This is My Beautiful House

I spent a crazy amount of time yesterday researching antique wallpaper while fielding emails and ignoring Valentine's Day as well as I could. The wallpaper came from inside the walls of the house I remodeled, under the lath and plaster I removed, literally pasted to the boards that the house is built from. This is the house I've been living in since about 2007 after working on it for twelve years.

It's fascinating trying to imagine the process the previous builders and decorators of my dwelling went through. It was similar (but probably not very) to mine, but there were so many variables and conditions that have changed since then, and so few clues left behind. It makes me wish I had put more evidence inside the walls myself, and also determined to write about some of it for the next owners.

That's one cool thing about working on a house, the idea that some of it will remain when I am gone. Some of it has been here awhile. This house was probably built in the early years of the twentieth century. I searched Deeds and Records way back in the beginning and the land was first recorded as the property of Samantha (Davis) Huddleston, who was Eugene and Mary Skinner's babysitter. This makes the history of Eugene seem very short and personal.

She began selling off the lots in 1906. It has been through about a dozen owners, and it took us a year to clear the title and get the land sales contract in place. We paid $23,000 for it, in 1988, and it was a dump. The yard was total blackberries, puddles, and leaking water and sewage from the inadequate plumbing. I started working on the yard even before we signed the papers, mostly because the filberts and climbing roses had overgrown the sidewalk. It was without a doubt the worst house on the block, and neighbors were very excited when we started working on it.

There are two little houses, a bit bigger now, but neither even a thousand square feet. My ex-partner Mike did most of the work on the "little house" that is my shop now, and I did almost all of the work on the bigger one where I live. I started in 1995 and am not technically finished since I still haven't managed to get the baseboards on. I've even done a few things two or three times already. Mine is a life that responds to my house.

It's a good value, worth maybe ten times what we initially paid, though of course by now I have bought it a few times over and the value is almost all equity. It still has a few problems, some created by me, some fixed, some just maintained enough to be handed over to the next owner.

I've been trying to write the book of it for most of this time also, going through my various crises of faith and trying to get an angle on it that will work and make me want to write. I enjoy the research, and this week I made a list of topics that reflect the things I like most about it, which might work to make a framework for the writing.

So the wallpaper is one. The walls themselves were made with big nine-foot-long 1x12 boards, planed but still rough, probably fir, mostly clear. One layer went vertically on the outside, and one horizontally on the inside. They are separated by a flat 2x4, but no insulation was put into the 2" space. The outside was covered with narrow clapboards, though when it was first built it could have been covered with asphalt paper or shingles. Hard to say.

The inside was covered with a thick kraft paper and some crude, straw-flecked plain paper, dark turquoise in one room, brown in the other. At the top was a printed geometric border, and my research shows it was woodblock printed, probably in the Twenties, as it is Art Deco in style. This was covered with a pale striped damask-type paper with floral borders at the top, Victorian in style but most likely newer than what was underneath, so not really Victorian. But who knows? Where did people buy wallpaper at that time? Did they order it through Quackenbush's hardware? Did a traveling salesman bring around the sample books?

I'm speculating all sorts of things about it. The front door is most likely in the same place it was, because the big porch seems to be the same age as the rest. The more ornate flower print is in the livingroom, but the prettier turquoise was in the bedroom. Maybe the original front room-parlor was in the room without the door, and the one with the door was more of a kitchen/dining room. Or maybe the person who picked out the wallpaper just put the one they liked better in the bedroom. The bedroom paper has less fading and wear, but that room is on the north side. And it has a closet, but of course that could have been added later. Was there wallpaper in the closet? I wish I could remember. I can go on and on like this.

I get an excitement when I think of the huge upgrade the owners made when they put in the lath and plaster over those two (possibly three) paper layers of decorative improvements. The plaster wasn't particularly masterful in style, but it wasn't such a lost skill in those days so the homeowners may have done it themselves. The trim boards were all put on over it, of course, and on the back of the transom boards (need more research, are they called that? Head casings?) Frank Bowers signed his name with a flourish. His signature is big and proud. I put mine under his on most of them.

Grace Bowers was the owner of the lot in 1914, and I think she was married to H.F. Bowers. This could be Frank, or maybe Frank was another of their relatives, maybe their son. Payments of amounts like $100 and $500 were made over the next ten years between the Bowers family and F.G. Vaughan, who bought 2 1/2 acres for $700 from Samantha Huddleston on my birthday in 1908 (only 42 years before I was born). The property was south of 11th St, and west of Van Buren, so it was probably my land, though the records are spotty. But it does say that Vaughan paid the city and county $100 to have 11th extended west.

Can you imagine that West 11th wasn't even paved then? My neighbor May told me that when she was little, her dad built a little tarpaper house where hers is now at the end of our street (ends at the Fairgrounds, which was given to the county by Huddleston I think, at which point it stopped being a racetrack for horses). She's 91 I think, so that would have been 1925 or 30, and she remembers being completely surrounded by a lake of rainwater in the winters...this was just a big pasture/wetlands then.

