This episode is the first in a new series called Renovation Story. My guest for this renovation story is Kim Tierney, owner and caretaker of Bloomfield Farm, a beautiful stone house in Virginia built in the 1700s. I have been following her account on TikTok and am grateful that she took the time to record her story of acquiring the house, her approach to preservation, the history of the house and her challenges.
KM: Well, thank you. First of all, I really appreciate you coming on. All I know about you really is that you have this beautiful house in Virginia and that you lived in Texas and somehow you bought this place and are fixing it up. And I think you’re living there now. That’s about what I know. How did you come to buy a house in Virginia when you lived 20 hours away?
KT: Well, I’m originally from Virginia. I grew up in Arlington, Virginia, which is about an hour from here. I’d never been to this part of Virginia before, but in high school I had a best guy friend who ended up buying a place very close to here, and he had it for numerous years. I brought my daughter back to go to camp in Virginia and one year I stopped by his farm and I was like, oh my God, I love this place. We had always talked when we were younger that when we were old, we would buy adjoining farms and grow old together, it’s just one of those pacts. And he happened to see this place come up for auction. It was quite expensive and way too rich for my blood. He told me about it and I was like, oh gosh, I can’t afford that but I do want a place so keep your eyes and ears to the ground. And I’d kind of told everybody, I want to move back to Virginia. I’d grown up on a farm in Fredericksburg, Virginia, and I’d always sworn I’d buy that place, but then the national park service got ahold of it and it’s now a stop for the civil war. So they tore down all the buildings and the land was where Stonewall Jackson’s hand was shot and he got gangrene. So 10,000 men died on our land.
KM: Did you know that growing up?
KT: No, I knew it was haunted. There was no question about that. I just love the place. I mean, it was where I had all my freedom as a kid and I’d jump on my pony and ride for hours, back in the days where people didn’t mind if you cross their land. So it was a beautiful, beautiful childhood for me, and all I wanted was that again. But life has its way of making you work hard and try to make a living. I had to put that on a hiatus for many, many years. So I was looking all over, I was looking at Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, really anywhere with some serious character back on the East coast, cause I just miss four seasons and I miss the life here. Texas is wonderful for economy and friends. Great people. So I just wanted to move back to the east coast and put my feelers down, and John found this house that was going for auction and it was with 108 acres and had been in the same family for over a hundred years and before that since it’s built. So it only had two owners prior to us. He saw that it was coming up for auction, and I said, I can’t afford that, John. I think the beginning bid was like 550,000 or something like that. And he said, well I’m going to go anyway, I’m going to go to the auction. I said, okay, you go to that auction. So when he did, at the end of the auction, it was down to a woman from Washington DC, who was on her phone with her purse and apparently doing her bids, you know, talking bidding. And then it was a cattle farmer, who’s pretty big around here and he needed more land, and the cattle farmer won. And John walked up to him, my friend walked up to him at the end of the auction and said, hey, what are you going to do with that house? And he said, I don’t know what I’m going to do with that house. You know, he did not buy this for the house at all. He wanted it for the land and where the house sits is kind of swampy. There was a beautiful Creek that went through here, but over the years, I think with all the building, now that Creek is just kind of spread out and becomes marshland around the lower end of the house. So John said, well, I have a friend who would probably want to buy this house, would you sell it? He said sure, I’d sell it. So he, with his land, he also got four dwelling rights so he could parcel off this house. He didn’t really want to sell a lot of land, but making a long story short we got it for the price that I could afford and we got six acres with it and it took about six months to subdivide off. And now he’s my neighbor and he doesn’t have a house there, he just wanted the land. So that’s how we got the farm. Or what I call a farm.
KM: Well I like that, because that means that you don’t have to give up, even if on the face of it something seems like it can’t happen, there’s often a way it can happen. Like your dream can come true somehow, just don’t give up when you see it was 550,000 starting bid, for example.
KT: Yeah. No, no, never give up. You just never know what’s going to happen. I think that if you’re looking for a property, as you probably already know, just let as many people know as you can. Everybody you know, I’m looking, I’m looking, I want to have a place there.
