Our New Old House

This month’s meeting was at the home of Jack and Meghan Daugherty.  They bought the house next door to theirs and rehabbed it back from a deteriorating apartment house into a beautiful single family home.  The Des Moines Register did a story about them:

http://www.desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080207/NEWS/802070329/1001/NEWS

Jack discussed the biggest parts of the project: the woodwork, leveling the floors, and pulling down all the plaster and lath to insulate the walls and put up drywall. The woodwork had all been painted a horrible orange and turquoise combination, so he pulled it all off the windows and doorways, labeled each piece, and sent it off to a furniture stripping company in Valley Junction. We all had a chuckle about Jack’s mild panic when he realized that the stripping solution also took off his pencil markings that told him how to put all the pieces back together! It added an extra day’s worth of work for Jack to piece everything back together based on the position of nail holes and other little imperfections that matched up to the original placement. The floors in the house were all warped and wavy. Parts of the foundation had settled and joists had sagged over the years. He hired a company to raise the house, re-build the foundation, and level it all out. Jack described this as the most difficult part to watch because with every creak and squeak the house made, he thought the whole thing was going to fall apart. He needn’t have worried. The floors came out perfect and the rebuilt foundation looks better than ever!

What struck me the most about these home rehabbers was their sense of humor. They were able to keep a positive attitude through some very stressful challenges, including the arrival of a surprise baby girl!

 Here’s our host, Jack, discussing the project:

A young guest listened attentively.

A couple of details about the house stood out to me. For example, this corner sink was fascinating.

An example of Victorian love of symmetry:

Jack is also the president of our neighborhood association, (http://www.unionparkdsm.com/) so of course we’ll be going to the meeting tonight!

[tags]Des Moines Rehabbers Club, photos, Union Park, woodwork, foundation[/tags]

Phew! What a busy couple of weeks it’s been!  I’ll have lots and lots of blog posts coming your way to tell you all about everything (with pictures!)

Today I sent a response to the lady who used to live in my house.  When I wrote to her last month she sent me back a really nice letter promising to look for some pictures for me.  In the meantime, I’m sending her photos of some of the puzzling wallpaper in this house to see if she remembers any of it, and also some photos of the clothing I found that must have belonged to her family. 

 Stay tuned for blog posts about replacing our storm windows, upgrading our furnace and adding A/C, a recap of the March Des Moines Rehabbers Club meeting, and much much more!  That’s all for the news.  Film at eleven.

[tags]neighborhood history, wallpaper[/tags]

Remember last month when I found those clothes in the wall and looked up the family who lived in my house when those papers and clothes were stuffed in the wall and I wrote a letter to the lady I guessed must have lived in my house at that time?  Well she wrote me back!!!

I was worried she wasn’t the right person or didn’t want to talk about her past or didn’t remember anything since she was so little.  But none of these things turned out to be true!  She was excited to hear from me, remembers lots of details about the house, and is going to share some of her photos with me when she gets back home (she’s spending the winter down south) at the end of April. 

Here are a couple excerpts from her letter:

“It is surprising how much I do recall of the house – I remember where each room was & some of the placement of furniture. Yes, I do recall a built-in buffet or cabinet in the dining room with windows above it on the south side of that room. I also remember the living room and fireplace, the enclosed front porch, kitchen, bath and 2 bedrooms.”

“We had a cherry tree in the backyard & also a goldfish pond, which my Dad filled in because he didn’t want me to fall in and drown.”

Pretty neat, huh? I’ll keep you up to date about what I hear from her.

Oh, and… I haven’t finished the bathroom sink yet. I don’t have an excuse. I don’t have an explanation. I can only tell you that I slept all weekend. I wasn’t sick, just needed to catch up. (shrug)

[tags]neighborhood history, bathroom, correspondence, old photos[/tags]