• more houseporn: brown shingles for sale

    The unpainted (or brown-painted) brown shingle is one of my favorite types of house. Usually taller than a one-story ground-hugging bungalow, built in either a Craftsman style or Western Stick variant (which often incorporates more rustic and cabin-like features, like rougher beam endings and less-symmetrical eaves), and are less often Craftsman-fied Queen Annes, with glossy trim and a bid of beadwork around the windows, these houses always seemed warm and friendly to me – partly because I grew up in Berkeley, CA, which is full of such homes, and partly because my father lives in a very warm & comfortable house built in this style. Some are raw wood or brown-painted wood shingle, others use wood siding or brown-painted wood siding; all share a sort of undecorated honesty of design. (There are also quite a few very modern brown shingles, built in the angular "Northern California" style that owes far more to Sea Ranch than Maybeck; these are mostly in the Eucalyptus woods of the upper Berkeley, Oakland and San Francisco Hills, and while I am sure many of them are fine homes, they’re not especially interesting to me, or – I imagine – to you.)

    Here are a number of attractive brown shingles for sale. As you can see, the style is most popular on the West Coast, specifically in the Bay Area; I doubt wood shingle would last nearly as long when exposed regularly to snow, wind and ice.

  • “cannibalizing my Craftsman bungalow” on alt.home.repair

    from the Usenet group alt.home.repair:

    I have a modest 90yr. old Craftsman bungalow that I have owned for over 15 years. I recently bit the bullet and took the time (months!) and  money (you don’t even want to know) to have the old composite shingle  siding removed to expose the original redwood clapboard. My
    painter/restorer filled every nail hole, scraped every nook and cranny,  carefully and conservatively sanded off every layer, repaired every  corner of old window frame, etc. and finally completed a new coat of  paint that does my little place justice. It is constructed of solid old  growth redwood and feels like it will go another 90 years, no worries.

    Until today. My roofers came out today. This is a company I have used before – they re-roofed my detached garage a few yers back. I don’t have any leaks, but I’m trying to be proactive and not wait for trouble, so I signed up for a new 30 year shingle. After about two hours of banging I decided to go out and have a look at progress. I was stunned to see two workers in the process of nailing up a dinky piece of pine in the place where my front fascia used to be. This was a 12
    ft. long 2×8 that completed 1/2 of my front roofline – nice and wide with an angled rafter end tail. Gasping, I asked "What have you done with my redwood "Oh, there was some dry rot on the end" Well, I had known about that – my painter had informed me and we felt that during
    the re-roof would be the time to address it, repair and repaint. The involved area was about 1-2" deep along about 6" of the rafter tail.

    For this they removed the WHOLE thing. Just ripped it off – and were nailing up a piece of typical modern day lumber – in other words, too small in two dimensions. A 2×8 doesn’t measure 2×8 these days, but my old one did. Can you imagine how inadequate that was? I felt like someone had cut off my foot – being a preservationist is not easy. They looked at me like I was cockeyed, I was trying not to shoot anyone. 🙂

    My contract specifically notes that the owner is to be informed immediately if any latent damage is discovered, requiring any wood work. What happened!?! They acted as though they were doing me a favor – "Oh, we thought you’d want to go with the lowest cost option" Ack!
    Removing an irreplaceable lengtht of redwood is an option?! Gawd, if they’d only asked me first.

    Read the full article and folks’ advice for fixing this enormous cock-up.

  • Greene & Greene properties: a map

    So, I’ve created a map – using social-mapping tool Platial – of all the existing Greene & Greene properties I’ve been able to find record of. I’ll also be adding a new layer of no-longer-standing Greene & Greene projects, but that’s a few weeks off.Take a look, and let me know if you like this style of map and if the tool is easy to use; if so, I’ll revive our Craftsman Home Registry (above) using this, so you can all add your own homes.

  • for sale: real estate update, May 2007

    A few homes that struck me as I was browsing new (to me) search engine Oodle, which lets you look at classifieds at almost every major newspaper in the US (and plenty of not-so-major papers):

  • East Bay (California) homes for sale

  • Arts & Crafts sketches and doodles

    Our friend Michael Joyce of the always-illuminating Historic Omaha website / blog is addicted to American Bungalow magazine. So much so that he takes extensive notes and doodles many things he sees & loves in that magazine. Take a look at his extensive Flickr set of these sketches, and some of my personal favorites:

  • video, video and, what’s this? more video

    Lots of folks have put great videos up in the last few weeks on Google Video / YouTube / GooTube / whatever you want to call it.

  • how to live within history – not on top of it

    This is one of the most delightful things I’ve read in a newspaper since long before the current war began, and it’s almost enough to distract me for a few minutes from Kurt Vonnegut’s death, the rising toll of wounded and killed overseas and the idiocracy we seem to have saddled ourselves with in Washington.

    For today’s Los Angeles Times, William Deverell, a history professor at USC, has written a quiet and beautifully moving paean to his home, his neighborhood and how he has learned to "live amid history:"

    Houses and neighborhoods seduce us. They always have. What
    starts with limitations — cost and location — often blossoms into
    habits of living and cherished memories. Our love affair began in
    Pasadena eight years ago.

    It was the fall of 1999. We knew we
    wanted to be close to Caltech, where I was teaching at the time, and
    near the Huntington Library, where my wife, Jenny, works. So we drew an
    imaginary rectangle on a map of Pasadena, hoping that somewhere inside
    this space we would find our perfect home and our perfect neighborhood.

    When we first saw it, the house hid behind 20 years of benign neglect.
    It was a Mission Revival with old wooden awnings sagging atop wrought
    iron braces. In the yard, worn-out grass fought a losing battle with
    brown spots and weeds. Here and there, a few succulents hung on.

    Built
    in 1923, the house was tired. The bathrooms needed work — a lot of
    work. Every window had heavy iron bars on it. An apartment attached to
    the garage was decrepit, and a freestanding building out back, with an
    incinerator plunked down in a corner, was a mess.

    The owner
    had been in the leather business in downtown Los Angeles. He had
    retired years earlier and brought his inventory home with him. Bolts of
    leather stood stacked in rooms and corners of the house: raw leather,
    finished leather and leather in some stage in-between. A couple of
    rooms were off-limits because we couldn’t open the doors; leather was
    in the way.

    Our real estate agent apologized to us on the sidewalk as we left.

    "I really like it," Jenny whispered to me.