Demolition

     A reflection on this process is that someone with a borderline obsessive-compulsive personality disorder should avoid the endless detail and fuss of Victorian architecture. Not actually a style of architecture, but a period of time that, for the first time in human history, common people had access to beautiful things.  Because of the creative genius of millers and metal-smiths, industrialists and investors, small factories popped up all over the US, producing turned spindlework with water powered lathes and impossibly complicated fretwork by the boxcar load ready for painting in any of a thousand manufactured colors. The beautiful, shiny tidbits that make up a Victorian parlor:  six types of wallpaper, floor, inlay, hearth, mantle, base shoe, baseboard, wainscoting, char rail, picture rail, crown molding, ceiling medallion, ceiling frieze, an electrified gas-light fixture, pocket doors, curtains and rods, ties...  Somewhere between enthusiasm and dysfunction lies 352 Lesley Avenue.
    
     My first project was flooring.  In a prior home, an arts and crafts bungalow, my wife and I rented a drum sander and finished the floors in a couple of days.  When the moldy and stained carpet was removed from our new house, it didn’t seem fitting that the floors should be done with a machine, as in 1896, when the house was built, the method of finishing wood would have been more primitive.  Over the next couple of weeks, I proceeded to sand the second-story floors by hand.  Now finished, they have retained the imperfect by shiny glory that the original Victorian homeowner would have appreciated.  Halfway through this project, my shoulders were swollen and stiff, my back and knees were agonizing reminders of the work.  Prescription anti-inflammatory medicine to control the damage I was doing to my body helped,  but the work was taking a physical toll;  I was just as committed to the process as when I started and wouldn’t have done it in any other way.

     While this project was going on, I tackled the ceiling in the Library, a 16X16 room in the center of the house, on the first floor.  After installing crown molding, I proceeded to large project of painting a frieze on the ceiling, adding wainscoting, chair rail, crown molding, yada, yada, yada.  Over the next eight weeks, I came home from work, grabbed my artist’s paint brushes and ladder, plaster and trowel, and got to work, sometimes painting, plastering or cutting wood until two or three in the morning.  There were normally three to four major projects going on at any given time.

 The good news is that after two years of this, we are roughly 3% done with the house!

The newest project is the exterior.  When we bought the house, it was covered in aluminum.  I'm sure there was a salesman in Irvington in the early 70's that made a mint convincing people that this is what houses are going to look like in the future.  What this salesman forgot to tell everyone was...

1.  The Victorian guy that designed your house knew what he was doing.  

The eves, roof brackets, yankee gutters, window trim, corbels, drip rails and window crowns that were all hacked off with a hatchet when they installed the siding, served a purpose.  They were beautiful, yes, but they kept water out, while allowing the occasional moisture to evaporate.  The only thing that aluminum or vinyl siding does better than keeping water out, is keeping it in.  If you have a historic home with siding on it, you have rotted wood under it.  Did you wonder how mice were getting in, or how we are always seeing gnats in the house?

And 2.  Aluminum and vinyl siding looks bad.   

The irony in the removal of my siding was that the wood underneath was painted EXACTLY the same color red as the aluminum the prior owners later chose.  You can see that with chippy, rotten wood, the cedar plank siding shows more shadow and depth that the almost 2 dimensional aluminum. 

 So here we are in demolition.  Construction starts next week.  We have chosen WC Zeller as the contractor--they did the beautiful arts and crafts house on Hawthorne.  

I will always love this house, but I have misgivings that it could ever look as beautiful as I'm sure it did in 1896, when a carpenter and his wife named William and Phoebe Mann finished the construction and moved the family from a farm somewhere near Plainfield, Indiana.