KM: How long has this been going on and when did you buy it? From following your Tik Tok it looks like you’ve been going back and forth to Texas and Virginia for a few years.
KT: We got it under contract February of 2018, so November of 2017 was the first time I ever walked through the house. And it was right before the auction and I just fell in love. I mean, we pulled up and I fell in love and the floors were all collapsed and there was definite sign of many, many animals had died in here over the years. It actually looked like it had been abandoned forever, but it hadn’t, come to find out. So I just said, yes, I want it. And I talked to the agent that the guy who won the auction brought in. And so we decided on a price, which was pretty inexpensive, cause they thought around here that he was just going to tear the house down. They were worried that it was just going to be here on a Saturday, gone on a Sunday, or just let it continue to rot, which he probably would have because he just really had no interest in the house at all. So we went under contract finally in February, and then I think we closed May of 2018.
KM: Okay. Are you done right now, or are you pretty done?
KT: We don’t have a kitchen yet. So the house was built in stages. The main part of the house was built around 1770, and then sometime around the 1800s, the section I’m sitting in right now, this section was put in and it’s a dining room with a bedroom above. And then around 1890 judging by all the nails and all the Victorian ware in there, the kitchen and a servant’s quarters was put above. So there’s a little staircase that goes from the kitchen upstairs. One of those little twisty, narrow staircases that goes up in that part of the house is literally falling off the house. And in fact, when we got back from being gone a month over Christmas, we found evidence of lots of critters have moved back into the house.
KM: Oh no. So there’s actually room enough for animals to get in, it’s falling off that much?
KT: Well, we thought we secured it, but animals are crafty.
KM: They are crafty. They can get in really, really small holes too. It’s creepy, actually.
KT: It’s incredible. I mean, I’m sure that these animals weren’t that small judging by what they left behind. We knew it was going to happen. I wished it didn’t happen, but it did. And they didn’t destroy anything, they more destroyed trying to get back out than anything in the house, they couldn’t get into anything, which is good. That section of the house, we’re trying to save it. So the guy that’s here today is here to help us fix the foundation of that part. And my husband and I are DIYers, this is like our second or third property that we’ve done and we enlisted people as we go, but I work as the general contractor and coordinate everything because I redid my first house at 23 in New York, so it’s just what I love. It’s like I pick up stray animals and stray houses.
KM: Well, that’s the way I feel about houses too, I feel like this house needs me to help it. So I feel like I’m helping the house and kind of, yes, like helping a stray animal, I feel the same way. If I had been walking through a house with a floor that’s falling through, or the porch is falling off, I think this is the house for me, I need to take on this house. I don’t know. It must be just an affliction some people have.
KT: An affliction, I want us to think that it’s a gift.
KM: It is a gift, yes. I didn’t mean to put it in a negative light.
KT: No, no, no, I don’t mean it like that. I didn’t think it was negative, I just know that it becomes the affliction because you end up with this monstrosity that you have to redo and now you’ve committed.
KM: You had already done a couple of these renovations, right? So, you know what you were getting into.
KT: On a small scale and more things from the 1940s up, you know? So nothing like this, this was fascinating. I didn’t even know how to eat this elephant. Believe it or not, we’re an hour from DC, but getting contractors- my contractor who’s here helping me right now is from Maryland. He drives an hour to get here. And so trying to find good craftsmen that are available here, it’s almost impossible. I mean, you have to wait five, six months and then they kind of dole out their time to you as they go. And not to get all juju and weirdy, but I think this house picks who works on her. We had many contractors parade through here and I would get this pain in my stomach and just know that they weren’t the right ones. And maybe a little off topic, a lot of them didn’t want to work with a woman.
KM: That’s been on my mind a lot recently. Always, actually. I mean, I get the same thing. I feel like that first walkthrough with a contractor, that’s when you’re dating really, and they should put their best foot forward at that point. And if they’re not, it’s not going to get better and they’re not going to come around somehow. They’re going to be probably more of what they already are.
