Our Home Renovation

Yesterday I posted a quick history, but thankfully Art, who I bought the house from, provided a much better history of the house with more details. Rather than just change the previous post, I decided to give it a new post and just add a note to the previous one.

The Sheridan House was built in the early 1920s. A few years after being built, the original owners sold it to the Buist family from whom I bought it this year. Charles and Helen Buist (immigrants from Scotland) moved-in in 1925, along with their children: Charles, Jr. (14), Helen (18) and Mona (11). In the mid-1930’s Charles, Jr. (in his early 20’s) undertook a renovation of the house, which changed a bedroom to the kitchen, and vis-versa, (the old kitchen had a hand-pump for water). An inside bathroom was installed (the original house had an outhouse in the back). The livingroom was expanded and a fireplace was built.

Charles Sr. passed away in 1952, and Mrs. Helen Buist passed away in 1975, at age 92. Their son Charles Jr. took care of the house for the next 30 years. The lawn was kept mowed and overall the property was maintained so as to not be an eyesore. In September 2004, Charles Jr. allowed his son Art to take the living room and dining room furniture, so Art could furnish a newly purchased vintage rowhouse in Baltimore. Charles Jr. passed away peacefully at his son’s house in Baltimore, in March 2005, age 94, surrounded by the furniture that had been at the house on Sheridan for so many years. Art Buist then set about closing-out not only the house on Sheridan, but also his own boyhood home which his father had built and lived in, in another part of Rockford.

Today when we cleaned out the fireplace, at first it appeared that the logs were some sort of electric comtraption, as a cord was coming out of them. After investigating further, we discovered that there was a bare bulb hidden under a bowl (or maybe old light fixture globe), wrapped in red cellophane and covered with logs. Unfortunately the cord was too deteriorated to plug in and see how well the electric fire worked.

Update: This “quick history” is missing a lot of details. A more complete version can be found here.

You may have read how a little trailer led to our buying the Sheridan House. I haven’t, however, posted yet about the interesting history of the Sheridan House. As a bonus, I’ve got a few newly-acquired photos of the interior from days gone by. This short history isn’t meant to be exact or exhaustive, but more just to share the interesting story of the house.

The Sheridan House was built in the early 1920s. A few years after being built, the original owners sold it to the Buist family who I bought it from this year. (Don’t worry, the interesting part is still coming - that wasn’t it…) Mr. Buist passed away sometime prior to 1975 when his wife died. Their son, Charles, took care of the house for the next 30 years. The lawn was kept mowed and overall the property was maintained so as to not be an eyesore. Nobody has lived in the house since 1975. In 2005, Charles passed away and his son is the one from whom I bought the house this year.

So, we’re the third owners of the house and I have to say that it has been a very satisfying challenge to try and fix up the Sheridan House while still maintaining the character and respecting the sentiment and emotion that it represents for the descendants/family of Mr. and Mrs. Buist.

Here are a few photos of the interior of the Sheridan House as it appeared from 1975 until 2007. Click to see them larger.

As promised, here are some photos from the flooding this week. My brother (who is a photographer) took these photos. Thankfully, even though more rain was forecast for the past two days, very little ended up coming down. The ground is still so saturated that even the quarter-inch we got last night put a lot of water on the roads.

(Click the photos to see larger versions)

The other day when I posted about the mysteries of the Sheridan House, I forgot about the weirdest one…

When we started tearing out the wall around the tub, there was something furry poking out. A friend that was helping me reached into the hole in the wall and jumped back quickly. He thought it was something dead. Turns out that they insulated the pipes with fur! It’s really weird because out of all the pipes in the house, the only ones that were insulated at all were the pipes going from the tub faucet up to the shower head. There were lots of long, sewn together strips of some kind of soft brown fur wrapped around the pipes. I don’t know that much about old plumbing practices, but I’ve never heard of such a thing.

I could understand a little more if it were, say, a farmhouse built in the 1800s and they used the resources that were available to them at the time. This bathroom, though, was added around 1936 (they had an outhouse previously) and it’s in a little cottage in the middle of town. Strange indeed. Another mystery that is yet unsolved.

