In the Beginning....

Welcome to the virtual tour of the Ward's famed and feared Money Pit, also known as the Historic Owens House, or Ward's Folly. We bought the place in October 2004, and the plaster dust has been flying ever since. I should have begun blogging back then, but just the act of making a sandwich in the primitive kitchen was a challenge. Throw in teenagers, a career, and volunteer work in what we laughingly call spare time, and no way was I going to take time to blog. Frankly, back then, if I had to actually stop and think about what we were doing long enough to document it, I would probably have opened my wrists. But now we are in the final stretch, after many, many projects, and more money than we ever imagined spending, we are down to the sexy stuff, and it is time to invite y'all in to our world.

I'll kick off with before and after photos, to date. The house was built in 1908, by James and Sarah Owens, who raised their 2 daughters here. The home was surrounded by orchards, running from our corner at Wilhelmina and Lemon, to Harbor Blvd and North Street. During the housing boom following World War 1, the family subdivided the property, creating the Owens and Jones Tract. Shortly after that the Owens parents and one daughter passed away, and the remaining daughter had left Anaheim. The house then went to a series of owners, and like many large homes, became a boarding house during the Depression. Each bedroom became an apartment, complete with the holes in our floorboards for "hot, cold, drain". In time the home was purchased by absentee landlords, who rented it to Frank Rose, who operated it as the Colonial Fellowship Halfway House for decades. Sad that the place that survived the Long Beach Earthquake of 1933, and the Great Flood of 1938, saw its greatest destruction in the last few decades. But that is where our story begins. In the meantime, I will pull together the photos we have been shooting over time, and share the trials, tribulations, and triumphs of putting our beloved home back together again. Worth it? Yep, I would do it again in a heartbeat. Of course I would be divorced and childless, but I would still do it.