The Queen of Vintage Sews

The first thing we did to the exterior was to paint that front door “Chinese Red”. I just could not take the vast expanse of white. When the sun hit it just right, it was eye-killing.

Peep that crazy sidewalk that had been covered in asphalt by the city to “repair” holes. Seriously people? Yeah, that would be an ongoing issue which would eventually be resolved in 2004 after numerous letters and phone calls. Apparently since it had been “recently repaired” it wasn’t a high priority.

This could be anywhere from June 2002 to June 2004. The car is a 2002 PT cruiser that was purchased in April of 2002 and since my oldest was born in June, I know I wouldn’t have had a car seat in the car before then. I know it’s before June 2004 because that tree in the foreground was ripped out and dropped across the street by Hurricane Charley in late August 2004 and the sidewalk was installed that summer before hurricane season.

For reference, I’m standing in the street at our far property line facing diagonally across both our parcels. I had to threaten the city with a lawsuit over the sidewalk, actually. As I think about it, this picture could be from winter 2003 because I recall my last communication to the city was to tell them that if I, a pregnant woman, or my aging grandmother fell and any of us were injured on that sidewalk, the city would be sued for damages. The sidewalk was installed pretty quickly after that.

A lot has changed in our fair city since those days. The “good ol’ boy” network has largely been replaced with more forward thinking folks who are commited to making our little town a world class destination while still retaining the “bedroom commuinity” and vintage feel.

…before we really started working on it…

From here we can see from what used to be the front window into what the previous owners had made into a “tv room”. Originally it was a covered porch. NGL, I’m super grateful they did this reno for us. Even if they did use wood panelling. The grey “wall” to the left is a book case and that area would eventually have a wall put up by my dad and uncle to close in the “office” and create a “foyer”. Sadly, I didn’t think to even take befores of the whole house. I did take afters of (almost) every room once we had it ready to move in.

Here we see the awesome dining room where the wallpaper literally fell of the walls. I wasn’t mad about it because it was a 1960s shimmery wallpaper that had seen better days. It also wasn’t well installed because it fell off in sheets if you looked at it wrong.

Not pictured is the kitchen, middle door is the closet (for linens maybe?) that functions as my baking/cake deco supply storage. The doorway you can see goes into the hallway. This room stayed empty until after our first Christmas because we literally had NO dining room furniture and couldn’t afford it because we’d just bought a house and had to do a LOT of work to make it livable before we moved in. We closed in April, moved in May 1st and had to be finished by the end of the month because we could NOT afford to pay rent, a mortgage payment, and for what needed to be done.

What you don’t see that needed to be done was refinishing all the hardwood floors. I was SO grateful for the hallway door here because we could do the bedroom floors, go down the hall to the living room and work our way to the kitchen, go out the back door and stay out for 8 hours, come back and start all over again. We have to redo these floors (and actually finish the hallway floor) as a top priority. They are well-worn at this point and there’s no amount of chemical cleaner that will fix them.

Stay tuned for a walk-through of the OG renovation/decoration…

While I LOVE this little house and the fact it’s paid for, it felt like it was getting time to expand just a little. With 2 adults working from home full time due to (waves at the world) and the oldest kid in college full time, followed in the fall by the middle kid… Well… The youngest is 14 and growing like crazy, so we are all feeling a little cramped with everything going on.

I have a sewing studio crammed into an 8×9 space. Oldest is a budding cosplayer who wants to take commissions and has no place to work. Middle is an aspiring costume designer who also has no room to work. Youngest is a violinist with no place to practice (that doesn’t drive the rest of us bonkers).

We’ve maximized the space we do have and have run out of room. The decision was made to utilize our vacant lot and just build a second house and let the college kids live in the OG house. Sounds great on the surface but the OG house needs a LOT of work inside. Which, incidentally will probably be headed by Middle Kid as she has serious PLANS for what the house will look like. She’s an old soul who appreciates vintage style & architecture and won’t run amok with knocking down walls and putting straw on the walls (if you know, you know).

HOWEVER! We can’t live in the house while it’s being renovated so we have to build first and then renovate. Have you ever tried refinishing hardwood floors in a house full of furniture? Yeah. I’m so not going there. We also had serious requirements for any house that we build:

It has to fit into the aesthetics of the neighborhood. That is, it has to look like it’s been here since our house was built or thereabouts. I’m not slapping a MCM thing next to my bungalow. As much as I dearly love MCM and will be incorporating it in the new build interior, it’s a hard no for the exterior.

