The Story of Someone Else's House

Once upon a time, this house was next door to us.

We used to be so jealous of its yellow-ness, because if your neighbor's house is yellow, you cannot also paint your house yellow.  It is...well, it isn't written.  But it's definitely a rule, I think.

A nice guy lived there, and he had an awesome Mustang that our children loved to listen to morning and evening (you could hear the vrooming through the walls, over the sound of the A/C.  Old house problems).  He used to have a beautiful backyard garden that we could see from the kitchen window, but he got tired of taking care of it, so he tore it out.  Oh, well.  It was his yard. We built a fence so we couldn't see in his yard anymore, and he paid for half, like a good neighbor.

He bought a new house and sold this one, quick as a snap.  He didn't even have time to list it.

The new buyer was a builder who wanted to build a new house.  We were sad for the old house, but oh, well.  It was his house.  We took this picture so we'd remember it.

The builder took his time building a new house.  He didn't do anything with the old house.  I called the realtor like a nosy neighbor and asked, impatiently, if he'd please keep up with the lawn.  He sort of did so.  Every once in a while someone would come by and take things out of the house--the appliances, doorknobs, plumbing fixtures.

The house sat for three and a half years.  It didn't look lived-in anymore.

You could see it was still a nice house, though, and we hoped maybe someone would save it.  That yellow paint still looked as sunshiny as ever.  A guy came to live in it who worked for the builder.  He cooked on a fire-pit in the back yard because there was no stove, anymore.  He put window-unit air-conditioners in because the central air unit had gone long ago.  He had a mean dog.  

After a few months, he moved out.  He took the window units with him.  The windows were left open to the air and the rain and the creatures of Houston. (I snuck over and tried to shut them.  They were totally stuck.)  We heard from a neighbor that the house had sold, again, to another builder.

We knew it was coming, but there's nothing like the sound of a Bobcat in the morning.

This is what's left.

The new builder seems to be actually interested in building a house here.  I'm sure it will be a pretty-enough house.  I'm excited we'll have neighbors again, after four years (come be my neighbor! I'm only a little nosy, I swear).  I'm really excited there's not a place for snakes and possums and I-don't-want-to- think-about what else to live in a vacant house just a few feet from my front door.  You certainly can't be mad about the neighborhood property values going up.

But I'm sad for that cute little yellow house.  The property records show it was about the same age as my house--built by a guy named Cecil from the Virgin Islands.  It was the last house on the block until the 1940s; to its North, there was nothing but farmland for miles until you got to Spring.  Cecil was a kind of suburbanite frontiersman with a British accent living with his children and grandchildren in his pretty little house.  Someone refurbished it at some point, and before it was left to rot, it had good bones and nice finishes.  I bet it was a good home.  I hope the new home has a place in some family's story like I imagine the old one did.

Emma and 812 Main Street

I'm such a homebody, you guys.  I've been running into friends freshly home from great summer adventures, and when the conversation turns, people ask, as they do, "What have you been up to?" I say, with what I think is audible happiness and relief, "NOTHING."  Sure, the kids and I have been to the pool, and the library.  But lots have days have been like today, where I listen to the whine of lawn tools and the roar of the garbage truck and the voices of my children imagining they are Endermen and waiters and bunny rabbits as I do the dishes and make some appointments and peanut-butter and Nutella sandwiches.  My vacation this year is staying in my beautiful house and enjoying the heck out of it.

I've been so hesitant to make more blog posts.  I've not really had the urge to write stuff, for one thing, and I've felt kind of weird about thinking that anyone is interested on what's inside my house, for another.  My writing itch has returned, probably as a side effect of all of this delicious leisure, and if I think about it, I'm really interested about what's going on with other people's houses (if you wrote a blog, I'd totally bookmark it), so why wouldn't other people want to read about mine?  And if you're not, you won't read.  Issue resolved.

I've also been a little embarrassed to show parts of my house that aren't finished yet.  There's almost no furniture in the front room, and every time the pizza guy comes to the door and says, "Oh, just moving in?" in a totally friendly way, I'd like to sink through the floor when I have to say, "Nope."  I'd like to claim that I'm such a devout minimalist that I plan to keep most of the room bare (not true) along with the other unfurnished, unfinished rooms in the house, or that some really pressing thing has monopolized all of my time (a total lie).  I'm just slow, is all.  I have a couch for the living room, my "parlor," but deciding what fabric to recover it in is taking a LOT of thought.  And that's just an example of what's going on in the whole house, and I'm embarrassed for you to see that it took only ten months for my house to be built from slab to finish, but it's been eight months and I don't even have curtains for all the windows.

But what's the point of thoughtfully filling my house with just the right stuff for me if I'm not going to invite people in?  So come into my family room, which is not finished, but is finished enough for now, for you to come have some tea with me (even if it's just imaginary tea because you live far away).