KT: Yeah, you and I could probably be coaches for those guys because I want to tell them when they leave, you need to know your audience, don’t blow it on the interview. Don’t try to be all puffery and act like you know, because somebody that lives in a house that’s 250 years old- and we would stay here amongst the vermin and the filth. We fixed one room really quickly, that’s where we lived and we would come back and forth. I have a flexible lifestyle cause I’m a realtor. So I was able to on my down months come here and work, not months but weeks. But contractors would come in and… oh yeah, you need insulation in these walls. You gotta tear out all this plaster and start over again. Or you need to build false walls on top of the plaster walls and, I don’t even know how to say this for a podcast. But I was thinking like over my dead body are you tearing out anything original in this house. And that’s when I quickly learned we were doing a restoration, we weren’t doing a renovation. And I didn’t quite know the difference then, but then the more I realized, people would go, well, we need to pull these boards up here, they’re all burnt. And I’m like, no, don’t touch those boards! Those are tongue in groove and those were done 250 years ago. Don’t touch them, they’re beautiful. I never found my contractor, so I just decided that the guy that was going to oversee it all, you know, it was a lot of them. My husband lets me drive the boat on this because it is my passion project, and they would talk to him and not me. “You need to talk to Kim, she just asked you that question three times. Address her” and they still address him.
KM: That’s it, they’re out.
KT: Yeah. And I tried, you know, I realized that it was kind of the way of the world here, in this neck of the woods, so I was trying to be a little bit more open, but then once I finally realized that this wasn’t a gift from God or whatever, cause so many people approached us after we got it. How’d you get it, how’d you get it, how’d you get it? We wanted that house. We wanted this. And I realized, I always felt so humbled by that. Like, Oh my God, how did I get it? How was I so lucky? Should I not have it? Those people have had millions of dollars to put into this house and we certainly don’t have that. And I started feeling guilty, but then once I realized I’d put in two years of sweat equity here already, I just took full ownership. And it was like off with your head. Contractors come in and I’m like, no, we don’t need to talk anymore. And my husband, “she’s going after them. Kim’s got bulldog on” and just be like, no, we don’t need to talk anymore. You’re not talking my language, but thank you for coming.
KM: Yeah. I think that’s important. I’ve only ever been a woman, so I don’t know if it would be different if I were a man. But I feel like there are some things like we’re less confident, or we don’t want to have the confidence or seem like we’re bulldog or whatever. And so we’re kind of conditioned to act a certain way, but I feel like after you get to be a certain age, I just don’t care anymore. And I’m just willing to say this isn’t going to work out, but thanks for coming.
KT: Yeah. And it’s being able to own that. Because you know, I get questioned a lot. Are you sure you want to do that? A lot of it is just an artistic vision rather than a literal- like who do you know has redone a 1700s house? Not a lot of people do this. So when you live in an area, maybe Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, it’s different, but in Virginia, I mean, we’re probably one of the oldest houses around. I know we are the oldest house in Clark County, if not the second oldest. So you don’t have a lot of people that have gone before you, yet they act like it. Oh, I’ve done this and I’ve done that. So you do question yourself just even as a human being, let alone a woman. Well, Oh gosh, maybe you do know more. And that’s what I mean, the more I lived here and the more that I touched every crevice of this house, taking tools and getting out from between the floorboards all the dirt in every room. And the house isn’t that big, it’s just four bedrooms and three weird living rooms, one of them will be a dining room, and then a center hall. But still, when you go around and you become very intimate with your house, you start to know what’s good for it, and what’s bad for it. And you can judge those people right away. And we’ve been really blessed. The craftsmen that have come through here have been phenomenal. Our plasterer saved this house. He saved this house and he is the most kind, gentle man. And he works with his son. I don’t know what I would’ve done without JT. I mean, just even his energy, he brings us a little pack lunch and he sits on the front porch at work and he’s just kind. Just about everybody that’s put their hands on her, Bloomfield, has been an amazing craftsman. So that’s why I feel like she has really- either through me, or maybe it’s me, I don’t know. But the only people that have actually worked on her have been beautiful human beings, very kind. And the energy in this house is that way. I get asked a lot, is it haunted? Is it haunted? People try to freak you out on Tik Tok. They say, oh, don’t do this because that ghost is going to come get you or whatever. The energy in this house is like nothing I’ve ever felt before. I mean I told you I grew up in that house that was where the civil war was fought. I wouldn’t say there was negative energy there, but there was a lot of energy there. So I know the difference and we have not been haunted here yet. There’s just something here feeling-wise, it’s an over all house feeling like she kind of hugs you when you walk in and everybody feels it when they walk in, they’re like, oh my God. And it’s not because it’s opulent or there’s these amazing carvings. It’s not like a Victorian house where everywhere you look is yummy. This is a pretty plain house with some nice woodwork and good old floors, but people walk in and they just are overwhelmed by something here.
