breaking news

As the friend I've been bitching to about this would say, "people are heathens."

The house next door to me continues to cause grief.  It's a large and very attractive Prairie Foursquare, and today it's been painted white and is having it's original three over one sashes and storms thrown away in favor of blank expressionless vinyl.

Yes flippers, take a historic home sandwiched between two big restored Victorians and paint it white, black and plastic.  Surely this will bring the buyers running....

heavy lifting

So, the piano ran away to join the circus...

 Here's hoping she takes pictures, or better yet, writes us a postcard inviting us to the set...

 Incidentally, the guys picking it up didn't know it was only being rented, and after the hell of loading it, took great pleasure talking about the scene where it was to be set on fire.

 Hilarious...

more of Mildred

After finding the silhouettes and initials on the wall (read more about it here), I've been intensely curious about Mildred.  Despite being the only daughter of a fairly prestigious family, we knew little about her life until after she married Robert King, who had to have been one of Pittsburgh's most eligible bachelors. As it turns out, I already had a wealth of info open in a pdf on my computer (a tab that had been open for months in fact), that I had never gotten around to going through.

There, waiting for me to find her, was Mildred A. Kelly.  As it turns out, she was quite a beauty...

Miss Mildred A. Kelly

The photo and new tidbits were found in the digitized archives of Pittsburgh's Illustrated Weekly.

Pittsburgh's Illustrated Weekly, 1911

New and exciting?  Details of motoring trips to East Coast resorts and cities via their car and chauffeur, cruises to Europe, where they were renting their summer home and details of what must have been her and Robert's stunning wedding at the Bellevue-Stratford in Philadelphia.

We spend so much time working on the house and trying to make ends meet that it's always a shock to realize that our overwhelming project was once a manse built for a life of luxury and privilege (and MAIDS!).  Even more difficult to comprehend for my 21st century mind?  After her marriage, John and Agnes moved into their new son-in-law's even larger and more beautiful mansion, two new photos of which were also lurking in the magazine...

The King Estate, Baywood on Negley

side view of Baywood in Pittsburgh

While I have no desire for a chauffeur, and had a beautiful wedding of my own, a grand tour of Europe would certainly be a welcome change.  And I don't think I'd turn down a maid either (although I'd see about trading her in for a live-in carpenter instead).

paint by the foot

These past few days have been beautiful, and it looks like we'll be getting more of the same in the upcoming week.  I've been using the time to wrap up some painting I started much earlier in the summer - the plan had been to be much further along, but sick dogs, a spike in paying work and a troublesome neighbor managed to throw a wrench in those plans.

This part of the house was in wretched condition when we bought it.  A window had been removed, and the hole filled with fiberglass insulation covered with a piece of plywood.  The rotted built-in gutter and leaking downspout were pouring directly into the hole, which made a lovely spongy home for a colony of carpenter ants.  On the interior, this space had been walled off from the rest of the bedroom to form a kitchen of sorts, with a collapsing drop ceiling and a nice 50's steel sink cabinet that had never been installed.

and yes, they removed tile to build that wall...

braving the plywood and temporary tar paper

We have no idea why this window was removed, although I did pull out pieces of broken glass from under the floorboards - our best guess is that it's one of the windows used to fill in the doorway and stained glass window in the original entry from when the house was divided and the entry moved.  We think the other window in the entry came from our office - which has a little wood replacement window.  When we restore the entry we'll move the two windows in there to these two spots - for now I'll count my blessings that I found a used replacement window with the perfect dimensions at the Habitat Restore for $15.  While I'm usually the first to expound on the evils of vinyl, there's a time and a place for everything.

When we installed the window we jerry-rigged a new sill and trim that will be replaced when we re-install the correct window.  Since the restored window will be slightly different dimensions, it didn't make much sense to spend too much time or money on it.  Same goes for the cedar shingles, we replaced what we had to when we put in the window, but the rest are at the end of their lifespan and will get dealt with later.

None of this had been painted, caulked, stained or primed though, so three years later I conned the flying monkey into helping me set up some scaffolding.  Convincing him wasn't too hard being that water was making it's way in through the un-caulked window.  Half a tube of Sika-flex bronze later, this section of the house is water tight (why can't they make a brick color though!).  Many hours of scraping, sanding and filling later and I was able to prime everything, although it wasn't until yesterday that I actually got paint up.  

the flashing had to be re-glued and clamped

primed, stained and caulked

two months for 15 feet of trim...

from the inside, just need to finish plastering

 Hopefully this slow progress isn't how the rest of the painting will go, on the other hand, I bought scaffolding casters, which may have been my best idea ever.

well, hello there...

My melancholy mood. brought on by nearing the end of scraping the wallpaper from all these old walls, was relieved by one last surprise today.

Waiting to make my acquaintance on one of the last walls I've worked on was a self-portrait of a little girl, initialed M.K.  I can only guess that this is Mildred Kelly, only child of our house's original owner, John G. Kelly, and future wife of Robert King (of the King Estate, Baywood).  She hasn't been alone on the wall all these years though, there are other profiles and initials on this section, although who they might be I don't know.

A.S.

E.S.

Cousins, workers, maids?  I have no idea.  Hopefully we'll encounter more names as our research continues.  For now I just hope we can save this section of wall before it crumbles away.
 

the drawings are on the small wall to the right of the chimney wall

I'm grateful for this discovery, in this room, as this room was home to another huge drawing on the plaster which was destroyed by our electrician before I stripped the wallpaper - the only evidence being the outer edges of sketched hills on either side of a gaping hole.  What it could have been will haunt me.  

Of course, this isn't the only art we've found in the house.  Several rooms have sported sketches of room outlines and molding profiles.  The best however, and one in a series of strange coincidences that gave rise to our house's name, is found near the floor of the guest bedroom.