The Background

This is your basic old house renovation blog.

Some time back, my partner, MK, and I were driving home from the hardware store. Instead of taking the usual arterial street past downtown, we took a side street and came across a real-estate open house for a big, ancient, poorly maintained old house that looked destined for a bad future.

We stopped.

We poked around. We came back. We came back again. We measured. We called in professionals.

We bought (after much deliberation.)

It's our big, old, baby. The old Mellicker Place.

Two and a half stories, 2100 sq. feet, of spectacular birch woodwork and floors, cool front and back stairs, 14 x 30' kitchen, butler's pantry, pocket doors, 5 bedrooms 2nd floor, 2 on the third, tall ceilings, ancient wiring, really scary plumbing, and a 1905 boiler that works pretty well. Nobody ever messed with it much, save for a hideous 1960s French-provincial bathroom remuddle and a ghastly enclosure of the 40' wide front porch, which looks like half a double-wide was smacked onto the front of the house. It's not a mansion, just a big old American Foursquare which was built over and incorporating a much more modest 1873 cottage.

It's a great place.

We had lived in a mint 1920s bungalow in a very desirable close-in neighborhood, which was quiet, low-crime, and very attractive. We just wanted a bit more space and to be a little closer to downtown. Our new house has a lot more space, is much closer to downtown, has relatively higher crime (we learned what it means to have a crack-house around the corner) and is quite convenient to a hospital and several psychologist's offices (deeper meanings?) but has its charms. The bungalow sold (to a cash buyer, no less) within three hours of being listed, for the same price that we paid for 225.

Our family, such as it is (or was) consists of two dogs, the big, sweet and mellow Tank, a German Shepherd-Great Dane mix, the lovely the deeply crazy Princess Molly, a purebred Australian Shepherd, and cats Mr. Higgins (at 18, about ready for the next world,) Edgar, a zippy 14 year old, Howard, a cute nitwit aged 7, and the late baby Maud, a stray kitten who came with the house and who died aged about 10 months. We grew to love Maud a great deal and miss her like crazy.

Such is the beginning. We bought the house in 2006, and the blog will weave in and out between Then and Now, as does most of life itself.