• for sale: real estate, West Coast edition (again)

    Dug these up from classified sections, Craigslist(s), flyers, redfin & other sites over the weekend. Lots and lots of beautiful old houses all over the western US:

  • saving historic Seattle bungalow a “no-brainer”

    reader Keith Harrison forwards this article about a fellow preserving some of his own neighborhood’s character by saving an historic 1917 Craftsman home that was slated for demolition. Nicole Tsong has the full story at the Seattle Times; here’s a short excerpt:

    Frank-Michael Rebhan was not looking for a new house when he walked his dog past 6317 Phinney Ave. N. in late January.

    He already owned a small house a few blocks away. But this
    sandy-gray beauty was a 1917 Craftsman-style home with leaded
    stained-glass windows, dark wood built-ins and box-beam ceilings. And a
    notice said it was slated for demolition.

    Rebhan had an outlandish idea: What if he saved the home by moving it to his own lot?

    Rebhan hadn’t even been inside yet, but the 37-year-old quickly did some intense calculations. He added up costs for moving the house, demolition of his own home, excavation and the other issues involved in moving a house.

    He figured out how much it would add to his current mortgage and realized: "It’s a no-brainer."

  • Craigslist finds, May 2007: West Coast Edition

    Plenty of nice stuff out there if you know where to look. Included for your edification, several bits & pieces of Arts & Crafts furniture, architectural salvage and other related items that I’ve found using the terrific Craigslist search engine Crazedlist.

    • refinished Limbert dresser with original copper hardware, $1000 (San Francisco CA)
    • document or sample cabinet, $340 (Santa Cruz CA)
    • Gustav Stickley ladderback chair, $475 (Santa Cruz CA)
    • L & JG Stickley "postal desk" and rocker, $500 ea (Glendora CA)
    • set of 4 early Mission Revival / Craftsman side chairs and 1 armchair, $350 (Ventura CA)
    • Stickley #729 writing desk, $5900 (Montecito CA)
    • round pedestal dining table, $600 (Sherman Oaks CA)
    • set of four c1925 Stickley side chairs, $3600 (Las Vegas NV)
    • set of two contemporary Stickley spindle-back armchairs, $1300 (Del Mar CA)
    • contemporary glass-top Stickley coffee table, $250 (San Diego CA)
    • L & JG Stickley armless rocker, $500 (Portland OR)
    • another Stickley armless rocker, this one with new-ish leather seat, $250 (Portland OR)
    • Stickley Bros. rocker, needs minor repair, $225 (Tacoma WA)
    • drop-leaf Mission desk, $275 (Alameda CA)

  • Ted Wells’ Living Simple: a new book

    My single favorite writer on architectural and design issues is Ted Wells. Unlike here, where I’m constantly filling in the space between interesting issues with notes of very minor importance, Ted’s  puts articles up on Living Simple only when he has something to say. He’s a really good writer and teacher (and designer, of course; that is his primary profession), and in my few conversations with him I’ve learned a lot about architecture and our responsibility to art.

    Living Simple’s motto is "Do your work. Be honest. Keep your word. Help when you can. Be fair." Even when Ted is critical – as he sometimes is, especially of communities (and homeowners) who are unable or unwilling to maintain architectural and aesthetic responsibility or historic character through either a lack of education or simple greed, or historic homeowners who are dishonest or inattentive stewards of their homes – he is always fair, and takes his responsibilities seriously. He even writes on his personal website that his "most important job is helping guide the stewardship of notable historic architecture, art, built and natural landscapes, and thought and culture."

    Ted has a new book coming out next year with Gibbs-Smith, one of the world’s best publishers of books on American architecture and design. Ted and John Ellis are currently finishing up work on the book, which is about the mid-century modernist architect Harwell Hamilton Harris. Twenty-two of Harris’ homes will be profiled in the book, which will be published next year.

  • 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):

  • new books, April 2007

    A number of books which look like they’d be very interesting to Craftsman (and other old-home) aficionados have been released recently. I’ll try to get my hands on copies of some of these for full reviews. If you are a publisher and would like to have your book reviewed here, drop me a line.