677. Check Out Our Old House in California!

This is our old house in California.  We sold it when we moved across country to Crazy Town almost eight years ago. 


our house in Los Angeles

Here is some info about the house: 

• It was a Craftsman style house built in 1913.
• It was painted a weird teal green when we bought it, so we changed it to navy (click HERE for that blog post).  This navy was a Ralph Lauren color (cannot remember the name--sorry!) and it looked black on the chip.  
• We put in that new walkway, and also new grass.  
• There had been some sort of wall enclosure thing on the left side of the porch, which we removed.
• I handpainted the house number up there while standing on a very shaky ladder.  Because I am so smart like that.  (Fact:  #1 household injury cause is falling off of ladders.  Fact:  I just made that up.) 
• That little cross design you see painted on the columns was there in the bricks, but had been painted over.  We chose to highlight it.  
• I took this photo in such a way as to block the front door because it was really ugly and we never had enough money to replace it and it was a perfectly good door, just ugly, so hard to justify buying a new one.  

Here is a picture of our living room/ dining room in that house:



such a Virgo living room; by the way, had to stand on chair to take this photo 

We made a lot of changes in here:

• We stained the floors dark.  
• We painted the walls a very soft lavender with white trim.
• The biggest transformation was that we ADDED those divider cabinet/ bookcases you see.  We are pretty sure something similar was in the house originally, but when we bought it, they were not there.  We hired a carpenter to build them. 
• Next, I took a book of 1920's design pictures to a stained glass place and the lady duplicated the lovely glass design.  New, but made to look old!  That was my favorite part.  I really loved it when people would say, "Oh, the original built-in's!"  That was very gratifying.  I always felt like the house was giving me a big hug for putting those back in. 

All right, here is another favorite thing from that house.  Our blue stove in the kitchen:


pretty stove

When we sold the house, the new owners wrote that stove into the contract. 

• 1952 O'Keefe & Merritt stove
• Came with the house when we bought it
• Was white, we had it re-enameled cobalt blue at Antique Stove Heaven
• They also completely re-built it and refurbished it
• Best stove we ever owned
• We would like to get a red one for our current home at some point

Here is a pic of our back deck at that house: 

I was in a lavender phase

The nice thing about that house was that we had a lemon tree.  It produced enough lemons to probably sell at a Farmer's Market.  Mostly we made lemon bread or lemon pancakes or lemonade.

Okay, are you bored yet?  This is Tall's cute little baby room.


was this clean once, for this photo when we were selling house

 Last photo for today:


Tall, age 7 months

 Hope you liked the tour!

MOV