KM: Yeah. I totally feel that in houses. I have been known to Sage houses. I had to sage my house before we moved in and another house I was working on, I felt like it could use a little. I don’t know if Sage even works. I don’t know. It’s not really my thing, but I thought, why not try it at least if it would help because yeah, there is an energy and we all give off energy that just maybe gets- there’s a residual energy of the people who live there and the things that happened to them when they lived here. That’s one reason I love houses is because of that.
KT: I agree. I think they encompass it. And I’ve saged the house we live in, in Dallas. I mean, I had a woman come through and do the whole salting, open all the windows and doors because everyone that had been in that house since its beginning had pretty violent marriages and divorces and you could just… The house was wonderful, but something was there. My husband and I survived, so maybe we can say something for the saging, it worked.
KM: So you’ve been finding things behind the mantle that you’ve been investigating.
KT: Yes. That was very cool. We bought the house in May and I was damned and determined. I was like, okay, I’m staying there. The month of June, my daughter was going off to a class thing and I had a month free. I drove cross-country with my dogs and my husband, and he left me here and flew back. I stayed here in this house for a month. There was a woman who had known all of these houses around here that are the older houses and she had a published book and it included Bloomfield in it. So I looked her up and she’s in town. She’s an architecture historian, and she’s mid fifties and we just hit it off right away. She’s like, do you want to come to the office? I dug up some stuff on Bloomfield, do you want to see it? And I’m like, sure. So I go down there, I’m all excited. I meet her and she’s giving me papers and things that she’d found on the history of the house. And then she said, would you like to see pictures of it from last year? And I was like, yes. And she pulls out these pictures. And I literally just got sick to my stomach. The house had been a hoarder house and I didn’t know that. And she was here mid clean and it was pretty cleaned out from what everyone around here now is telling me. I have those pictures and I post them sometimes. It made sense from the smell of the house, the whole house smelled, every room smelled differently. I just looked at those pictures. I must have gotten white and I literally just said, could I get a copy of these? And she’s like, sure. I could not wait to get out of there. As I was driving home, this storm was brewing in and I was like, I can’t stay another minute in that house. Not only was the house probably a hoarder house for 30 years at least, The amount of animals that had died in here- and then the chemicals I could see in the pictures that people were using to clean this house out, I was like, what have I done? Like, why am I an idiot? Why am I doing this? I need to get rid of this house. I didn’t want to get rid of the house, but I needed to get out of there. I came home, packed all my stuff. The storm is blowing in. I mean, it was just like the things of a movie, you know, and I’m stuffing my dogs in the car and we drive off to a La Quinta that allowed me to have my dogs with me. And that’s where I stayed the rest of my trip. I’d come back every day and clean the house. But I did not know it was a hoarding house, and come to find out from the neighbors who, one of my neighbors she’s so sweet, but she’s probably 5’11”. And she said that Frank, the man that inherited the house and actually lived here until December of 2016, she said when you walked in the door, you had to step up and he would only let you in the front door a few feet, but you had to step up and it was about a foot and a half off the floor. She couldn’t even see over the boxes. And there were like pathways. She also said that when they cleaned the house out, basically they made a deal after Frank died, his wife made a deal with a guy that said, I’ll keep whatever I find that’s still salvageable, but I’ll clean this house out. And he brought in five or six tractor trailer size dumpsters and put them out back and was just throwing everything out the window. They said that took about four months to do and tractor trailers were pulling in and out of here. I had no idea. Some of the things that were on the floor, like outlines, were where cats had died and it was literally the imprint of a cat and then areas where raccoons had literally died and decomposed and the floors were completely rotted out.
