HOUSE TALES

We live in it now! And sure, we had a house full of guests for Thanksgiving 2005 and no plumbing, but we adapted. And it's fixed now.

If you know the story of our house, look to the menu to find pictures and updates.

If you don't, here's the scoop: we bought a home in 2005 in historic Springfield, one mile north of the St. John's River, in downtown Jacksonville. It is an incredible location. And if you ever get the chance to hover in space in geosynchronous orbit above our house, it will look like this:

We considered doing the work ourselves-there is an integrity and purity to the idea-but imagined a world where we were always out of money and time .. so we paid to have it done.

(We also think the romance would have been gone after the 8th straight weekend of pulling down rotten wood and having bat dung fall in our hair.)

Our house.

Our home was originally built in 1905 in the Craftsman or Vernacular style--apparently, builders of the time were starting to reject the perceived excesses of the Victorian era before it--and is a straightforward design with two beautiful 240-square foot covered porches.  Three bedrooms (plus a 'sewing room'), two and a half baths.

(Ed tried to get a gun turret for the upstairs patio, but the historical district code prohibits this.)

The home was constructed and owned by Charles Nicholson exactly 101 years ago--but we know very little about him. Hopefully that will change; we'd love to find photos of him and his family to hang in the house.

1920 square feet (plus those patios!), tall ceilings, hardwood floors throughout.

The house was condemned and a vacation playhome for, err, transients, to use a kind word. (Is bums too harsh?) The resident at the time we bought it had an affinity for, of all things, squirrel tails and fine neckwear (a story better told in person).

After much trepidation and nervous impatience, this shell of a condemned house has taken on the visage of a home--our home. The first thing they did was tear down the asbestos siding, exposing surprisingly good wood underneath. With a historically-correct new metal roof, restored patio and historic-styled wooden windows, it's taken shape.

We found out the hard way that watching a home get renovated is kinda like owning a stock. You see, we would drive by the house daily--sometimes twice a day--and if we didn't see a crew working on it, we'd get jittery like a ferret let loose in a meth lab.

We learned that there are just days where the crews are waiting on materials, or were transitioning from one project to the next, or the contractor just sucks. And the house would be abandoned for a day or three. Or a week or three. So you can't obsess on it minute-by-minute. You'll drive yourself crazy.

Which we did.

But now it's done, we live in it, have a fence and a shed and a walkway and a lawn and a working fireplace and a retaining wall and all the trappings of a lovely home--it's great.

Steve

A friend, Steve, and his fiancee, Ashia, bought a home on our street as well. Granted, Springfield is a weird, schizophrenic mix of ghetto and affluence (with some homes approaching $500,000) as more and more people look to restore old homes in Springfield (which is widely considered 'the next desirable' neighborhood in Jacksonville tantamount to an Avondale or Riverside ..), but we're lucky--our block is relatively quiet and is a hub of development and activity--there are or will be approximately a dozen homes built or restored right around ours in the next year.

Steve, however, umm, ain't been bestowed with as much luck. For now, let's just say that there's a slum lord who owns a couple buildings across the street from his house that are a constant hub of, err, activity--the most innocuous of which, I believe, is playing dice. Remind us to tell you the story of their first day working in their new home ..

[STEVE & ASHIA UPDATE: they couldn't take it and bought another house in Springfield, which they now live in. They're married, and Steve is committably insanely considering taking on another renovation project and going back to do this one too. God bless him.]