So this room is open to the kitchen, (behind me when I was taking this picture), and it used to be the kids' bedroom.  It's bigger, by two or three feet, widthwise, than it was when it was a bedroom, but it has the same triple window that it used to, and it feels like the same sunshiny room it used to be when my baby boy (now almost EIGHT!) would nap in my lap in a sunbeam from that window.  So I like this room, just a little.  The paint color is Sherwin Williams Gardenia, which they list as white, but is clearly just the right amount of sunshiny yellow.  I'm a sucker for primary colors, and should probably not have gone all out for the red accents, but those curtains used to be in the old dining room AND they are just the same color as my awesome stove, so there they go and I love them.

The centerpiece of any family room is a squishy couch, of course.  This one is grey velvet (that cleans up surprisingly easily), and is great for napping, watching tv, and playing way-too-competitive rounds of Monopoly (which the coffee table is big enough for--KEY).

 If you have any thoughts about my pillows, I'd love to hear them.  All I really know about pillows is how to drool on them while napping, but I give decorative (washable) pillows my best attempt.

Part of why this room took me so long to put together was this rug.  It's actually individual one-foot squares from Flor that I spent about three months agonizing over and rearranging into the perfect "random/not too random" configuration.  I should have asked for help from their free design service.  If you and I are pals, you know that's a hilarious and nonsensical idea (Asking for help?! Bah!).  It's a good rug, made from 100% recycled materials, that's comfy and washable.  And you can play board games on it and the board doesn't get all bendy.  I should have known that a rug this dark would show crumbs and fuzz more than I would like, but the internet told me I should have a darker rug to "anchor" my space.  Who knows?  Fortunately, this is also a centerpiece of my living room:

I love my robot vacuum a lot.  It's super awesome, and I highly recommend it, especially to people who may have small people in their house that produce crumbs at an alarming rate.

Someday, this folding table will be replaced by some kind of awesome real table, and someday, I might also have a piano on this wall to the right, but for now, this is a happy drawing/computing/doing homework station.

My kids don't get homework from school, so they make up homework to give each other.  I know! They also don't wear glasses (knock wood, turn around three times, says the mom who's always had corrective lenses), so these specs from a birthday party goody bag are a prized possession.

I didn't think this comfy chair was going to go in the family room of this house--I just didn't think it would work.    I'm pretty OK with it, though, and I'm glad, because this is an awesome reading spot.

And these squishy kid chairs are part of the unfinished-ness of this room-we'll theoretically have real chairs here, someday.  I haven't found any I want yet, though, and the kids love these, so they can stay until one of those things changes.  

I always feel like I don't have enough stuff on the walls.  I'm working on that in here, but at the same time, I'm pretty happy with how things are for now.

This is my favorite spot, though.  It's more than enough.  The bird painting is a housewarming gift from my dearest girlfriends by an artist (Raina Hampton) from the town where we all went to college together. The square thingys are lead ceiling tiles, probably old, certainly retouched, that I found fourth-or fifth-hand for cheap!  And the photograph is from the University of Houston archives and is a photograph of Main Street in about 1915.

So you can see lots of old cars, some dudes in super-cool hats, the Bender Hotel (which I think is a hilarious name), and there on the left, just past the first street light, the sign for Battelstein's department store.  Battelstein's is a part of Houston history, for sure, but I think it's also part of the history of my house, so I think it has a place on my wall.  Herman Fritch was probably the guy who built my house, in 1915 or so, and lived in it with his wife and son for thirty years.  He worked every day of his life, as nearly as I can reckon, and got up every day, walked four blocks to the streetcar at Heights Boulevard, and took that little train until right about here, where he went to work as a tailor at Battelstein's.  I'm not sure why I think this is such a neat picture, really, other than that nostalgia is my drug of choice.

That, and this is the same street from Google Maps today.  The Bender Hotel became the San Jacinto, then an office building, then, despite the marble and brass interior and the carved granite details, was demolished and replaced by a parking garage.  Battelstein's built a new building in 1950, but it's been abandoned about as long as I've lived here. I love Houston, and the city's drive for progress is making us the next great global city, if I do say so.  But it seems like there's as much value in remembering as there is in building new things, and maybe that's part of my job as a lover of old stuff.  So I have an old picture in my new family room, and I remember.  

Fortunately, Houston is discovering, along with the rest of the world, that progress and history aren't natural enemies.  The Carter building, next to Battelstein's, is now a schmancy new JW Marriot, retaining original features and celebrating the building's history. And in the next block is the old Gulf Building, Houston's tallest skyscraper at 37 stories until 1963, on the National Register of Historic Places AND still a functioning office building.  I'm glad other folks are loving their new/old stuff like I am.