KM: Okay. So this is while Frank was still living there, obviously, because he’d only left the building in 2016.
KT: Correct. We think he moved in around 2014, so he was only here about two years. But before him, his great aunt had lived, was born in this house. She did not die here, but she was almost a hundred years old and she left it to Frank. And I think she died in like 2008. So he just kept filling it up with stuff. It was like a storage unit for him. She was a silver spoon baby, so she did not know how to take care of this house. That’s my assumption. And she ended up living in the center room for the remainder of her life, 15 years just living in one room. So she had already filled the house and then he came in.
KM: Was she the original hoarder, and then he just didn’t mind it?
KT: Yes, I think so. He was a minister and great guy from what I hear. He was recruited by the Cleveland Browns, but he wanted to do his life in ministry, and he always saw this house as being a home for wayward boys. And he was a big animal lover. In fact, his daughter showed up one day and I didn’t know her- people always pull up and talk, you know, during the day. It’s kind of cool. But she’s like, yeah, we’re looking for dad’s other two cats. And at that time, I didn’t know that there were two imprints on the primary bedroom floor, they were cat prints. I don’t know if those are the two cats she was looking for, but somewhere in the hoard over the years, there’s still the outline of kitties.
KM: Oh man. Are you keeping those outlines?
KT: Mhm. My daughter has a best friend who’s a brilliant artist and she’s going to come and paint little mice around all the mouse holes.
KM: I love that idea. I love that.
KT: These doors are beautiful. So why would I fix them? People are like, how are you going to fix that? I’m like, it doesn’t need fixing. So I wrote a story, it’s on my blog, about the mice. I used to think, Oh, these poor mice were trapped in these rooms and had to chew their way out. How did they have the stamina? And then one day it dawned on me. No, they were getting in. So I made the story up about these mice that come to work on each door. They’re all living in this house, like a big condo complex. And they all come together and you know, their little lunch pails and stuff like that. So she’s going to add the mouse holes, and I want her to also bring those cats back to life. So give it whiskers and a little nose and maybe we make a name for it and paint it.
KM: It’s just so sad. It’s so sad to think of the cat just lying on the ground forever. I love the idea of being painted. I’m just saying like when the cat actually passed away and I mean, I guess the cat doesn’t care he’s dead. But to think he was living like that…
KT: There were two right next to each other, so I think that they were kind of cuddling. And I mean, I don’t think Frank or Lucy-Mae, his aunt were bad people at all. I think that they were circumstantial people, you know.
KM: it gets overwhelming. Life gets overwhelming and things like that happen. And it just gets worse over time.
KT: Yeah. And being elderly in this house or not even knowing how to maintain it, I mean, this house is a beast. She’s a monster to restore and to fix, so I can’t imagine. As she’s crumbling around me and there’s trees- like here, there’s a whole corner that was missing. And this room that we had, I don’t know if you can see it, but we had to get it replastered because there’s a gigantic tree outside, just scraping the stone for probably 40 years. All the water was coming in and where I’m sitting, there were no floorboards. Then I look back on those pictures and I scare myself. I don’t know whether it’s because now I’m almost 55 and I was 51. I don’t know if that makes a big difference, and I had more chutzpah, but I look back on those pictures and I know that this is my last restoration, knock on wood. Because they scare me. I look back on the pictures that I took when I first got here and I’m like Oh my God, how did I ever think I could do that? There’s no way. But there was no question about doing it. When you walk in the front door to a house that is going to be yours and you don’t know it yet, you don’t see any of the imperfections. You see everything as opportunity and you see it perfect. And you coddle the things like, for instance- getting to the mantle, sorry. You know, that mantle was just hanging there and it was super plain. All these mantles are beautiful, all hand-carved and there’s a bunch of books on some of these mantles, but that one was really plain. I just saw that it was coming off the wall and I just pulled it and it had these two railroad spikes holding it into the wall. It’s in the original part of the house, 1700s section and I just wiggled it cause I’m like, well, you have to repair this anyway, let me just pull it off, clean behind it. Right there, the floor was gone. The floor was all rotted out and the whole fireplace had collapsed. So I just wiggled it and then I pulled it away. And then there fell in 200 years of dust and dirt were these pieces