• Rich Baumhofer & Cindy Bechtel’s Curtis Park firehouse, part II

    Yesterday, HGTV ran an episode of their reZONED program on Richard Baumhofer & Cindy Bechtel’s beautiful Curtis Park home in a remodeled and restored firehouse, which we originally wrote about this week last year. Marybeth Bizjak has more on the house in her September 2006 article in Sacramento Magazine. Later in the article, Rich notes his favorite northern California salvage yards – which happen to be mine, too – Ohmega Salvage and Urban Ore, both in Berkeley:

    Vision. Some people have it; some don’t.

    Rich Baumhofer and
    Cindy Bechtel fall squarely into the “have vision” category. When the
    couple stumbled upon a dilapidated old house in Curtis Park, they could
    see it had major potential.

    Their friends told them they were
    crazy to consider buying the structure, which had been built in 1917 as
    a fire station and later converted to a private home. But buy it they
    did, setting out to restore its “firehouse charm.”

    They
    succeeded so spectacularly that HGTV will feature their house on an
    upcoming episode of “reZONED,” a show about people who turn commercial
    spaces into one-of-a-kind homes.

    “My intention was to
    rebuild in the spirit of the original firehouse,” says Baumhofer, a
    builder and general contractor who has worked on many old houses. He
    kept the shell of the Craftsman-style building intact while gutting the
    inside to create a spacious, family-friendly home.

       

    Congratulations to both Rich and Cindy – it’s nice when the rest of the world acknowledges all your hard work. And thanks, too, for sharing your home with all of us!