This old house

“A jack of all trades and a master of none, huh Jon?”

I knew it was a dig but, he was so good-natured and generally helpful, I took it well and smiled.

“You’ll get there.”

I did, eventually. And I repainted them, cleaned up the glass, shined the hardware and put them back where they belonged. I never did get to the other built-in book cases, but it’s on my list.

When we moved in our house, it was a mere babe at 90 years old. Now that’s it more than 100 years old, there is very little of this house I haven’t worked on or thought about working on, or even just looked at for a while wondering what to do.

What I have learned is that it has what is called “good bones.” It’s a very basic house, with a very basic layout and there isn’t much to it. But the wood is good, the light is good, the pipes are now good and we’ve done what we could to make it as nice as possible.

As with many cheap houses that have been used as rentals, it’s been modified. Not too much, but enough. Yet, the value of this house to me is its age and utility. Restoring it as much as possible to its original state improves it.

Rather than just replacing an overhead light that was originally hard-wired to the now long-gone knob-and-tube electrical system, I have spent far too long Frankenstein fixing it because it came with the house and is beautiful. When I say far too long I mean more than a weekend, when replacing it would have taken no more than an hour. It also didn’t help that I didn’t really know what I was doing. I kept the pushbutton light switches in case we could ever find a way to get back to that. And since some of our doorknobs were replaced over the years, I have spent hours going through bins at Urban Ore looking for some that match the originals. We have come very close in some instances, but it’s always a work in progress.

Our neighbors have similar homes and I’ve gotten clues from those what the original conditions were to see what we can do and there is evidence throughout about paint colors, tile, wallpaper, original flooring, etc. We have done what we can to match what we envision the original condition could have been. I know, for instance, that the original house color was white with green trim, but no one else wanted to go with that; however, my grandparents’ farm house had the same color scheme. Instead, we went neutral gray, or as the paint color said, “San Francisco fog,” with white trim. Close enough.

Our bathroom tile is now tiny white hexagons with black ones to reveal a larger flower shape, and there is a reason why people don’t have those tiny tiles any more. They’re a pain.

Our floors are now back to the original hardwood and we were able to find the moulding from Pedersen Arnold to replace the section once cut out for an old achy wall heater.

Our house isn’t fancy enough to be historic. It doesn’t really even have a style. It’s not craftsman, and it’s not farm house. It’s just a small house built in 1919 originally as a vacation home for people from the city. I also recognize that small houses like ours are endangered because there is too much of a push for higher densities. But I’d like it to be saved. It can easily last another 100 years.

While I don’t have that many years in me, I do have a few more to fully bring it back to its original condition. It’s our home. And sometimes the learning is in the doing, being is becoming and original is much better than new.

Jon Mays is the editor in chief of the Daily Journal. He can be reached at jon@smdailyjournal.com. Follow Jon on Twitter @jonmays.