It has to have a manageable amount of space inside. I’m not Suzy Homemaker because #VintageStyleNotVintageValue. I’m able to manage dishes, changing the sheets and stuff but as I get nearer to 50 and my health issues act up, the less able I am to do physical labor. And that’s not even touching my ADHD. You know that dog from Up? It me. So it can’t be a HUGE house. Has to be under 2,000 square feet.

It has to be at least 3 bedrooms and 2 baths. We only have one right now and while it has been doable for the last 20 years, there are 5 of us plus a cat that use that room. I WANT TO PEE IN PEACE. I want my OWN bathroom.

The kitchen has to be at the back of the house and be enclosed. I detest “open plan” houses with kitchens that are open to the entire house. There’s a reason old homes have kitchens closed off from the main area. It’s because people used to cook at home. And we do.

Finally, the laundry room needs to be indoors. Our current laundry space is on an enclosed back porch and in 20 years we’ve been through numerous washers and dryers because being exposed to the elements is rough on them. I want fancy ones but until they can live inside the house, that won’t be happening. That and the fact that the cat constantly tries to escape out the back whenever we have the door open to do laundry… Yeah…

On a lark, I decided to search for this unicorn of a home on some house plans sites. Imagine my shock when I found exactly the house we were looking for that ticked every single box (and then some!). Behold! There is literally one thing I would change about this house plan. I’d close off the bar in the dining room and put a door into the kitchen. And that? That is an EASY fix. I’d change it to a pocket door style so as not to interrupt the lines of the room. It is almost identical in layout to our existing home, too!

Each bedroom is super spacious for “modern” times. Most smaller homes give you barely 10×10 for secondary bedrooms but the smallest bedroom is 11’4″x10’2″.

The two full bathrooms are generously sized and the only change I’d make in the master is to separate the toilet from the bath/shower area and to make the bath/shower area more like a Japanese bathroom. We fell in love with Japanese bathrooms (and toilets!) last year and this floor plan will definitely accommodate this.

The living room will get built-ins on either side of the fireplace to house our growing collection of Gundam models, crowns, and souvenirs from our world travels. But where would we work? My studio is a converted front porch and that just can’t continue.

This is where the NHOTB truly delivers. The main floor is 1451sf, but there’s a “bonus room” upstairs that is a spacious1152sf, making this house 2600+sf. I did say I didn’t want a 2000+sf house but the way this house is designed, it doesn’t feel huge.

#WatchThisSpace for more developments! And I think I’m going to bounce back and forth between the OG House and the NHOTB. Compare/contrast as it were. Which is hilarious to me because maybe I’m not caffeinated enough, but if I had a nickel for every time I had to “compare/contrast” a topic…

I have pictures from when the house was purchased, but this was in the days before digital cameras and phones that connected to the internet, so here we are. I had to search around until I found a cache of actual developed film pictures!

So much has changed since this picture was taken! It’s hard to believe the house looked like this… Since this picture was taken, that car is no longer with us, the door was replaced, the awning and door were painted, a new roof was put on, the shutters inside the front window were removed, the sidewalk was replaced (a story in and of itself!) and a fence was installed along the full 120 feet of frontage and then we accidentally backed into the gates and broke them. OUCH!

I’m not sure how I’m going to organize the blog. I’m not sure whether I’m going to go chronologically or room by room or do a parallel of old house vs new house. We’ve done a LOT to this house over 20 years. Most of it was done with our own hands. Including scraping orange and brown ASTROTURF off the hardwood floors in the room that would eventually be the master bedroom after three kids.

Until next time…

Hey there! I’m Giovannina, The Queen of Vintage! I live in an almost 100 year old house in a neighborhood that was orange groves in 1910 and platted out as a community by 1920.

I’ve lived here for 20 years so far. Coming in at a spacious 1425 square feet, this 1920s Craftsman bungalow has seen some renovations over the near century and has served our family of 5 plus cat well. We had plans to renovate it and have our older two offspring live here during their college years rather than pay for dorms at college while we build a similar home on our second lot, buuuuuuuttttt…. Well, plans can and do change. In any case, enjoy the process of the house becoming what it’s meant to be!

The plan was to build a similar era-style home on what is currently our side yard, move in there, and THEN finally renovate our original home.

Here’s a (really old) panoramic photo of our entire property for reference: