New to the forum with an old house!

by **Hoosier Foursquare** on Mon Jan 30, 2012 12:28 pm

Hello from Southern Indiana!

My family and I purchased a 3 story over basement, American Foursquare that was built in 1901. It sits on a large city lot (originally deeded as 2 parcels) and is part of our town's "Northside Historical District".

Prior to us, the house had been in the same family for it's entire life seeing three different actual owners. The man who built the house was named Carl Furst, a German imigrant, who came to America in pursuit of the great dream. He was a master stone mason and made his way to Bedford, Indiana by way of Chicago in the late 1800's to work in the fledgling limestone business. later, he and his cousin Henry formed a limestone company along with another man and so was born Furst & Kerber Cut Stone Company.

Back to the house. It's framed entirely of what I call "full-dimensional native lumber" and is completely clad in limestone block with a very unique tooling feature on the surface called "4 Cut" which means it has 4 cuts or ridges per 1 inch of width. All of the limestone came from one of Mr. Furst's quarries and was laid by his own quarrymen. I was told that there was a mini-recession going on at the time in the area and to keep his men emplyed and paid he enlisted them to aid in the construction of his house. The house itself cost roughly $10,000 to build which was a lot of money! Mr. Furst even had an electrician come all the way from Chicago to wire the house. I can only imagine how long it took him to get there. It takes us about 4 hours without stopping at 70 mph!

When we purchased the house it had been sitting vacant for 3 years. There was a caretaker/handyman that would come over to take care of the basics such as heating and cooling, maintenance and yard care but other than that it remained unused. The PO was the grand-daughter of the original owner and had since moved to Florida. After a lot of looking, deciding and praying we closed on the house about 10 months ago and became the owners of a huge project!

After a lot of research and talking to people that knew the history of the house we embarked on what I call a resto-mod of the house. There was and is no way that we could afford to do (or want to) a FULL restoration of the house to bring it back 100% to it's original state as built in 1901. We could have dropped $500,000 and that still probably wouldn't get it done. Over the years a lot of things were changed that took it from being original which would be either to costly or impossible to bring back, like the original red asbestos tile roof'.

In the early 50's, the second family owner converted the Parlor into a bedroom which meant removing the colonnade entry from the Foyer and walling it off. I have no idea where the colonnade boxes went but the PO took the columns with her to Florida and currently uses them as plant stands and wouldn't let us have them. The Parlor originally had a 60" opening with oak, 5-panel pocket doors that opened into the Sitting Room. The doors were long gone and replaced with a single 32" hollow core luan pocket door. The Sitting Room had been converted into a full bathroom, hallway and closet to service the bedroom. The original fireplace mantel and opening had been bricked in and replaced with a vanity and the hardwood flooring removed and replaced with a 2" mortar bed and tile. The original 60" opening from the Sitting Room to the Dining Room once had pocket doors that matched the other set leading from the Parlor but they were gone as well. The only traces that remained of either set of doors was the bar on edge track that was still in the wall!

The Dining Room remained fairly original with the exception of the Crane Baseboard Radiators that had been added to most rooms in the house sometime in the early 50's. The kitchen was tiny to say the least! It had received the 50's update as well complete with white metal cabinets! The ceiling had been dropped from it's original 10' height in favor of 8'. There was a Butler's Pantry off of the Kitchen which had been converted to a Laundry Room when the PO moved it from the Basement. The largest project that was completed during the remodeling was the removal of the rear porch and the addition of a Sunroom that fit into the original footprint of the porch along with matching roof lines and partial limestone facade.

I wish I had of found this site and forum prior to starting our project. As it stands now, we are 5 days away from move-in after almost 9 months of work. We hired a GC to tackle most of the work and me doing all of the demo, clean-up and other tasks and projects that I didn't get quoted.

