You Know You’ve Been Restoring Too Long When…

You know when you’ve been restoring your house too long when you open up a wall thinking that you’ve found new treasure, only to discover that it is something you put in the walls yourself for future generations to find.

That is exactly what happened to me. I’m always slipping little things in to the walls. Receipts and invoices are good. I won’t put a receipt for a tube of caulk from Ace Hardware in a wall, but maybe a receipt for some millwork I had made or some antique light fixture I scored. Old porn is also good.



You can see that one, lone green board next to the door in the picture above. There was a light switch installed there at some point, but I moved it to the other side of the room so it would be next to the door to the side yard. This was done about 4 years ago when I did a whole-house re-wire. At the time, I put a copy of an 1898 advertisement for Thomas Petch’s electric light shop that was located on F Street here in Eureka. I must have been doing a lot of research at time. Anyway, as you can imagine, I had long since forgotten that I put it in there.

Well, this week I wanted to replace that board so I could get rid of the hole cut for the light switch. This is 1X6, double-bead, tongue & groove beadboard. I got out the sawsall and cut down the middle of the board and then removed the too halves. You can imagine how excited I was when I pulled out the first half and saw a piece of paper behind the board.

Quickly and gingerly I removed the other half of the board so I could extract my newly found treasure. Oh, what could it be! Maybe it was a turn-of-the-century, tear stained letter filled with all of the juicy details of Mr. & Mrs. Petch’s divorce. Maybe it was an envelope filled with money that Mrs. Petch was trying to hide from her husband. Even though this is the butler’s pantry, this was were Mrs. Petch lived after the divorce when she opened up the house to boarders.

It could have been just about anything, but all it was was a Xeroxed copy of an ad I made and shoved in the wall 4 years ago. It was not only disappointing that it wasn’t something old and really neat, but the realization that I’m to the point finding the things that I put in the walls was a bit much at the time. I stopped working, poured myself a glass of wine, and collapsed on the couch thinking to myself, “Holy crap! I’ve been doing this a long time”.


PS: I shoved the ad back in the wall before I put the new board on. If I ever find it again, I'm walking away from the house and never looking back.

A Builder's Name

Its funny how things come together sometimes. It is rare, I think, that you stumble on to a treasure trove of information about the history of your house, or the first owners. More often than not it is a long process that takes years, with little tidbits sometimes revealing themselves when you least expect it. Just recently another piece of the puzzle came together.

The local paper has a monthly insert called Restore & Preserver. It is about local architecture, and several years ago they did a write-up on my house. The most recent issue had an article on the other Petch House in town. While I was researching my house I found that the Petch family first lived at 1025 J Street.



I had an opportunity to speak with the current owner once. He is a very nice man, and he is doing a very nice restoration of the house, but knew nothing of the Petch family's time in the house. Not too surprising really. No matter, it is still fun to talk about old houses and local architecture. There are other houses in town, that while they have no connection to the Petch family, they do have connection to The Petch House, in architectual terms anyway.



The house above on Hillsdale has an almost identical window to The Petch House. It is a fairly unique design, so it has always seemed that there must be some connection to my house, but I could never prove it. It could be the same architect or the same builder. If nothing else, surely the window came out of the same mill.



This other house above, which is considered the sister house to the Hillsdale house, also has the same front window. This house was a full two stories at one time, but caught fire and was rebuilt as a story and a half. I’ve been told that at one time it was identical to the Hillsdale house.

The Green Book, a local inventory of historical structures in town, credits these two homes as being built by a man named Mowry. My house, even though it has the same front window, has no builder or architect credited to it in The Green Book. In fact, the book goes as far as to say that my front window is a later addition. Gasp! The Nerve!

I’m not exactly sure where this idea came from that my window is a later addition. Obviously it is a mistake. The only thing that can possibly explain this mistake is that my house was covered in asbestos siding at the time The Green Book was compiled back in the 1970s. Regardless, this obvious mistake in the book has become a bit of a running joke among my friends here in town.

So anyway, back to Restore & Preserve. I was excited to see the other Petch House on J street getting a write-up in the paper. It is a very nice little Eastlake cottage, and it too was once covered with asbestos siding. The current owner – it was his dad who covered the house in asbestos back in the 40s – has been doing a faithful restoration of the exterior for about 20 years. The house looks great.

The article went on to talk about Mr. Eugene Mowery, builder and architect of the J street house. It said that in 1884 he and a partner owned a mill at the corner of 3rd & B streets that turned out lots of gingerbread, fancy doors, and sash. It also said that he was a builder and architect and built several prominent structures in town. Not only did he build the house on J street, the Hillsdale house, and the 2nd street house, but he also built and lived in the house at 135 J St, right next door to the first Petch House at 1025 J St. In fact, he built his house first and then built the house next door as a rental. And guess who he rented it too? That’s right, the young and growing Petch Faimily!

So in the late 1880s we have The Petch Family living at 1025 J street. Right next door is his neighbor, landlord, close personal friend, and prominnet local builder and architect, Mr. Mowery. In 1895, 2 years after the Mr. Mowery builds the Hillsdale house, The Petch House gets built on M street with a nearly identical window.

Well, a blind man could connect the dots at this point. Not only did Mr. Mowery build The Petch house, but all of the millwork most certianly came out of Mr. Mowery’s mill at the corner of 3rd & B streets.

It is just one more tiny piece of the puzzle, but I find it all very fascinating.

So, This Is Very Cool

I got an email this week from Marilyn over at The Hauser House. In her own words, she is a genealogist and history buff and when she gets bored she grabs a family and starts researching, and boy does she ever. She found the bit of information I had on my site that I had done for the Petch Family and just ran with it.

My brother is an avid genealogist as well and so I have some familiarity with what goes in to this. I can see how it can be a bit of an obsession. For me it was like that with stripping wallpaper. In the first year I was in The Petch House I stripped a lot of wallpaper. I just couldn’t stop. I would be innocently passing by a room and catch a little dog-eared piece of wallpaper out of the corner of my eye. I just had to tug at it. The next thing you know, four hours have passed and I can no longer see the floor because of all the wallpaper I had pulled off. I get the feeling searching a family history is similar.

Anyway, Marilyn sent me a GEDCOM file. In the genealogy world a GEDCOM file is sort of the industry standard for file formats for storing family history information. It is sort of like the PDF format in that it has become universal in the field, but it is not a static format like PDF. More than one program can open, read, and modify GEDCOM files.

As I said, my brother is a genealogist and he’s also a computer programmer. He wrote a program called UncleGED (clever, don’t you think) that takes the information in a GEDCOM file and spits it all out into a collection of linked web pages. So I used UncleGED to take all of the Petch family history that Marilyn dug up - and it’s a lot, and it’s very, very impressive - and I ported it all to web pages and posted on-line.

I’ve been so busy I haven’t really had the time to go through it all but the Petch family is big and far flung. I can’t thank Marilyn enough for the work she did. It’s just really amazing. If you want to take a look at it, click on the link below.

The Petch Family