Old-new Promises

I've promised you twice now, dear reader-friend, a grand tour of the whole house.  I'm here to tell you that I don't think I'm going to do that.  Before you get too heart-broken over my false promises, let me tell you about my new plan:  I think I'm going to do a detail of each room as it gets a little more settled.  A few things have occurred to me as I've settled in to write over the past month: 1. A grand tour of the house would be a giant (and probably boring) post.  2. There are all kinds of wee details that I'd want to know about if I were a reader of this blog that I've heretofore neglected.  And 3.  Even though the house is finished and this chapter of the story of the house is done, I'm not done telling you about it, so I need a way to stretch out the narrative a bit.  So here you go:  chapter infinity.  For those who are interested, here begins a new story of our old house:  some details about bits of the house, room by room (including "before and after," because those are the best), what I'm putting in it, and of course, more about how to protect your home from dead people.  That's clearly my thing.

No dead people today, though!

To start, a small and relatively un-intimidating space: the downstairs bathroom.

This is what it looked like before:

It was pretty nice before.  I love that big, cast-iron tub.  If you've never taken a bath in a cast-iron and porcelain tub, I highly recommend it.  The metal keeps the heat so you can keep the water really hot for a really long time.  However, I hated that baby-poo brown, but I was too lazy to paint all the beadboard because I'd have to figure out how to paint behind the tub.  Also, the water pressure was for the birds, and the floor was stick-on paper linoleum, which didn't hold up well to the two wee children I shared the bathroom with (Lots of splashing, poor aim).  Also, possums liked to hang out inside the wall behind the toilet.  I highly do not recommend sitting on a toilet in the middle of the night and hearing something large and hairy scrabble up the inside of the wall behind you.  

 We wanted to keep this bathroom, really, but just make it better.

It's so, so much better.  

Strangely though, it feels like the same place.  Both kids prefer this bathroom to their own, and I think that's partly because they're familiar with it (and partly because they take after their mom in that they get easily freaked out when alone because: dead people?  Probably).  It seems like the old bathroom finally got it together, threw out the possums, got a new paint job, and returned to its original 1920s sanitary-chic finishes.

You'll notice that it's bigger--there's a double window rather than a single, and the wall between the bath room and the guest bedroom has been bumped in about two feet to give extra room for a decent shower for our guests (you're welcome, guests!).  But it feels the same, partly, because it is the same.  Same sink, freshly re-porcelained: check.

Same bathtub, also refinished so that it's no longer painted a yuck color: also check.

I even hung stuff on the wall for you!

The beadboard wainscoting is new, but the same height and style, just finally painted a lovely, shiny white (Sherwin Williams "Snowbound").  Notice that the shelf that topped the old wainscoting is gone, since I whacked my head on it more times that I'd like to count.  Even the window and door trim is new, but substantially the same as it used to be.  The bathtub fixtures are new but are almost exactly like the old ones (just not crudded up with gunk from ancient pipes, yay! If you've never de-gunked a faucet filter, high-five!  It's not a fun job, even if you remember exactly how to put it back together the right way).  

Why do I have so many crooked pictures?

And even the door is one of our good, solid, five-panel doors from the old house.  The things that are new are so right that they fit right in with the old-new stuff.  New faucets, and new subway tile in the new shower (by the way, Andrea from 329 Design helped me pick these out, and helped me feel good about going all-in with white subway tile EVERYWHERE):

A new medicine cabinet that's so lovely and right at home because this bathroom SHOULD always have had a medicine cabinet, complete with a neat little milk-glass, beehive-shaped knob that I found in the antique hardware place:

An antique milk-glass interior knob with chrome backplate to go with the rest of the white and chrome/nickel inside the bathroom:

Some neat do-dads that look old fashioned-y even though they're shiny new (and they're useful):

And the best thing of all, white ceramic hexagonal tile on the floors.

So. Dang. Beautiful!

Just after we originally moved into the house the first time, I was poking around in the garage and found some of the renovation supplies the original owner had left for us.  Tiles for the kitchen counter, a few bricks, and some spare stick-on linoleum floor stuff, I think.  And there in that pile were chunks of white hex tile set in mortar, like someone had hammered out that old floor to put in plywood and paper.  I don't remember if I cried, but that's the feeling I had, mourning for such a pretty, durable, and easily clean-able floor that someone decided wasn't fashionable enough (though to be fair, maybe it was gross.  But I doubt it).  Not only is this absolutely the prettiest kind of floor in the world and my favorite, it feels like I've set the house right again by putting the proper floor back in the original bathroom.

I had thought I wanted to go all in on the oldness of this room, and I looked really hard at rewired period light fixtures.  They would have looked really good in here, I think, and I'm sure they PROBABLY would have been safe, but in the end I couldn't trust my house's safety to rewired stuff just because old stuff is so cool.  I just rescued it from frayed knob-and-tube (and possums), after all. 

So I got these lovely new guys and the pretty vanity light you see above as well as LED can lights in the ceiling:

Add plenty of towel bars, my stacks of fluffy towels, and it's a bathroom fit for real visitors!  I'm not actually responsible for ANY of the things that make this bathroom so nice, but I'm pleased to see it look so much like I dreamed.  It's just beyond awesome.