I'll post some more later about the specifics and fun parts of this saga!

by **PowerMuffin** on Mon Jan 30, 2012 2:31 pm

Ok, now I would like to see a close up of the outside stone and pictures of the interior. Sounds like a great house.
Diane

by **pqtex** on Mon Jan 30, 2012 3:45 pm

It's beautiful! I love it. Welcome to the forum.

by **cberhomengarden** on Mon Jan 30, 2012 4:21 pm

Welcome!
Can't wait to hear more of your story. :-)

by **Kansas. 1911.** on Mon Jan 30, 2012 8:10 pm

Welcome to another foursquare. Were you happy with your general contractor's knowledge of old houses? We had a fabulous contractor who milled all needed lumber to original sizes, and that's just the way he does business on old houses.

I can't wait to see the interior. I can't imagine what was going on for nine months.

by **CycloneOfRed** on Tue Jan 31, 2012 9:15 am

I'm with Powermuffin, I'm intrigued by this special tooling method you mentioned was used on the exterior. Pictures please!

But yes, welcome to the forum, and beautiful house (I am in LOVE with that stone wall).

by **Hoosier Foursquare** on Tue Jan 31, 2012 12:31 pm

Thanks for all of the replies!

I looked through all of my pictures and realized that I haven't taken any specifically of the stone to show the detail, I'll take some and post them.

My GC has done great job as far as work goes. They are a little over 3 months overdue which I'm not very happy about. All of that stems from letting a "new" person take over the quoting process not realizing that older homes need just a tad bit more attention than say a remodel on a circa 1990 house! They also incorrectly assumed that I would be late on the demo portion and didn't want to push. I told them from the very start that If I was going to hold up progress that they were to tell me and I would re-direct my efforts and get the job done on time. I told them that in all seriousness and made the assumption that they beleived me.....

Whoops! Turned out they figured that I was "just saying that" and would pull their guys off of the job periodically for 3-4 days at a time with no explanation other than the few jobs that could be done at my house could be accomplished in 3-4 hours and wasn't holding up the show. I finally got fed up with the whole gig and had a meeting with the owner and laid everything out for him. He admitted to me that he had wrongly judged me as being a "lip service guy" that only said that he wanted to be pushed but in reallity didn't really want to be told what to do. He also admitted to me that my work ethic and knowledge proved otherwise and that he was surprised at how much I could get done.

So, to his credit he admitted his error in judging me which I really appreciated. I thanked him and then proceeded to remind him of the 2 completion dates that had eclipsed with not so much as phone call, text or smoke signal. October 26th, December 16th.....He admitted that his project manager had grossly underestimated the scope of work and that those dates were way off. During that meeting he promised that the house would be livable by the 16th of January 2012, it wasn't and now the new and FINAL date is the 4th of February, next Saturday, to have it completely done, not just livable.

My final questions to him during our last meeting were these:

"When you asked for a draw on our construction loan, did I pay you within 1 day of the request?" The answer: "Yes"

I said "Ok, well, since I fulfilled my end of deal by paying you on time don't you think it's fair that I expect that my house is completed on time? I also asked him if it would be ok If I payed him three months down the road after completion? Before he could answer that, I did it for him. I said "No, that wouldn't fly! I would have a mechanics lien slapped on my house so fast my head would spin" "So, how is this a fair deal??"

I then asked him what he was going to do to "Make it right". He turned it around on me and asked me what I wanted. I proceeded to tell him that I wanted my house finished and for him to "make it right" for being 3 months late and putting myself and my family out. He said he'd take care of it at the end. As it stands right now we have one final draw to pay......He's told me more than once that he's never left a business transaction on a bad note, let's pray it doesn't start now!

On the birght side though, all of the work that has been done is awesome! I'm really happy with the workmanship and the level of effort that was put into helping bring this house back to something close to it's former glory. It's just the time thing that really put a bad taste in my mouth. We'll get past it though and completely forget about it when all is said and done!

Enough drama! Here are a few historical pictures of the house dating from when it was built up into the 1930's. The car in some of the pictures is the Stutz Bearcat that belonged to the original owner.

by **Hoosier Foursquare** on Tue Jan 31, 2012 12:33 pm

Some more historical pictures:

by **Hoosier Foursquare** on Tue Jan 31, 2012 12:37 pm

A few more historical pictures. The kids dressed up for Halloween are sitting inside the Parlor with their backs to the bay window. Kinda creepy looking!