. Yet they still depend on a standard of measurement based in physical objects, which of course do decay. Likewise, laser technology isn't divorced from the physical realm. Light decays, and its measurements are based on physical standards, which also decay. And of course these machines are operated humans, and humans err.

Stuff I Wish I could Preserve: The Wallpaper

Also indicated as an issue by the appraiser is the wallpaper in the staircase. Which is really unfortunate, but unfortunately just hastens a process that had to occur anyway. As I mentioned, the previous owner was in the midst of a renovation. He stripped off some really awful-looking wall coverings, but he also scored the wallpaper for removal.

I've already started stripping back the wallpaper with my handy dandy Wagner steamer,and what have I found? Lots of very cool unfortunately doomed wallpaper, none in large enough quantity to preserve.  The stuff at left, which appears to show a variety of mills in a blue and black toile pattern, is the topmost.  Oddly enough, the wallpaper isn't uniform from one side of the hall to the other -- the left side appears to have two layers, while the right has at least four.  I'll try to get photos of some of the other layers as I continue to work.

Why Don't I Own My House?

Ah, the challenges of historic preservation....

First, let me state here that I bought a historic house for a reason -- which is that I believe that we must know our past to comprehend our future. In other words, it's the right thing to do. But that doesn't mean it's the easy thing to do.

Case in point: I agreed, more or less, to buy the house a month ago. There have been many, many challenges in this process, which in the aggregate mean that I am now missing my original closing date. Thank God the guy who owned the house is generous and wants it sold and is willing to let my husband and animals and I not be homeless while we wait for it all to be resolved.

So, what's the issue? Well, I was buying a 125 year-old duplex which is in great structural condition, but less-than-ideal cosmetic condition. The previous owner had renovated roughly half of it to a great standard and was in the midst of renovating the other portion. This turned out to be a major issue as we got to the end of what should have been the pre-closing period.

I have great credit, and originally was guaranteed a 30-day closing. But we had trouble completing the inspection. Because of issues with the size of the house and the mechanical systems, the current owner had to pour $1,300 into a furnace and inspection took about a week. Due diligence was inspected. But hey, no problem -- the finish line was still in sight.

And then the appraisal came back, and it was both low and requiring repairs before closing. This is why we haven't closed already. Instead we're entertaining the appraiser on a return visit, having put $2,000 into drywall and wallpaper scraping.

What sucks about this, as well, is that in order to make this happen in an expedient manner we had to make a historically-inappropriate choice. Yes, we're drywalling. But that's only because we more or less have to. We're only doing what we absolutely have to do make the lender happy quickly enough to get this done.

Fingers crossed that it goes well.

Translating the Stories of the Dead to the Living

I think too often we forget about all the humans involved in historic preservation, and in the committing of oral and other history to the next generation. Which is why people like Christina Marshall, featured in a Banner-Herald article titled "Athens Cemetery History Set in Stone" should be featured more often.

Too often historic preservation is boiled down to exemplary architecture or even remnants of physical space. Tombstones can certainly take this form, since their history is written more or less upon them. On their face, tombstones are a form of funerary art and they mark the passage of a life. However, tombstones, like most other physical spaces and markers of the past, exist in a context that can be very complex. Without skilled interpreters, or at least passionate ones, this context tends to go unrecognized.

Oconee Hill, like a lot of others of its vintage, has been altered over the years to allow the dead to move for reasons as varied as marital status changes of the survivors, because of other cemeteries changing status, or because of political or social context There are reasons why one grave has an elaborate headstone and another is lost in the undergrowth, or why one is lovingly tended and another is neglected. The space itself tells some of the story, but a historian's voice communicates it more effectively to the fellow living.

Advice

When renovation/restoring/whatever an old home, don't assume that other people, even if they're professionals, share your beliefs or your goals or what have you.

A friend of ours, who is a general contractor, reviewed the house with me early on, as I was making the decision to purchase. Keep in mind this is a general contractor. This is a guy who can handle virtually all aspects of construction. But he's not an old house guy. As he was poking and prodding and giving me his opinion on the house, he admitted to me that he'd never even been inside "one of these houses," meaning a victorian-era urban house. So, great guy, and can do whatever we ask him to do. But he might suggest solutions that aren't appropriate to our house, because he's not familiar with our type of house or sharing our basic goal of preserving what we can and adding elements back to the house that are appropriate to it.

Likewise, drywall guy? In all seriousness, he walked into one of the rooms that doesn't have its original ceilings and told me it was "good." The adjective I had in mind was "hideous." But keep in mind that this is a guy who spends 80% of his time putting drywall into new homes and the other 20% throwing drywall up over old plaster walls and ceilings -- plus, of course, he makes no money when people decide to restore old plaster. Of course he's inclined more toward installing drywall than making an appropriate choice for the property.

My point is that decisions about appropriateness are really yours as the owner to make. You make one when you hire a contractor, and hiring a restoration contractor takes some of the pressure off you because a restoration contractor is more likely to know what is appropriate to your house. But once you start talking about jobs, you also have to as the owner of an old house do your own research. Because no one will watch out for your house but you -- it's your job and no one else's.