Anyway I think the Bowers family sold the place in 1924 so they may not have done the plastering. Maybe some future owners took off the trim and put it back on like I did. The windows and doors are cased with beautiful clear fir with the crown molding details that are found on Victorian-style interiors. They are often found on the outside, though. My windows were all plainly cased on the outside, but the casings were sunk flush to the siding rather than proud of it (I love these technical terms) which could mean the clapboards were put on later to cover the cheaper covering of the original house.

It's a fun tangle to unravel, and I will have to go back to Deeds and Records and do it again so I am sure I have all of the information I can gather. I hope you can still go view those. When I did it in 1995 you could still see the spidery handwriting of the clerk who recorded it all.

The single most exciting thing about taking apart and putting this house together was the board I almost missed, but found in a pile of the tongue-and-groove siding I salvaged from the walls and ceiling of the kitchen and bathroom, which was a kind of shed-like thing tacked onto the back side of the original two rooms. Spaced about a foot apart on the back of the clear fir are three names and dates: Elmer Jouvin Van Orden, Marcola Oregon, April 23, 1915; what looks like Howard Bowers, Jan 10, 1916; and Bilyeu or Bilyer Vaughan, Eugene, Ore Jan. 10, 1916.

So Mr. Van Orden from Marcola put this siding up in April 1915, and then Mr. Bowers (maybe H.F., or maybe Frank is the same person) and Mr. Vaughan put it up again in January of 1916.
My feeling is that the 1915 house was recycled into my house in part. It isn't a clapboard, so it may have always been inside, because maybe it was common practice before sheetrock to line your walls with t&g boards. The entire kitchen and bathroom ceiling and walls were lined with this wonderful material, which is now partly on the back of my house where I ran out of clapboards that matched, and partly in my bathroom as wainscoting (and that is another story.)

So I think F.G. Vaughan or his relative Bilyeu and Frank Bowers or his relative H.F. finished building my house in 1916. That would make it just coming up on it's hundredth birthday in a few years. My work at the end of the twentieth century probably bought the house another fifty years, though in this neighborhood in this century, it might go to the dump well before its useful life is over. All of the things I labored over so diligently were done for my own purposes, the kitchen the way I want it, the clawfoot put in without a shower because I am a bath person, the old foundation shored up but not replaced because I didn't decide to put on a second story as we originally thought we might. It's a perfect one-person house, though it could have two bedrooms if you weren't a person who liked to have a whole room full of Jell-O art and silk scarves waiting to be painted. People like bigger houses now, though that trend might be eroding, and once I am gone or can't keep the house, I will have no say, or even awareness possibly, of what happens to "my" property.

I still enjoy working on my houses, but major building projects are most likely not in my future, since the owner-built experience is not quite as easy as it was in 1995 when I started. At some point the little shop will need to be remodeled back into a rental house, I'm guessing. Both could be torn down for a McMansion or some ugly apartment complex. The duplex next to me could doom our whole block, as it is not being maintained and will most likely be sold and demolished. I don't know how many of my neighbors will remain in place as we age. The future is all about as many questions and speculations as the past is.

But starting with the wallpaper I am going to write the story of my life in this house. This is the next stage of my ownership. When I read back in my journals, I remember that this wasn't even the house I wanted. I wanted one a few blocks south but since $32,500 was out of our price range, we passed on that larger yard and cuter place. Maybe we made the right decision.

But I am as thoroughly amused at this stage of my occupation as I have been all along as I have just spent the larger part of two days on the old wallpaper I saved from the dumpster, and I still don't know much at all about it. Writing the book may just take as long as building the house did.

At least we have the internet. Anyone know any of those old dead guys? Floyd G. Vaughan died in 1927, and is buried in Mulkey cemetary, which I am not sure you can even get to anymore, somewhere up past 18th. I'll have to go see if I can learn anything from his gravestone. There's nothing more to take apart on this house; I've had my fingers on every inch except the inside of the bearing wall in the middle. I could still unearth something from the yard, or something more from the Historical Museum or the library. Someone planted the huge Gravenstein right behind the house, and I will study its rings if it ever falls down, which surely it will someday, because it is just a tree.

At the meeting last night someone quickly explained the concept of Thich Nat Hahn about "inter-is," (yes, more research is indicated), when they pointed to a sheet of paper and said within the paper is the tree, and the logger, and the logger's family, and what they ate for breakfast and who fed the pig that fed them, and the oak that provided the acorns eaten by the pig, and so on. We can never, and waste time trying to, separate ourselves from all that is. Inside the house, I live, and I eat the kale that grows where a Vaughan may have grazed a sheep, and the rocks I found under the house came from a river or a glacier or a truck that hauled them from a mountain, which was driven by a relative of Grace, or the wallpaper was screenprinted by an artist in England just as I now am trying to figure out a way to screenprint on Jell-O.

What a wild and fascinating existence. I wish I could be this alive every minute, because right now I feel like my life is very, very short and tiny, and at the same time touches everything. Leaving a book behind sounds like a pretty good idea if I can just narrow things down.