My wife and I bought this house in 1992. Although 101 years old, it has always been lived in by working class people and the list of owners does not include anyone famous. Probably the one claim to fame, according to our neighbour to the north when we bought the house(she had lived in her house since she was 6 months old and was at least in her 60s by this point) was a small convenience store that operated in the living room during the 1930s.
The original building was a basically a bungalow with an attic. The only access to the attic was a narrow steep staircase that you accessed from the main bathroom. I do not know if locating the entrance to the stairway in the main bathroom was an original feature or a result of a later renovation.
I would estimate (based on newspaper I found when we removed the walls) that the attic was made usable in the 1930's when 2/3 of it was insulated and walls and ceilings added. The result was about 200 square feet of additional usable space, although with the chimney coming through the middle of the floor area. The result was a room that was cold in the winter and got very hot in the summer. When we bought the house, the upstairs area had been mainly used for storage by the prior owners. Of greatest curiosity was a double bed spring that would not have gone up the stairs. The only other access was the window that effectively was three floors up and would only fit the bed spring if all glass were removed! How it got there, I will probably never know.
My wife and I totally gutted the house, moving walls where necessary, providing a proper staircase to the upstairs and basement, adding an 8 foot addition at the back, and raising the roof to triple the usable area on the second level. Although our renovations were extreme, our objective through the process was to end up with a house that gives the feel of the era in which it was built, and I think my wife achieved that, through her choice of wall paper, addition of ceiling details, the use of lead windows (we preserved the 2 pre-existing windows and have added an additional 3) and the preservation of the columns that framed the entrance to the living room (which we duplicated to frame the stair way entrance).
We hired a contractor to do all of the structural work and advise us on the finishing but my wife and I did much of the destruction and dry-walling ourselves while living in the house. I started the process with no practical skills - when we started, I was cutting dry-wall with a skill saw until a tradesman pointed out the error of my ways and told me how to do it properly. Fortunately, my wife was a trained Interior Designer and had a vision for the house, plus our contractor was (a) gem. So all I had to do was the heavy lifting while they made sure the work was correct and achieving the design vision.
The interesting side-effect of doing the destruction yourself is you get to find all of the flaws of previous renovations.
The first flaw we found was with the blown-in insulation that was the primary insulation in the house (prior to which I do not think the house had any insulation) in one of the bedrooms, we found evidence of framing for a second window. We do not know if the window was moved after the house was built or the original builder had a change of mind but there was no indication on the walls that a window had ever existed. As a result, when the insulation was blown in from the top and the bottom, there was a 4 foot by 3 foot section that received no insulation. We suspect that bedroom (we found the flaw before our first winter in the house) was always cool.
When we bought the house, there was a gas fireplace in the living room but it had not been hooked up for some time. We have since replaced it with a modern (but antique looking) fireplace but we're very glad we had not tried to use the original one when we removed the wall about it.
The 'chimney' had never been installed correctly and the pipes were not securely fastened, so that the flue gases escaped into the wall cavity. My wife found that lath, where the chimney was, crumbled like brown sugar when she removed it.
To make matters even worse, when the fireplace was installed, the person who did it simply cut off the studs at the right height, and never bothered to install a header. So three of the studs simply ended 3 feet above the floor.
We have added several architectural features that my wife and I really appreciate. When we bought the house, there was an old claw foot bath tub buried in the backyard to provide a fish pond (a.k.a. mosquito breeding farm). We resurrected it and it now is the tub in our main bathroom.
With the living and dining rooms being one large room, my wife wanted to create a sense of two rooms. So we created ceiling mouldings. Since we were not prepared to pay the cost of commercial mouldings (we weer already way over budget), we created them ourselves out of Styrofoam, with textured wall paper forming the centre. My wife regarded it as a great accomplishment when a visitor (who was a contractor) congratulated her on "preserving the original ceilings"
I could tell a lot more stories about our renovations and what we learned about the house in doing so but if you have read this far, you have done well. I will end by noting that when we bought the house, my wife's objective was to take the worst house on the street and make it the nicest. I will not insult my neighbours by claiming to have the nicest house on the street, but I will claim to have one of the nicest houses.
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The Calgary Public Library has digitized our Postcard Collection in order to provide our customers with a useful online historic resources. The Calgary Public Library makes no assertions as to ownership of any original copyrights to images digitized for our site. All images in this collection are intended for personal/research use only. Any other use, may be subject to additional restrictions including but not limited to the copyrights held by parties other than the Library. Users are responsible for determining the existence of such rights and for obtaining any permissions and/or paying any associated fees necessary for the use of the image.
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