Second Skin

Here is the house just before we bought it. I had plenty of time to take photos, we were in escrow for 14 months. Long story, essentially the halfway house tenants did not want to leave, and used every trick in the book to stay. In the small window, center, upper floor, (which is now our bedroom), is a cardboard cutout of Brittney Spears. You can guess at what the remaining decor was. The white siding is actually a secondary cladding surface. Hideous shingles put on in the 1940s, during the War years, as the house continued to serve as a boarding house. The shingles covered where doors were turned into windows or walls, to close off rooms. We have spent many long hours tracing those changes and putting the house back together.

As we removed the shingles (safety first, folks) we were able to uncover the details that workmen ripped off in their zeal to "modernize" the house. We find this pretty consistently, when a secondary cladding is layered on. Window frames, corbels, brackets, they all get shaved off, or in the case of vinyl the workers just go up and over it, which completely changes the dimensions. That is why a house covered in vinyl skin looks different, although you may be hard pressed to tell exactly why. Those architectural details not only define the style of the home, they provide movement, depth, and "articulation" to the facade. In short, they provide character, and when we remove them, or change them, we change the essence of what the house wants to be. In our case, we put them back.