of paper and pens, writing quills with hand-carved wooden handles. And I couldn’t get that mantle out of my hands fast enough. I mean, it weighs a ton. I got it to the other side of the room and I came back over and just sat in this mess and I was blown away. I was just, Oh my God, these are pieces of paper. And as I would unravel them, I started seeing dates on them. And I think they date from… I’ll check my records, but from like 1822 to about 1875, which would make sense because the house changed hands around that time in 1875. So this was all during the civil war that the ladies of the house would sit, I’m assuming this room was the parlor. I just had this gut feeling that it had a piano in it at one time, but they would sit there and while they were practicing their painting or their music or their writing or penmanship, they would get these pieces of paper that were just scrap paper or newspaper and would roll them up. And they look like little cylinders with points on the end and some of them have wax coatings. So I think they would dip them in wax, and they were used to stick in the fireplace and light the candles. So they were used as matches almost, or maybe vice versa from the candle to light the fire. So there were literally hundreds of them and the mantle, I guess, maybe that area, you can see it on the stone, on the outside of the house where that fireplace area, the stone kind of angles down towards it. So I think as the house settled, that mantle was moving away from the wall and leaning towards the wall. So they would go and just like, where’s my glasses. They would put their spills up there along with their pens, their writing quills, and they would roll behind the mantle. And they were like, I know I put these up there, and there they would go, roll down behind the mantle. So being in a house, backing up to the hoarding, that had been completely cleaned out by that guy that came in and traded, to remove everything for if he found anything valuable. He went up in the chimneys, I mean, there’s not anything here. So it was kind of sad as an old house person to not find anything, any trinkets of something left behind, or even if they’d left the attic full, I wouldn’t have cared. I’m sad I’ll never see the photographs that I’m sure he threw out. But to find this was more of a treasure for somebody who loves the house so much. And then also didn’t find anything in the house when we took possession. Catherine Larue was the woman who was married to Colonel John Larue, the Larues built the house a hundred years prior. They built it in the 1770s. And so he was a descendant of that family and she, her actual penmanship, she would practice her penmanship and her name, her autograph. So there’s many Catherine Larue, Catherine Larue and Catherine Buck Larue, which was her maiden name. Lots of those spills were her name, practicing her penmanship. And then also they would practice their Os, you know, back in the old days. And a lot of people have questioned me on the stuff I post on Tik Tok they’re like, yeah, right there’s college lined paper back then. Cause there were lines, but lined paper actually came in in the 1780s.
KM: A lot of that stuff, people don’t really have a clear timeline on when certain things came into being, it’s always interesting. I love history too, so it’s always interesting to me to hear something like that. That’s when that came into existence, right?
KT: Yeah. I think about people back then as kind of primal. I mean, I don’t know why I just kind of place them in more of a simplistic brain space, that they were more simplistic, but if you were going through the newspapers, I mean, there was the Wall Street Journal there, there was the Baltimore Gazette, there was the Virginia Bazaar, there was another one, New York Times? something like that. These people are very well read. They had these newspapers delivered all the way out here and we’re only an hour from DC, but still they made a point of educating and obviously their penmanship was beautiful. So I just thought, wow, these people were really well read. They prided themselves on the news. We also were fortunate enough to find an excerpt from a diary.
KM: that you’ve been reading, right?
KT: Yeah. So hearing that diary, but also seeing the little pieces of paper that were leftover from these times, these people, you know, I don’t even get the wall street journal, you know what I mean? And I was very impressed by how well-read they were, to be honest. And then working on their beautiful handwriting, which is incredible. And It got misunderstood on Tik Tok when I put out that I felt guilty about opening these things. It wasn’t that I felt guilty so much as taken so literally on Tik Tok, right. People pick it apart. But what I felt was more honored that, how am I the one that got to find these? And the last person to touch this was probably Catherine Larue. I get to touch something she touched. I mean, it wasn’t guilt. It was like, Wow. Why am I honored? So that’s the guilt. Does that make sense? But I got picked apart on that.
