My "Deed" for the Day

William K. Fentress and Louise Gale Fentress in front of their house (our house)

In the photo above, Mr. and Mrs. Fentress (the original owners of our new/old house) are standing in front of the far left corner of our house. So, the house that you are seeing behind them is the next door neighbor's house. I am guessing this photo was taken in the 1950s.

 

If we could just pan right we would be able to tell if there was a column in the middle, back then. We don't have one. We have a brick pier in the middle but no column on top. I have no idea if the house ever had one?

 

House with the cream colored vinyl siding removed. And, see? No middle column!

 

I have spent some time in the Circuit Court House in Norfolk where the deeds, wills, marriage licenses, and other such documents are kept. My original goal was to see if I could find out anything about our house ... that didn't happen. 

 

 

Here is what I did discover:

 

• The lot that our house sits on was part of a development by the Westover Company. The lot is in block 21 and is all of lot 3 and 3/5 of lot 4. An original lot was 30 feet wide so by adding part of lot 4 the Fentress' gained another 10 feet of width.  This made it wide enough to build a house and add a driveway.

• Mrs. Fentress was the owner of the lot and she paid $2000. (Our lot assessed for almost 100 times that last year!)

• Eight families have lived here, in our house, since 1922

• The Fentress' purchased the lot in 1919 and apparently they had the house built and then moved in, in 1922.

• The family that lived here the longest was the first, the Fentress' - for 43 years!

• The average years that a family has lived here is 13 1/2.

• The median number of years that families lived here is 5 years.

• We are the 4th owners in the last 11 years.

Can you tell I'm married to a mathematician?

Guess what? In next week's blog posts there will be pictures of the completed bathroom tile!! AND, there will be pictures of the James Hardie siding going up!! Yee Haw!

 



What Should Our 1922 Foursquare Look Like?

I drove up to our new/old house recently, and this is what I saw. The house had brown shingles - the original brown shingles. Is this what our house looked like 91 years ago? I tried to imagine it? Well, I think this is as close as we're going to get to seeing the original house but, alas, it only lasted a day or two.

Back when I posted about the siding being removed and about all the layers of construction, I mentioned that our contractor had informed us that we would not be able to restore or paint the original cedar shingle siding.  I had really hoped to paint the old shingles, I knew I did not want a dark brown house.

HGTV Dream Home exterior-NuCedar Shingles

So square one. Then I thought I would like to simulate the original shingles with a vinyl or pvc shingle product. We went down that road and the product that I really, really liked was pvc shingle by NuCedar Mills. It is gorgeous and it looks like the real thing. Unfortunately, it was prohibitively expensive.

House under construction at East Beach sided with Hardie Plank.

 

Contractor Chris recommended using a James Hardie Siding aka Hardie Plank. He said that wood siding would have been an authentic material in 1922 and Hardie Plank looks like wood but is even better than wood. Best of all, the price was in the ball park! Hardie Plank is made primarily of cement. It is great in all kinds of bad weather and it won't burn. It is what they are using to build the new houses at the East Beach neighborhood in Norfolk. Sounds good!

That decision was made and then came the question of color.  Hardie comes in about 20 colors or primed and ready to paint. The pre-painted version won't need to be painted for about 20 years. Painted it is! How did we decide on the color? I eliminated beige, white and cream right away. Our last two houses were beige - don't want the same thing. So, pretty much, our choices boiled down to green, yellow, blue or gray.

Red brick and cream stucco house right next door

So I surveyed the street.  There is a pretty green house diagonally across the intersection from us. There are a couple versions of cream and white nearby, another green and a few red brick.  Also a pretty gray diagonally behind us and a yellow house directly behind us. Blue it is!

James Hardie siding in Boothbay Blue

James Hardie only makes siding in one blue shade and it is barely blue.  Though it looks blue in photos, it is really more gray than blue called, Boothbay Blue. We hear new siding will begin to be applied to our house THIS WEEK!

Stay with me ...