Rainy Day

The forecast for this week looks like this:

Rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. Rain.

Our roof was almost on at the end of last week, and the guys even came by for a while on Memorial Day, so I had hopes that the roof would beat the rain.  Alas, it did not happen, and there was a lake on my beautiful slab on Tuesday.  I know that rain happens; I know that we've been super-lucky to not be delayed at all so far.  Nonetheless, I was a little bummed by this forecast so I put on my yellow polka-dot rain boots and planned to take a field trip today.

Hola, Harris County Civil Courthouse, home of the Harris County Clerk Records and Information Office!

We've established that I'm a dork for history and old stuff, right?  So here's the backstory.  Several years ago, the 1940 US Census Records were released to the public, and shortly thereafter, Ancestry.com got them all scanned in to their database and opened them to the public for free.  I, of course, spent several days poking around the records because I evidently have lots and lots of free time to spend doing useless stuff on the Internet.  Or I don't sleep.  We'd always considered it an open question when our house was built, since the info the previous owner gave us differed from the Tax Office's date, so when I noticed you could search the Census by address I typed ours in.  And there they were, people who lived in our house:  Herbert C. and Anna Fritch.  

Herbert C. (called Carl more commonly, it seems from other records) was a tailor with Battelstein's department store downtown.  He likely took the Houston Heights streetcar the two miles to his workplace on the north end of Main Street every day.

Main Street, 1924.  Battelstein's is the short building on the left.
Image from the  U of H Digital Library.

Anna talked to the survey taker, and she was a housewife, like me.  She cooked and cleaned, raised her son, talked to her neighbors, maybe took the streetcar to the Fine Arts Museum.

With their names, I was able to search the 1930 then 1920 Census as well, and found that Carl and Anna lived at our address for all of those two decades.  I was glad to have some evidence that the tax office was wrong and our house was old, but I was also excited to fill in some details on our home's history.  It wasn't the whole story, but it was like choosing a book because it has a cool title or cover, then flipping open a page to find an actually good story inside.  I just got a few sentences, though; farther back than 1920, the trail stopped.  There was no record of Carl and Anna in 1910 (at least, not at our address; I might have found them in San Angelo), but knowing even a little about the family who walked our floors gave our home additional breath and body and homeyness.

Before 1920 was a blank, though, and I found all I could online.  So it was time for a title search.  The folks at the County Clerk's were nice, if a little bewildered about why I wanted to do a title search just for fun.  They showed me how to use the computers, and I went hunting.

I was lucky to have Mr. Fritch's name and lucky to know about when he might have bought the property.  The county has two kinds of books scanned in--the Deed Indices, and the Deeds proper.  I had to scroll through about three hundred pages of old-timey handwriting, looking for "Fritch" to appear in the Grantee of title column sometime between 1910 and 1920.  

The eyestrain is palpable.

I missed it, the first time through, and was a little worried that I had paid to park downtown for nothing.   Do you see it there, fourth line from the bottom?  Looks a little like Earl Freitag to me, but sure enough refers to our Block and Lot number.  Carl paid $150 down and signed a mortgage for $1,325 over 28 months on June 17th, 1914.  I'm not sure this is our house's birthday, but it's certainly at least it's conception date (the deed doesn't refer to any improvements on the land).

From here back I can't quite trace our lot back to the original land grant from Mexico to John Austin, but I'm almost there.  When you've only got two hours between school runs, you take what you can get.  N. Bailey, who sold the lot to Carl, had bought it only six months earlier from J.J. Lyles, taking over his outstanding loan of $480 and paying an additional $400.  A profit of $825 for six months appreciation, or almost $20,000, today?  Not bad.  And J.J. himself made a neat profit, having bought the property just two days before from Dave and Alma Eckols by assuming their loan and paying $100.  

Deed.

