The latest addition to our family...

...is this 130-year-old armoire! What did you think I was going to say? :)

At the urgent request of my mom to "buy it and if you don't want it, ship it to me!", we decided to venture out in a rainstorm to check it out, even though usually Craigslist postings end up falling short. We may have lucked out on this one though because it's the perfect addition to our house. Old houses need old furniture, right? And since we don't have the huge walk-in closets that all those bubble-fueling new construction houses of 2007 have, we are happy to have the supplemental storage space. It did require renting a moving van and sweet-talking our neighbors and one of Craig's friends, but we managed to get the thing inside, un-damaged. It came from a military family that took it with them around the country, including to Hawaii, so it's well traveled.

Now, it just needs some lights on top of it to shine down, old-school style, so we can see the contents. I actually found some really reasonably priced ones at Ikea (!) but they aren't available online (what year is this???). I guess they will have to wait till our next trip to Chicago.

Abstract of Title...

Turns out the previous owners of our house had a copy of the Abstract of Title, which is a brief history of the titles for a piece of land. The Abstract of Title lists all of the legal actions that have been performed or used in conjunction with a piece of property. This is used to determine whether or not there is any kind of claim against a property (thank you Investopedia for that explanation).

So we now have the Abstract of Title to Lot #36 in Hills and Dales in West Lafayette, which dates back to the 1820s. There's a red arrow in the picture showing Lot #36. Apparently the first owners of the lot, John E. Kieffer and his wife Ora, bought #35 and #36 in 1939. They sold it to Ora R. Clarkson (husband) and his wife, Bertha, in 1948 (who knew Ora was such a popular unisex name back then?). Then they sold only Lot #36 (ours) to George V. Mueller and his wife, Vera, and the story goes that they actually built the house, in 1940 (although that doesn't fit in the timeline of ownership). Then in 1958, Charles M. Kirpatrick and his wife, Gail, bought the house and stayed till 1982, when Larry E. and Mary K. Crotser bought it (and wrote their names in the back patio concrete). In 1995, Gail G. Biberstine bought the house and owned it until we bought it in 2012.

Dr. Mueller was a Purdue professor, Ms. Biberstine worked in the Mechanical Engineering department/school there, and I would venture a guess that at least a few of the other families that lived here were associated with the University too, since it's right on the other side of Northwestern Ave. 

Shockingly, the Abstract mentions that at no time shall this property be lived in or owned by black people (yikes!). Good to know times have changed, at least in that sense. The neighborhood is quite diverse and we like it that way!

To all the previous owners: Thanks for taking care of the house all those years. We're so excited to live here and make it our own (and completely gut the kitchen :-) ).

Passion for saving lives and...furniture!

I used to think no one could be as passionate about a job/career as an individual in the medical field. Having worked in the medical device space for nearly six (!) years, and for two companies that create life-saving products, I've been impressed so many times by the dedication, passion, and intelligence of the individuals I've been fortunate enough to call my colleagues. Some decisions really do come down to life or death, so to carry that burden, these people have to really care about what they do.

However, one Sunday morning, I discovered (with the help of Charles Osgood) a company based in North Carolina led by two individuals who bring the passion of the medical field (and many other fields to be fair) to the world of FURNITURE! Mitchell Gold and Bob Williams, founders of the company that shares their names, were being interviewed on CBS Sunday Morning, and I fell in love with their story, their mission, their furniture, and of course, their dog, Lulu. They make all their furniture in North Carolina, emphasize comfort, style, and quality in their products, treat family pets like true members of the family, and believe in treating their employees like the company's most valuable asset (through services like an education-based daycare, a subsidized cafe with healthy food options, and computer labs for employees to use during breaks). I want to work for them!

Naturally, when it came to investing in some furniture for our house, I knew exactly what I wanted! We had to run an "errand" to Chicago to visit one of their stores, and we had to shop during the semi-annual clearance sale, but we ended up with the Reese sofa and chair (same ones Bob has in his living room, I might add), and we didn't pay any sales tax since there are no stores in Indiana (woohoo!).

