Our House's History

I was talking to our neighbor the other night, a fellow who is about Michael's age and has lived in Athens since college - in fact, he lived in the house next door in college, with a bunch of guys, and now lives there with his wife and small children. So far he's our best source of history about the house, aside from the house itself.

Before us, A. owned the house, and I don't think she did much in the way of home improvement. Most of the visible things that have been done have a very DIY vibe about them, and A. is not a DIY kind of woman, from having met her at the closing. She had gardeners in to keep up from front garden and mow the back, but I don't think she changed much on the interior. Since she owned the house from 1995 until last July, she must have done some painting, and I think I can safely attribute the mint green paint in the dining room, kitchen, and upstairs to her tastes. (I happen to hate the mint green paint, but that's not meant to cast aspersions on A.; different people have different tastes.)



Before - probably right before - we bought it the house had several things done to it. All the downstairs floors were refinished. They are still quite shiny and slippery in places, and would be more so if we mopped as often as Evelyn would like us to (we have a Swiffer mop. It's FUN!) There were some minor repairs - new flashing on the roof under the back dormer, which the squirrels are eating, some structural shoring-up of the back deck with metal plates, and I'm guessing the ceiling fans and light fixture in the dining room are new. There was touch-up painting in a couple of places I think, but it was not well done. The furnace, ductwork, and air conditioner are all new, so that's nice. The house needs a roof soon, though - that was almost certainly last done right before A. bought the place, and it's coming up on 15 years old.

Prior to A. the house was, according to our neighbor, owned by a landscape architect. Presumably he laid out the garden that exists now in the front, and there are hints that there were more things elsewhere in the yard that A. did not keep up - the daffoldils in the rock garden, the oak leaf hydrangea half-buried under the magnolia, the flower bed along the side of the house held up by now-rotted railroad ties. Inside, though, I think a lot of the half-assed DIY stuff can probably be laid at his door (though I have no idea how long he was a tenant). The downstairs bathroom's ugly decor probably dates from his period (late 1980s-early 1990s, I am assuming), and judging by the age of the dishwasher, he is probably responsible for the kitchen remodel involving grey linoleum countertops.



He probably converted the attic (a 35 year old woman we know who grew up in the neighborhood remembers playing in the attic as a child, when it was an attic) and built the bathroom upstairs (the polybutylene pipe has copper connectors, which seems to place it in the early 1990s) and made the choice to have a grey toilet and sink and tiling, with navy tile highlights, but a black tile floor, and apparently the walls were painted bright teal, oh dear. The trimwork upstairs has a DIY flavor - a few odd angles and pieces missing. And it's left natural wood (pine). I'm afraid I don't much like DIY guy's taste, either, though he did have some overall layout skills.



I don't know if we can blame DIY guy for the most bizarre thing about the house. I asked our neighbor about it Friday and he says his house has it too, so perhaps it's actually commonplace. Most of the downstairs rooms are sheetrocked, but the plasterboard was applied directly over the original plaster of the walls, so that the trim around the doors and windows was sort of subsumed in the walls. Our neighbor says that in some places there's just a thick new layer of plaster over the old, and in his house in one room there was a picture rail around the top of a room that is now almost subsumed in plaster, so just a little bump pokes out. In our dining room the bottom molding under the window sill was entirely swallowed, and somebody decided to just nail a board on the wall under the sill (it looks pretty crappy). And in many of our rooms not-very-well-done chair rails or picture rails were added. (These, I suspect, have the look of DIY guy about them.) I really don't like this buried trim thing, but it would obviously be a major undertaking to take off the sheet rock, take off the original plaster, and re-do walls. Not a priority right now!