I haven't yet found who sold the land to Dave, but he was buying lots of land back then.  A lot of it in Humble (I thought he might be related to these guys, but in the end I think not.  I still recommend the rabbit trail.).  I think it's a good guess that at some point I'm going to find the Omaha and South Texas Land Company, who subdivided the land, built streets, laid electric lines, and started establishing shops and infrastructure for their little village, Houston Heights, in 1892.

Also from the U of H Digital Library.

I'll have to chase Mr. Eckols another day to find out why he bailed on our lot.  I have a lead to follow at the downtown genealogical library that talks about what he did in Humble, and I'm sure there will be another rainy morning to spend with my County Clerk friends to poke around some more Indices.  I also have a gap to fill between Mrs. Fritch, who died in 1955 and was verifiably still at home in 1951, and the last owner we can trace back from the present, Leon Kotka, who bought the house from the county in 1967 and that search will involve microfilm.  Woohoo!  

I hope I'm not boring you too much with all this hoopla about deeds.  I hope I'm not the only who sees a story in handwritten legal documents and makes imaginary friends with people who died before my mom was born.  If I am, don't worry.  I'll have more news about roofs, eaves, rakes and fascia before you know it!

Hidey Holes

By Saturday afternoon, I've usually spent at least 6 days pretty much constantly in the company of someone who is trying to talk to me.  It's delightful having small children, it really is, but I am a person who reaches a point where another discussion of volcanoes, earthquakes and black holes becomes just another wave of noise breaking over my head, and one more round of "Let It Go" might send me underwater for good.  So this Saturday afternoon, my nice husband packed me off for some quality time at our (blissfully unoccupied) house.  Because I have a knack for forgetting things, I got to the house and discovered that though I brought the camera I left the battery behind, and frankly, I didn't love you enough to drive the four whole blocks back to the apartment to get it.  So here's a post made entirely of phone photos.

There's probably still some chile peppers the wall under that plywood.  Drat!

They pretty much finished framing on Friday, and for a while on Saturday morning got started with the sheathing.  I'm surprised how having actual walls changes the feeling of the space--I thought it would feel smaller because everything is closed, but the rooms that are sheathed actually feel bigger.

I spent some time looking at the play of light through the windows, now that they're actually windows, but then wandered around (enjoying the quiet and) checking out spaces that I don't usually get to go.  The visit kind of became all about the cozy spots, intentional and unintentional, that are emerging in our new old house.

Here's my feet next to the framing in an intentional cozy spot--we had a walk-though meeting with our contractor and architect Friday morning, and, among other things, I asked if they'd mind making this little nook.  "No problem!" they said.  "That will be a great place for storage."  And here it is on Saturday, done, and, um, yes, I'm sure it could be a great place for storage.  Or a great place for sitting and reading or napping.  And this is the only picture you get because it's secret.  What on earth would be the point of building your own half-house if you don't get to have a secret room?

We also discussed Friday adding some decking to the existing attic, which is really a pretty nice attic, when it's not 8 million degrees.  Because it's often 8 million degrees, because I've always been afraid of falling through the ceiling, and because you can never be sure what's hanging out in the attic of an old house, I haven't really poked around in the attic in 9 years of living in our house.  Fling boxes and run is my general M.O.

Those are creature footprints in the attic insulation.  See, I was right to not hang out there.

Because a wall is gone, it's pretty bright and open for the moment, so I got to wander a bit.  I didn't find any secret treasures, but I did get to peek out the windows at the front of the house, which was fun.

How are there not treasures in this little corner?

I also got a chance to see the original wiring in-situ before they rip the last of it out, which was fun in a look-how-close-I-came-to-death kind of way.

Really old knobs and tubes, ad hoc new wiring, and weird old powdery insulation.

Wiring they'd already removed that a few months ago was supplying electricity somewhere in my house.
THAT'S not a fire hazard, not at all!

That's all pretty uneventful, I know, but I'm glad to get rid of that shady insulation, dangerous wiring, and unwelcome guests and reclaim the old attic as a clean and useful place again.  When you're a mom who can remember the origin and event history of every toy and article of clothing each child has ever had and who consequently invests a lot of emotional weight in "stuff," places to store the stuff are pretty special.  Even if it's just providing me license to become a hoarder, at least I'm going to have a nice hoard, you know?

