Back in August 2002, Bryan and I decided to go for it and purchase a "fixer-upper" - Bryan is a structural engineer with a background in architecture and I am an architect that grew up with a architect father who was always "fixing-up" old houses. What else would we do?We spent 7 months searching for "the perfect house" - historically intact, yet neglected enough so that we could actually work with it... lots of character, but not rat infested... enough ghetto so that we could get a lot of house for our dollar, yet safe enough so that we didn't need to ask Mr. T. to be our roommate... Anyway, Mr. T. would not have been necessary since we have our Charlevoix, 125 lbs. of St. Bernard whoop-ass...
We decided to focus our search in the neighborhood of North Kenwood, Chicago. A Chicago Landmark district, majority features rowhouses dating back to around 1890, a year after the area was annexed into Chicago. In March 2003, we became the owners of 4408...
Around 115 years old and a little over 2,000 sq. ft. (excluding the very unfinished and extremely nasty basement), this is home - even during all the construction (of which I will try and keep you all updated).
Technically, construction started in the fall of 2003, and has slowly been progressing, as our budget allows. I'll try and do a quick recap in my next post. However, after much planning and saving, the BIG work has commenced. Stay tuned...
2 comments:
Woa - your house is 115 yrs old? Hey is that a current picture of your street? Those cars are pretty retro, but I can see them parked on your street.
No joke, the house is THAT old.
I got that photo of 4400 S. Berkeley from the Chicago Landmarks department... although I think our neighbor still has that Buick cruiser parked out front.
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