A little more history uncovered

In doing a quick search of the internet based on names written on the back of the 1905 post card of the house at 215 North Main I found that, in 1900, Benn B. Perkins and his wife Marian B. Perkins lived here in the house and had for neighbors Frank and Jennie Fonda and just down the road William H. Ellis and his family (including his daughter, Ruth Ellis who would later own the house with her husband John Cushing in 1914.  Although there are no addresses written on the census for St. Albans in 1910 I DO know that the Fondas owned and lived in the house next door, a giant witch-hatted Victorian that is now home to 13 different apartments.  1900, so far, is the earliest known date that I have found.  Granted, the amazing ivy growth on the front porch in the 1905 photo attests to the fact that the house was here for a bit longer than that, I don't know anything about ivy growth, as far as I know that could just be 4 years worth right there.  Anyway, onward and upward!

Historical Photos Found!

Long story short, I have been able to track down the grandchildren of John and Ruth Cushing who actually have old pictures of the house AND pictures of the family in the living room!  This was the greatest birthday and Christmas gift all in one!  With a little PhotoShop editing I sent them off to a printing company and received them in time to frame them and hang them up for Thanksgiving.

Without further ado... here they are,  hoping some other photos turn up in the future!

The house at 215 North Main St. as it appeared in 1911.
This is the front of the photo

The photo was turned into a Post Card, I'm thinking that
Mrs. B.B.Perkins may have lived at 215 in at some time in the past.
The house may be older than I thought

The Cushing Family: Sarah, Whitney, Billy and Ruth

    The Cushing boys: Whitney, Billy and John    

 

The family in front of the Fireplace. This is a Bacharach photo.

John Cushing: Editor for the St Albans Messenger

The house as it appeared in the 1930s

The living room at 215 North Main.  I always wished
I had a time machine, this is the next best thing!

Visit our St. Albans Victorian House Web Page

If you really want to see the work being done to this house, check out our actual website at http://www.prydein.com/215.  I hijacked a little web space from my band, pretty sure they won't mind.  Almost 11 years worth of restoration there minus the few additions that I need to make.

Master Bedroom

Been awhile since I've been on here. I sat down to update the website today and forgot that I had started this blog as a companion to the website.  Since the last time this was updated our home has gone from a single family home with an accessory apartment to simply a single family home.  It was not the happiest of circumstances; Old Moe passed away in his bed on New Years' Eve, December 31st, 2012.  He told us many years ago that he would be going out feet first and he got his wish.

The room sat empty for a good year before we started to do any work there.  We normally try to stick to pretty original but in the case of this room we opted to add a little touch of modernity.  We decided that, due to the size of the room, we would add a soffit with can lights and a rope light around the perimeter.  This room took a great deal of construction, drywall, taping, mudding, sanding, painting and all.  Up until this point the living room had been our biggest project.  This one now is.

Here are a couple of before pics:

The rug was pretty gross, but not as gross as the old mohair carpet pad underneath.  I'm pretty sure I contracted some terminal lung thing when I pulled that out.  The room was pretty bare if you don't count the old 60's hot-glue-over-a-balloon constructed disco ball.  Shoddy white carpet, battered walls, yellowed ceiling, rusting radiators and windows that had less glazing than a Dunkin' Donuts doughnut.  The first thing to go was the carpet.




The next thing to do was to start building that soffit and running all new electrical for this room.









I elected to remove the plaster on the North wall in order to be able to run electric easily.  I agonized over this decision as I wanted to keep as many walls in their original plaster as I could.  I felt much better when I realized that the wall had actually been repaired/replastered during an earlier modification to the house and was in terrible shape.  At least that's what I tell myself at night.

In the end I was genuinely glad that I did it, otherwise I never would have found what is, so far, the coolest wall relic to date.  In the wall I found a little space above the hall closet (they share a wall) and inside was this little chamfered (ooo, my spell check doesn't like that word) wood block containing the names of John and Ruth Cushing's three children and their ages at the time; Whitney age 2, Sally age 3 and Billy age 1.

So I lined up these dates with the known birth dates of the kids. This is the earliest confirmed date I've found on the house and it dates it to around 1919.  Still a little late for a shingle style Queen Anne but I'll keep looking. I'm hoping to track down one of the Cushing children who I think still lives in the area, Sarah Cushing and see if she can tell me anything about the house.

We added a little memento of our own, a family picture/collage and a 4 pack of Heady Topper (empty!  I'm not crazy).

The space can be seen in this picture on the upper right.







In the soffit we opted to have bucket lights above the bed wired on a separate switch from those that would be located on the East and West walls.  With the rope lights being on a separate switch and the ceiling fan being on its own it was starting to look like I would need a row of switches on one wall.  Then I remembered combo switches and our problem was solved.  One normal sized double outlet box for 4 switches.




The trick was just remembering what went where and keeping track of the hot lines the whole time.



Leaving up the ceiling meant a little extra work when it came time to electrify the ceiling fan.  












The worst part of the job was the sheetrocking and basic plaster re-attachment/patching.  Everything tasted like joint compound.

I opted not to use a sheet rock lift for such thin spans of sheet rock; instead I used Bethany and the top of my head.










My FAVORITE part of this work is putting down a fresh coat of, as my daughter puts it, polathurnyane (pronounced exactly as it's spelt) on a freshly sanded floor. 

 After a balk on the originally picked paint colors, we repainted and came out with something we like, sort of a South West, terra cotta-y looking thing.  We opted to use LED lights instead of incandescent lights.

Overall we think this room came out really well.  Each project we do, the work gets better and better.  Pretty soon I'm going to want to start back at the beginning and do over all those things that I didn't quite get right the first time around.   Nah... I'll leave that to the next guy!

This Old House

Well, for all the talk about this not being a This Old House style re-model, we went and submitted our info to This Old House for their Owner Remodel contest after viewing some of the less "exciting" entries.  It was probably right after we hit submit that we began to see all of the more amazing entries into the contest.  While we now realize that we haven't a snowball's chance in hell at winning this, we're still proud of the work we've done and love living in the changes that we've made to this place.

On a side note, I spent about 7 hours a couple weeks ago pouring through the Archival section of the St. Albans Messenger looking for info on our house and the people who owned it before us.  The amount of information that I found was staggering.  I found the advertisement that listed "Lots on North Main St. with great lake views" from the turn of the century.  I found a notice for a meeting of a musical society in St. Albans to take place at our house under the hospitality of Mrs. Ruth Cushing who was an organist and pianist in town for local churches and events.  This explains the marks on the floor of the parlor, definitely the marks of a piano!

I also found classifieds dating back to the 1920s, the first for Corrine Boucher, the maid for the house who had lost her purse and ending with classifieds in the 1970s advertising "furnished rooms with carpeting and television. Single Men only".  Curious.

I'll be posting more pictures of Aria's room project to the website here in the next couple of days.

An Introduction

So I realized that I had no way, on the site, for anyone to contact me which was a bit of an oversight, especially seeing as how I created the site in case anyone had any questions or helpful hints which would make the process all the better.

We just finished Aria's bedroom (which used to be it's own efficiency apartment).  Here's a couple of before pics;

Here are a couple of the "after" pictures (yet before Aria moved all her stuff in and hid my floor ;-)

Closet made of wood paneling

First thing to go was that "perfectly good carpet"

It was sad to see the disco ball go.

Yes it's pink, but it's happier