We're going to have TWO other attics--they might connect above the library, but it will be tight, if they do.  I like them, too.

Attic door #1

Attic door #2

The porch is going to be a cozy spot, I hope.  They got a wall up and we chatted Friday about the floor, but I'm still feeling tentative about it.  It's big, and it's changing the face of the house, and I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it.  My brain thinks it's super, but my heart is giving it the stink-eye, or at least some suspicious side-eye.

 It helped that I got to poke around under the porch, which is not usual (you know, ROUSs and stuff). Spelunking through a hole in a building is a great spirit lifter.

There's not much down there--a few broken flower pots, our rusty water main, a whole lot of ancient and venerable dirt, and a few oyster shells.  Old-timey builder snacks, or former driveway paving?  I'm not sure, but they were neat and gross.  I also found an old bottle, which would have cost at least two dollars at a junk shop, so I felt like I'd won the lottery.

It's a Horlicks Malted Milk bottle, it's an unusual shape, it's iridescent with age, and it's probably permanently dirty.  I love it, and I love that it was a gift on top of the gift of an hour of quiet bonding time with the house.  It made me feel better about the new porch, actually, as if the house was reminding me that the life in a house is what makes a home.  And if that's not a neat (and cheesy, but totally genuine) enough ending for you, I got nothin'.

See-through

I can no longer pretend that our house looks pretty much the same from the front as it used to.

It's probably also (past) time for me to take the key to the front door off of my keychain.  Though I'm not doing that tonight.

I feel very strange about our house being open to the front like this.  On one hand, it's been totally open from the back for quite a while now, so any sense of privacy or security was illusory.  At the same time, the removal of that illusion is kind of shocking.  I hope they get that new wall up with a quickness, because it feels too nekkid this way.

Let's explore the nekkidness.  It'll be fun, in a going-to-therapy kind of way.  

When the house was built, we think, it had an L-shaped porch (Facing south and east, because, as I learned while being a big dork the other day and staying up late reading about my neighborhood on the internet, prevailing winds in Houston blow in from the Gulf--to the southeast.)  So the old porch is everything in the picture below that's NOT interior--both the white ceiling and the gray.    That square that's kind of surrounded by the porch was the entryway--East-facing door, south-facing door from the entryway into the living room.  That new piece of wood is where the wall between the bedroom and the porch/entryway was.

At some point, someone made most of the South part of the L and half of the entryway into a walk-in closet for the bedroom, so we had a skinny entryway and a smaller porch.  The gray part of the ceiling was the part that became a closet.

And now, on the way to having a big, square porch and a South-facing front door that pops right into the living room (the theory being that the porch will be our entryway), we have a very open bedroom and a gaping, muddy hole where the entryway used to be.

In addition, most of our windows are gone.  They have lovely new frames for the lovely new windows, but I'm a little worried about our house tonight.  It seems very unprotected, though if anyone wants to tote a cast-iron bathtub past the security fence, I guess they've earned it.  But they better not.

Fortunately, there were lots of other exciting things to distract me from the missing front-of-house.  Stairwell windows!  About five feet tall and above my head when I'm standing on the landing.  So I can go all out on a family photo extravaganza snaking up the stairs.  

Dogtrot Roof!  It ties the house together looking at it from the outside.  And, more practically, means I'll never have to carry groceries to the house in the rain again.  Detached garages are the norm in the Heights, and this little roof means the path from my car to my kitchen is no longer plagued with slippery deck boards, mosquitoes, and torrential rain.  That's why it even gets an artsy picture.

Artsy!

Strap thingys!  I've tried to find out more about these, but there's not much about them on the internet except where to buy them.  I know some straps are used as structural support, and some are used to help prevent my house from washing or blowing away in a hurricane.  Either way, thumbs up!

All this was done on a rainy day, by the way.  I'm starting to expect to come by one morning and they've been working all night and the house is finished.  I'd have no objections.

