Santa's first film appearance is the same year as our house, who knew?
Santa Claus and the Children (UK 1898). The Very first appearance of Santa on film.
We are building a creative, utilitarian life inside an old Victorian( built in 1898) in the historical "Ghosttown" district of Oakland, CA. This blog chronicles our experiences renovating this magnificent antique home and how we learn new ways to build, plant, create and explore our creativity. We'll share our tips and insights with you on how we rehabilitate, remake and refinish this old house so it will last another 100 years in style.
Monday, November 30, 2009
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Connecting with your inner builder
We've been in the house barely a week and already had installed new bulbs throughout the house, put in several deadbolts, installed motion sensor lights, security cameras, new blinds, pulled out the weeds in the back, yanked out the old phone lines, changed the shower head, put up drapes and finally put in the Weider workout system in the front of the house. We ordered 3 new double-paned windows and will have Jorge, our contractor, come by in a few days to repair the water damaged corner of the house and install these nice windows.
The house has been very cold because it has no insulation and all the doors and windows have gaps and seem crooked. I suppose a house that has been hanging around the Bay Area for 100 years would have experienced quite a lot of earth movement hence the crookedness of everything. I will need to go and replace all the door and window frames eventually. I started to replace some of the old light switches and found that a few do not have any boxes behind them and are essentially wires surrounded by old wood. Need to deal asap with that.
I found a couple of very nice, long shutters at Urban Ore and cut them to fit as our new french doors. They are different in that they do not contain any glass but you can move the shutters to let in light from the one room to the next. We could go with glass french doors but I learned the home insurer will ding us for them.
A fun fact about the house was to learn that Amelia Earhardt, Sergie Eisenstein, Federico Garcia Lorca were born when this house was built and the US went to war with Spain. Street cars regularly ran down the front of our house and the very first car was sold that same year.
Our contractor has all sorts of ideas to open up the house to make it seem bigger but I really want to keep the quaintness of the original even as I try to understand what that was. I only just discovered that our current entertainment room was once the original kitchen. I hope to have an accurate timeline of when things were added and I will do that by examining the wood studs to determine the changes.
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