House Tour

The house is set up in an H, with public places to the right of the front door, and two bedrooms and bathroom on the left through a privacy door and hallway. The French doors between the living room and dining room were removed when those rooms took on wallboard to cover the wall cracks from the sinking chimney in the 70s. The only evidence of the doors is the metal plate in the floor meant to catch the sliding door bolt. It looks like a smiley face.

The house is a block from the Miami-Washington D.C. train tracks used by Amtrak, the I-95 of the East Coast train world. Once I counted 23 autotrain cars while waiting at the local 8-way intersection, so the autotrain popularity is better than I thought. I hope Amtrak can stay afloat, I love the thought that I could jump on the back and ride to other places. And think of the celebrities who came through here in the 1920s and 30s! Jacksonville was a happening place back then, on the tour for most major music acts and movie stars.

Major renovations were done to the house in the 1970s, both interior and exterior, with an eye for respectfully keeping similar fixtures and features as the originals, while seemingly saying those features were incompatible with modern tastes, like the fireplace wall sconces. This is understandable, most people don't want to live in a museum; like all restorers I just wish stuff had been moved to the attic instead of being discarded. I am grateful they cared for the house, though, and didn't alter too much. I too like dishwashers, central AC and 40-60 watt bulbs, but as long as the spirit of the 1920s can be maintained, I'd like to make it so, despite my affection for modernist concrete.

There are two electric outlets per room, except for the 7 in the kitchen. There is no attic ventilation except for one gable-end's louver panel. When this 1047 sf. house was built in 1928, there were 12 doors, two phone outlets, and 2 or 3 electric circuits.

Butler's pantry/breakfast nook (no seating in the nook). The dining room is beyond. In the breakfast nook the area above the pantry and adjoining bedroom closet has been walled-off, and in the attic it is a cut-out in the attic floor.

The dip is made with plaster and lath; maybe an original alteration to the house? There doesn't seem to be a reason to have subtracted this storage space. The pantry in my last apartment, c.1914, had doors and shelving up to the ceiling. It's interesting that the pantry shelves are held up with top sections of the original baseboard molding.

In the kitchen, a popular 1940's green color is behind the top cabinets, and a peeling, paler 30s color below, where there are stripes from the shelf supports attatched to the wall. You can see by the patching ghosts that there was a chair railing around the room, the first layer of paint being olive green above the rail, and tan-gold below. The same green is the first layer on the bathroom walls (although substantially altered by light and time by the fact that it does not match the bath floor tile by any stretch). The gold is the same color as the first paint layer on all the house woodwork- and is possibly milkpaint. Also, there is an ironing board alcove with top and bottom doors; no ironing board exists but it has a shelf for the iron. An original phone outlet is directly below. The wall with the two windows above was altered sometime to be 2 1/2" fatter, maybe due to plumbing or wiring modernization.

Here is what seems to be the original kitchen layout:

The cabinets currently are really inefficient with tiny shelves and doors, especially the 4" door above. And partially rotted. We don't open those two doors under the sink.

There used to be a swinging door between the kitchen and breakfast nook. Sometime a pass-through was cut between the walls so that there would be more light in the nook, and the door was removed. Its post swivel is still in the doorframe.

One of the first kitchen floors was linoleum in a beige color with sparse blue and red thread-like streaks. Underneath it is the same wood flooring that continues throughout the house. The diagonal subfloor strips and finished floor were laid down before the interior walls were framed, so you can follow a board underneath a wall and into an adjoining room.

Volunteer kitty John Quincy Adams sitting in our excavated driveway ribbons. They need to be re-done.


Bathroom, between two bedrooms; walls and floor retiled by flipper.

The original green and white 1" checkerboard tiles are underneath old vinyl, underneath the new tile, making a 3", step-up sandwich. The floor's bottom layer of wood subfloor has halfways rotted away, especially near the tub pipes and toilet waste pipe. I'm thinking PO was allergic to plumbers. The first tub was a built-in, however, this one is new.

Based on the wall patching, it looks like there was a light on either side of the medicine cabinet, and possibly one above it. Parts of the original medicine cabinet are in the crawl space below the bathroom, in a pile of sky blue and black 50's tile fragments. It appears to have been an inset cabinet above an alcove, like this one:

This alcove shelf matches exactly our phone nook shelf. We probably had a similar sink and I don't think our walls were tiled, either.

Living room; bookcases used to have doors. The hinge ghosts show the same style as the pantry hinges. It appears the bottom shelf was filled in with drywall. Hearth tile was taken out and replaced with edgeless, cheapo field tile. I'd like to replace it with some from here. There is no chimney cap but it does have a clay liner.

The fireplace mantel is two layers of the original crown molding. It's hard to tell if this was an original detail or something done when the house's style became "modern" in the 70's, perhaps recycled from the molding which was removed from the dining and living rooms. Original-esque baseboard and crown moldings need to be reinstalled. The flipper's men did a horrible measuring job on the new baseboard and didn't even bother patching it. It was installed after we'd put a contract on the house.

The wall sconces seem to be a modern (70s), simplified version of the common 1910's-20s sconce with an arm and shade.

Back bedroom, identical measurements as front bedroom, flipped. This closet ceiling (door on the right) has been closed-in and the cedar siding has been drywalled-over. The original baseboards and crown (picture hook-supporting) molding are in here.

Back bedroom looking toward dining room door. Little Moroccan-looking phone alcove in hallway.

Lilly, intentionally planted at the front left corner of the garage opening. The one-car garage still existed in 1951, according to the Sanbourn fire maps, but is long gone. Its deep concrete-block foundation still exists, and we think it had a wooden floor.