The Sheridan House undoubtedly has quite a bit of mystery surrounding it. Nobody has lived in the house since 1975. The next door neighbors have lived in their house for 12 years and all that time nobody was ever in the house. We’ve definitely heard some interesting stories and rumors, some of which have proven to be true.

One of the things that I love about buying an old house is trying to figure things out about the house. Especially when it comes to renovations, you uncover weird things that take some work to figure out and sometimes you never do figure them out. Here’s a few of those kind of mysteries that we’ve encountered.

The sewer. (I posted about this on the houseblogs.net discussion forum a while back.) Shortly after we bought the house, I was calling the various utilities getting the name/billing info updated. When I called the sewer company, the woman told me that they had no record of the house ever being connected to the sewer! She even went back in the historical records and saw when the neighbors were connected in the 50s, but nothing for this place. Eventually we were able to confirm that the house was connected to the sewer, thankfully, but there is still the mystery of how it got connected. Our best guess is that when the city was putting the sewer in, the owner just connected it up himself.

The archway.

The house was originally built as a little 750 sq. ft. rectangle in the early 1920s. Between the 20s and mid-30s, two separate additions were added at two separate times (this we figured out from some clues in the framing in the attic and basement). Both were 7×13. Originally the back addition was a porch. It makes sense, as the old kitchen would have opened onto the back porch. Then, however, at some point, the kitchen was moved to the other back corner of the house and the porch was enclosed and turned into a room (7×13) and they had an archway between the former kitchen and this room. Then, the corners of the arch were cut out and a regular door was installed making that 7×13 room a bedroom, as well as turning the old kitchen into a bedroom. Follow that? Somehow, all that happened prior to 1936 from what we understand. A lot of changes in that short span of time. We still have no idea what the two rooms would have been with an archway between them.

The doorbell. This one still remains unsolved too. There is a doorbell button outside the front door. But there it doesn’t do anything and there is no sign inside of there ever being a doorbell. The paint on the walls is from the 1930s, so it’s pretty easy to see where things have been on the walls and there’s definitely no sign of a doorbell. The wire must go up into the attic (which I haven’t explored much lately), as it doesn’t go into the basement. None of the relatives remember there ever being a working doorbell.

(Note: in case anyone is following along with the 30-in-30, I posted this last night but somehow set the status to private, so it didn’t show up until today when I figured that out. So, today will end up looking like a double-post day, but this entry really was written on Saturday, I promise!)

Alternate title: The most expensive 4′x8′ trailer we’ll ever buy…

We’ve been looking for a small trailer for a while and were finally resigned to having to buy a new one. Then, on January 21, I found a 4×8 trailer listed on Craigslist for $80. I quickly emailed about it and then offered to buy it. Fast forward to February 28, the day I actually went to pick up the trailer (the owner lived out of town and that was when it worked out to get it).

Everything that could go wrong, did. First, I didn’t have the right size ball on my hitch, so we bought just a replacement ball thinking we could use a crescent wrench to take the other one off (ha!). We returned that one and finally got the right size. Then after waiting 20 minutes at the DMV (the last day of the month) they didn’t take debit or credit cards, so I went across the street to Walgreens to get cash out. Except that my debit card wasn’t being read by the machine. So we went to the nearest bank and got the cash, went back to the DMV and got the plates. Went back to finally hook up the trailer only to find out that the electrical wires on the trailer, as well as the chains aren’t long enough. AH! 45 minutes later, we returned and got everything in order and all was well.

During those 3.5 hours and 100 miles of driving, the guy I was buying the trailer from had been with me. We talked the whole time and got to know a bit about each other. I mentioned that we love fixing up houses and he mentioned that he had two houses that he was going to be selling at some point in the future - his dad’s and his grandmother’s. As we parted ways, I mentioned that when the time came to sell either house, to let me know as we might be interested.

Two days later he called and said that he was ready to sell his grandmother’s house and wondered if I would be interested in taking a look at it in two weeks when he returned to town. Two weeks later, we drove by and knew right away that we wanted the house. Then the next day as he gave us a tour of the house, he and I agreed on a price and decided to close on the house two weeks after that.

That’s how we came to acquire the Sheridan House, or, how one little 4×8 trailer is resulting in our spending tens of thousands of dollars.