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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.
- 2/2, San Francisco CA: $550K
- 2/2, Oakland CA: $699K
- 3/2.5, Oakland CA: $749K
- 4/3.5, Sausalito CA: $4M
- 2 units: 2/1 + 1.5/1, Berkeley CA: $1M
- 3/1.5, Berkeley CA: $795K
- 3/2, Berkeley CA: $860K
- 3/1, Oakland CA: $789K
- 3/3, Oakland CA: $740K
- 3/2, Oakland CA: $769K
- 3/1.75, Phoenix AZ: $775K
- 3/2 + 24 acres in Rome ME: $415K
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Small Houses and the Question of Need

Carol Lloyd has a good article at SFGate (the San Francisco Chronicle‘s site) on extremely tiny homes:
Down a rambling residential road on the outskirts of Sebastopol, the dream house sits like a testament to discriminating taste.

This dream house is the love child of artist-builder Jay Shafer,
who lovingly hand-crafted it. The stainless-steel kitchen, gleaming
next to the natural wood interior, is outfitted with customized storage
and built-ins. From his bed, Shafer can gaze into the Northern
California sky through a cathedral window. In his immaculate office
space, a laptop sits alongside rows of architectural books and
magazines — many featuring his house on the cover. And from the
old-fashioned front porch, he can look out on a breathtaking setting:
an apple orchard in full bloom.
But in an era when bigger is taken as a synonym for better,
calling Shafer’s home a dream house might strike some as an oxymoron.
Why? The entire house, including sleeping loft, measures only 96 square
feet — smaller than many people’s bathrooms. But Jay Shafer’s dream
isn’t of a lifestyle writ large but of one carefully created and then
writ tiny.
Read the whole thing.
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“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.
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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.
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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):
- just under a million dollars gets you 2,300 (very pretty) square feet in Pasadena CA;
- about the same amount brings a 4,200 square foot maple, cherry, oak, pecan, stone, brick & stucco bungalow on 100 acres in Royal AR;
- …and a bit under $200,000 gets you a beautiful wood-shingle bungalow in Coos Bay OR;
- a big, beautiful bungalow with two rental units in Long Beach CA for $939,000;
- modest 1922 bungalow for $340k in St. Petersburg FL;
- an equally pretty two-story bungalow for only $76,000 in Fort Wayne IN;
- another one of those just-short-of-hideous faux-Bungalow McMansions; this one is $1.7 million in Chevy Chase MD;
- nicely-restored bungalow for $718,000 in "mid Los Angeles" CA;
- updated & restored bungalow with nice landscaping for $549,000 in Portland OR;
- modest stucco Spanish Revival bungalow in Tucson AZ for $275,000; and a
- very representative stucco Craftsman bungalow in Oakland CA for $539,000.
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houseblog updates
A few new houseblogs with interesting and / or useful content:
- Breathing Treatment: notes on landscaping, electrical updates, water-permeable paving and more
- 201 Oregano: the construction of the Grant family home
- 1921 Highland Park Craftsman Bungalow: a collection of home-improvement projects
- Life in the Prairie Box: paint stripping, wood refinishing, paint and other labors
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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.
- Vintage Cottagesby Molly Hyde English
- Dream Porches and Sunrooms by Michael Snow
- The Green Self-Build Book by Jon Broome
- Arts & Crafts Furniture by the editors of Wood Magazine
- Cabinetmaking: Design & Construction by William P. Spence
- The Homeowner’s Guide to Managing a Renovation by Susan Solakian
- The Reclaimers: A Complete Guide to Salvage by Sally Bevan
- Charles Rennie Mackintosh: The Complete Furniture, Furniture Drawings & Interior Designs by Roger Billcliffe
- Japanese Homes and Their Surroundings by Edward S. Morse
- California Mediterranean by Melba Levick
- Rustic Fireplaces by Ralph Kylloe
- Wooden Houses by Judith Miller
- The New Bungalow Kitchen by Peter Labau
- Wood: Contemporary Houses in Wood by Joaquim Ballarin
- Creating a New Old House by Russell Versaci
- Craftsman & Other Timeless Dream Homes by Designs Direct Publishing
- California Romantica by D. J. Waldie and Diane Keaton
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East Bay (California) homes for sale
- 3BR/1BA Temescal-area Victorian / Craftsman highwater, $725,000: 671 61st St., Oakland CA
- attractive Mission Revival bungalow in Alameda’s historic East End, $661,000: 1127 Broadway, Alameda CA
- pretty Edwardian cottage in North Berkeley’s "gourmet ghetto," $725,000: 1834 Cedar, Berkeley CA
- a big brown shingle in Rockridge, $749,000: 5935 Keith Ave., Oakland CA
- very representative bungalow (i.e., tiny but well-made), bright & sunny (with pretty built-ins), $419,000: 993 Arlington Ave., Oakland CA (on the Emeryville border)
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3 easy-to-install green insulation options

GreenHomeGuide, one of the best general information sites for folks trying to maintain, restore or remodel their home in an environmentally conscious way, has a great article on three safe and renewable insulation products.
If you’ve ever struggled with huge, unwieldy bats of fiberglass
insulation or forced your way through a crawlspace, wrestling with a
hose and trying to blow fluffy white fibers into every corner — all the
while wondering what those toxic chemicals and shards of fiberglass are
doing to your body — you’ll be relieved to know that there are green
alternatives.
Here are three of our favorites for do-it-yourselfers.
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Urban Archaeology: architectural salvage in New York City

Urban Archaeology, with showrooms in Manhattan, Bridgehampton, Boston and Chicago, has been in the business of saving urban architectural treasures since they opened their Manhattan store in 1978.
In addition to a large stock of salvaged materials, they have also developed their own line of lighting, bath accessories, washstands and medicine cabinets based on popular historic designs.
As far as salvage goes, though, this is no scrapyard, but rather the highest end of the collectible architectural antique sellers.
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