KM: Well, Tik Tok is, you know, there’s a wide audience on Tik Tok.
KT: Yeah, you can’t filter them out, like on a Facebook page I agree or disagree who joins, so it’s a small, nice audience.
KM: But it’s interesting that you’re sharing your experience through Tik Tok. I like that a lot of people are sharing their house experiences, and yours I feel like has been a little bit more… I don’t know what the word would be, maybe just relatable. I would love to be doing the project that you’re doing, maybe that’s it. But a lot of them just seem a lot more Instagrammy to me, like look at my beautiful house and look at the beautiful thing I did in my kitchen. I’d rather hear about the history of it or that it was a hoarder house, or imagine these people practicing their penmanship for hours in the parlor, you know, like that that’s what gets me. So that’s why I appreciate your account on there. I also have a hoarder house. And when I finally actually owned it, I was all for it. And then I owned it and I thought, what have I even done? I just cried. I sat on the front porch and just cried because it was so overwhelming. Like this is just a lot to take on, but mine was nothing compared to yours. Mine’s like a 1920s house.
KT: The damage people can do by not doing anything is incredible. It doesn’t matter the age of the house. I mean, I’m sure this house was adored until about 1940, 1950.
KM: And that’s when Lucy-Mae, was that her name? Is that when she lived there?
KT: Her parents died around that time in the forties. And she was a little Jetsetter, I could tell, she was back and forth to New York to shop and she was that girl. Maybe a debutante, I’m not really sure. I haven’t done much digging on her yet. She inherited the house around the forties. And I think that judging by the wallpaper and everything, I don’t think too much was done after that. I think it was just overwhelming for her. And then she just kept spending her money—this is my story I tell myself—she just kept spending her money, and ran out of money and couldn’t afford the house, to upkeep it. It’s a sad tale because some of the wonderful craftsmen that have come through here or just people stopped to talk, they’re too old now to work, but they, oh, I worked on this house for Lucy Mae and oh, I helped her set up her fireplace in that room so she would have some coal heat. But she ended up living in the middle bedroom until her death.
KM: Okay. So you’ve obviously done this before, but if someone is listening to this and thinking they’d like to find a property similar to yours, do you have maybe three pieces of advice for them?
KT: I think you have to be willing to live and breathe it. Your paychecks have to go to your project. You have to make many sacrifices along the way, and you have to be willing to do that. There won’t be new cars, there won’t be new clothes. And you have to be ready to have as many setbacks as forward movement. I think I’ve cried as much as I’ve laughed and I’ve done both daily. I cry in this house every single day, because there’s always something that I think we’re going to be able to do, and I realized there’s about 30 steps that have to be taken to get to that end game. Just being able to go away, reassess, sit on the front porch like you said, and cry. And then go back in and just eat your elephant. My husband and I always say that. And he’s like, what are we doing hon? And I go, we’re eating an elephant! And I go, how do we do it? He goes one bite at a time! And I joke with my friends and say, but I’m just on the antelope appetizer! Like I haven’t even gone to the elephant yet, you know? So it’s just being willing to live and breathe it. You can’t take on a project like this if you’re not loaded, and you can’t hire a general contractor that’s going to Mark it up 20% and it’s going to end up costing 20% more than he bid. So you’re going to look at 40% over the cost that you think is on this piece of paper. It’s like a hem. You pick the hem and pull that string. And next thing you know, the whole skirt’s come undone. And that’s what happens in old houses. You have to be willing to do that. It looks great on Tik Tok and glamorous and everything, but there’s always more to do. This is my favorite piece of advice that I heard, and it has nothing to do with renovating, but I heard it. And right now, take it into renovation: A true artist knows when to stop painting. You can destroy it by keeping on and painting, and you have to be the one to say when you’re done. There are things in this house that I have just embraced, for instance the mouse holes, or some of the mantles. I’m afraid I will hurt them if I strip the paint off of them at this time right now today. So I’m going to leave them and let them be chippy. I’ve done the rooms, I’ve secured everything. So there’s that kind of more cerebral, how do you get your brain in the right place? And then the other part is the more physical part. If you are going to tackle a house, you have got to get rid of the water in the house, under the house, around the house. The rain, whatever, because water will destroy every house. So the first thing you have to do is roof and foundation and you’ve got to be realistic about what that’s going to cost and what that’s going to take and get as many people through that are experts on it that can tell you what needs to get done. And don’t stop at one bid, stop at 20 If you can’t do it yourself. That’s the biggest thing. I don’t think people understand. They go in like, oh, I can just paint this. We can do the carpentry, we can do this part, but they forget all about the structure, the foundation and the water penetration in the roof and around the house.