And finally, some chili peppers in the wall.  For a snack or to put some juju on our house?  I don't know.  If they're not gone soon I'm bringing holy water.

Dry Dry Bones

Waiting two weeks between blog posts not only means that I've let you down, dear readers, but it also means that I have SIXTY-FOUR photos to choose from to show you how our house got from this:

to this:

I'm not really sure I can tell you, so I have to show you.  I can tell you that it's taken two weeks of sunshiny solid 12-hour workdays (including Saturdays).  Though it may not look like quite THAT much labor (especially when you see how quickly houses generally pop up around the neighborhood), I can also tell you that the attention to detail and the solidness of these walls is going to have me leaving little poems for the framing guys before too long.  I know, I'd better stick to donuts, but really, this carpentry is a thing of beauty.  

My first poem would be entitled "24-inch Structural Beams"

There might be a whole series about Powerbeams,
 because those suckers are awesome.

Who can resist a nice roofline?

On with the tour!  We have a whole house to look at, after all.  It's so neat to run around and see the rooms as they actually are rather that just letting my imagination run wild.  We all love it, though I wonder if this kids will be disappointed when they can't just pop between studs anymore.  I think it will help that their hide and seek games will work better with walls.

We'll start where the old part of the house ends.  Here we are, walking into the kitchen.  That big window is going to be in front of the sink, you know, where I spend a good 9/10ths of my life, washing stuff.  I'm glad it's a pretty window.

And here's standing with my back to that window looking out over the stove (where I spend that other 10th of my life) into the family room.  Those stairs there, I love them.  Did you see that close-up up there?  Those are the most well-built stairs I'll ever have the pleasure of running up 700 times a day to get whatever I've forgotten, again.

You'll have to help me decide what I'm doing with that closet next to the stairs.  I'm going to have more storage than I've ever had, and the abundance is overwhelming.  It might be for pets, vacuums, coats, or Christmas decorations.  We'll think on this later.

At the top of the stairs is my lovely laundry and sewing room.  I know I don't have any time left in my life, but I'm sure this room and me will be bonding.  A lot.

You can't have too many roof-rafter pictures.  Look at those lovely things!

You might remember that the two kids' bedrooms are mirror images of each other.  This is the bathroom of one (sink and counter on the right, under the corner windows, shower on the left):

And this is the bedroom of the other.  I think those little East-facing windows in the corner NEED a window seat, don't you?

This is the room that really tempts me to just bring a tent to the work site and move into the house now.  It's the "library," or really, hallway with a lot of books in it, and it's spacious and breezy and bright (yes, I know, no walls will do that for a space, but those windows!).  It also smells like new wood and home and is already so cozy that I hate to leave.  The laundry room is right next door, so I might have to do my folding in here. 

Here's the tub (in front of the windows) and shower (to the right) space in the master:

The master closet that with the wide lens looks bigger than my old bedroom and might be:

And master bedroom:

Back down the stairs.  Those things in front of you there are space for windows, and I'm impatient for those to get framed up.  They're not going to be quite THAT big, but they are big and will let in lots of light.

Before we head outside lets look through the mud room back at the stairs (!) family room, and old house:

 And here's our familiar, lovely dog trot porch, front and side views.  That's the library above the porch, and there's space for a little garden and grilling area on the other side.

So, it's pretty gravelly now, of course, and not at all garden-like, but this is that little space, with the breakfast nook windows above it and laundry room windows above that (with the library and porch to the right, of course).

 Here's the other side--the stairs and family room.  Our under-the stairs closet opens into the yard, and I'm pretty excited about it.  It will be a great place to keep bikes and outside toys so we don't have to wrangle them through the garage.

And I'll leave you for tonight with this shot of the back of the garage from the alley side.  Those two little windows are in the master closet, that power beam across the top of the garage door is utterly lovely, and I'm going to dream about how nice those ceiling beams are when I'm sleeping in that bedroom and I can't even see them anymore.