If you're interested in their products, the company, or want to learn more about their decorating philosophy, I recommend both their books: The Comfortable Home and Let's Get Comfortable. The store gave us a copy of LGC and I found TCH on Amazon (I actually bought a used version that was signed by Mitchell!) for ~$15.

Surprise on our front door!

In addition to the UPS packages containing a new lamp, fabric for throw pillows, Honeybells (thanks, Margie, they are yummy!) and a tube of L'Occitane exfoliator (we don't have that store here...), we found something else on our front porch! It was a note from a hopeful, future Hills and Dales resident asking us if we plan to list our home any time soon! Um, no, but thank you for the interest! Here's the note:

Best of luck to the Janes family. There two houses down the street with For Sale signs in their yards, although they've been listed for a week so it's likely there's already an offer on each one...

My Office

One of the first projects we took on was getting my office ready. Since I didn't change jobs but relocated, I needed a home office that could serve as my primary work space during the week. One of the upstairs bedrooms was the perfect space for an office (the other will be a guest bedroom), so we set to painting it right away. 

The room has seven-foot ceilings (can I say hobbit house?!?) and a doghouse dormer, allowing for slightly more floor (and head) space, given the low ceilings that slope down with the roof line to ~five feet above the floor. With the lines in the room, crown molding would have been challenging to install and might have looked weird, so we opted for a chair rail instead. This allowed us to add another color to the walls and dress up the space a little bit. Here's how it looked before:

And here's a few pictures of how it turned out. On the ceiling and upper walls, we used Behr's Table Linen and below the chair rail, we used Castle Path. Table Linen actually has a slight pink tint to it, which I wanted. When else will I get to paint my top-floor corner office pink??? Also, we painted over the brown doors. Granted they were wood, but not a pretty grain or stain and all the original wood trim had already been painted so they didn't match anything. Now they're clean and white, and I love them.

Installing the chair rail definitely took patience. We measured the walls, painted all the trim, cut them with a hand saw and miter box, and then glued and nailed them to the walls. Given the age of the house and the resultant sloping floors and slanted walls on the second floor, caulk was an absolute necessity to make the molding look snug against the wall.

Hills and Dales

Our new (to us) house is in an old neighborhood near Purdue called Hills and Dales (H&Ds). It's one of the few areas of W. Lafayette, besides along the river, that has any semblance of hills, given there's lots of cornfields-turned-subdivisions that sprawl in virtually all directions around us.

Many of the houses here were built in the 1930s and '40s and have preserved their original character and details. The architecture is a mixture of English Tudor, Colonial, and Cape Cod. I took Ellie for a quick walk today and snapped these photos of a few houses near us. The neighborhood was a big draw for me, since I like a little variety in a neighborhood. Ellie sneaked into one of the shots. Can you see her in the snow? :) I included the picture of our house again, for the full effect.

Also, many of the houses around us have plaques from the Wabash Valley Trust for Historic Preservation. We're planning on applying for a plaque for our house too!

For a little more info. about the neighborhood, there's a video online you can watch here. The second house profiled in the video across the street from ours (and top right in the collage).

12/21/12

While everyone around us anxiously awaited the end of the world on December 21, 2012, we were too distracted to see if it was real because on 12/21/12 we arrived at our first home on Bexley Road in West Lafayette, IN, after a snow-filled drive from Boston.

To lure me away from a coast, Craig struck a deal with me that our relocation to the Midwest for his work would include purchasing our first home. We closed nearly two months ahead of our move date on a 72-year-old, all brick Cape (quite uncommon here), just a few hundred feet from the Purdue University football stadium. It's no surprise that we'd be drawn to an older home (as opposed to a new construction) that looks like it belongs in Plymouth, given we'd spent the last year and a half (give or take a little time since he moved before I did) in Boston in what felt like an 18-month immersion program for learning all about New England architecture, early American history, antiques, sailing, the Kennedys, lobster, and summers on the Cape. 

Despite its solid foundation, newer roof, and sturdy storm windows, given the age of the home and my closet/not-so-closet desire to be an interior designer, we knew coming in that this house would be a project. Read on to hear more about our adventure in "breaking" and re-building Bexley!