KM: Yeah, that is really stabilizing at first.
KT: Yeah. The first thing we did was we had roof estimates that came in like 40-45,000 for a new metal roof. Then we realized that it was just the seams that were leaking, so we goobered the seams and painted the roof with roofing paint, then I put on gutters right away. There was no question. A paycheck went from my hand, right to the gutter guy. And we put on gutters. My husband has been a Saint and just working on the foundation the whole time, tons of termite damage, stuff like that. That’s on the side, but that saves the house and then you could have it for years. You just keep fixing away. But getting the water out of the house and away from the house is number one.
KM: That’s very good advice. Have you ever read or listened to the book The World Without Us? About what would happen to the earth if humans just went away, not the earth, but what would happen to the structures and everything. And it’s this description about the plants, the water just destroying our built environment, because it can really quickly, you know, it wouldn’t take long for the water to penetrate. And then that opens the wall, I guess, for the plants and rodents and other animals to just come in and inhabit the house. Yeah, so you do need to stabilize it. Keep the animals out, get the water out.
KT: Shore it up. I kept saying, we just need to shore up this house. Because when we were in the process of buying it, there was a six month lag time from the time that I saw it to the time we actually closed and we came and actually worked on the house. I asked the agent, can you please ask the seller if I can get a key? And he’s like, why? Then I had begged him a bunch of times to come shut the windows over the winter. I was like, please, can you just shut the windows? Cause a lot of the windows were missing and they weren’t boarded up. And I said, can we just board them up, and they wouldn’t. So we flew out here and boarded them up. This is maybe too juju for this podcast, but this house, everything we touch goes right into place. All the windows were in the attic, so we just put them back in their sashes and there they went. It was amazing.
KM: Why were they in the attic?
KT: I don’t know. I don’t know whether it was when they cleaned out the hoard, they just decided it would be easier just to pull off all the windows and throw stuff out, and then they never replaced them. So this house spent a winter of snow on the floors, like you can see from the pictures from when I was in here in November to when we finally took possession of the house, the floors were exponentially sped up, ruined. The paint on some of the mantles was fine in November and then because of windows and the rain and the snow all came in in just a matter of six months, were minutes away from being completely destroyed. Water is everything. Water will destroy, especially a stone house with plaster.
KM: Well, it’s an incredible house. So how can people follow your journey? You’re obviously on Tik Tok, you’re on Instagram, you have a Facebook Group.
KT: I changed it to Bloomfield farm reservation on Instagram, but it’s Bloomfield farm fans on Facebook. And then bloomfieldfarm.net is my blog. It’s just stories I’ve written.
KM: I appreciate you making it a public story, because then the rest of us can appreciate it too, all your hard work that you’re doing over there. Are you going to be having it as a bed and breakfast? Is that your goal, eventually?
KT: I don’t feel like this house is ours. I feel like this is a treasure and we are just custodians to make her live another 250 years, let’s hope. So I feel a great need to share this house with people. And plus, if you read in the diary, there were always 10, 15 people coming through here at all times. When we had people here for Thanksgiving, we had our children all here and the house was just alive. It was wonderful to hear people in all corners of this house. So the house is intended to be filled with people and we would love to do a farm stay, which is basically, you know, your girlfriends or your husband, you would come out for the weekend. And on Saturdays, I’ll put a Blackboard by the front door and you can sign up to be a part of the dinner. There’s tons of vineyards around here. There’s great farm stands. So you can just say, I want to do appetizers or I’ll bring the wine or I’ll bring the bread. And then we meet back for hors d’oeuvres and all cook in the kitchen. