Made out like bandits

I’ve given up expressing surprise at the intervals between blog postings. I sit each day and read all the interesting updates at www.houseblogs.net and yet I can’t seem to get motivated to update our own blog. Oh well.

The last three weeks have been pretty good, house wise. We attended a salvage sale in Santa Ana and picked up a nice buffet for $150. It fills the hole nicely where a previous owner pulled out our buffet in the dining room.



It has all the original hardware and even has a butler’s pass through where you can open the panel at the back and pass plates back and forth from the kitchen to the dining room. I can just see how PK and I will amuse ourselves with that once it gets installed. Good thing we don’t have a dumb waiter or we would have fixed it up and used it as an impromptu elevator. Anyway ……..

The same day as the salvage sale we went to a demolition/estate sale in West Covina. It was a beautiful 1911 bungalow on a huge 3 acre section that was being demolished to make way for 20 McMansions.









The house was around 2500 feet and was just gorgeous – all the original stained wood work, three sets of colonnades, a built in bookcase with glass doors, built in secretary with all the cool little pigeon holes, built in window seats, you name it – this place had it.





We decided to buy the swing door from the kitchen to the dining room as we needed one for our place.



I thought we were doing well to get out of there with so little, until PK and the Garner sisters came up with a dastardly plan. We would purchase the ENTIRE FLOOR so we could pull up the floor boards and use them at our respective restoration projects. Why, what an excellent idea! How about spending four days pulling oak floor boards out then removing nails from said oak floor boards until your hands are little claws and you can’t stand up straight?! Why, it isn’t enough that you spend two weekends on it – you should take a day off work too just to pull those little suckers up and bring them home. Bring it on!

Yes, we bought the floor. Yes, we spent four days pulling it out. Hell, we even bought all the built ins we could too. We are suckers for punishment. The whole time we were doing this I had such mixed emotions – anger that someone would want to pull this amazing house apart, frustration that we weren’t really working on our house at this time, indignation that the estate sale company only made $15K from ripping the house apart and despair that I would never have those four days of my life back again.

A lot of locals came through the house, and many expressed dismay to find it being dismantled. We were quick to explain that we were planning on using the pieces we were taking on our old house, and it would be used in a period appropriate way. Some people still looked at us like we were evil cretins for tearing it down. I thought about telling people we were from Habitat for Humanity but that would just be wrong (tempting though).

I don’t ever want to drive past that lot again. It breaks my heart to think of the house not being there any more. When we walked through it the first time I couldn’t help but think about how much cooler that house was than ours – it just had so much more character. Most of our house’s “features” were torn out as it was used as a rental – the West Covina house was intact in every way, even down to the hardware on the doors and windows. The kitchen had been renovated in the 60’s but apart from that – everything was as it was.

So we trucked the floorboards home and of course needed to find somewhere to store them. There’s no room at all in the house so we ended up renting a storage unit. Public storage have a “move in” special for $1 for the first month. Of course its $200 per month after that. All work on the house has stopped temporarily while PK builds a shed to a) put the floor boards in and b) put his tools in once the floors installed.



The shed will be in the back right corner of our lot. Its 10*12 and 8ft tall – which is as large as we can go without getting permits.



Mmmmmm. Yellow.



8ft siding on a 6ft 2” wall leaves 22” of skill saw fun on a ladder…..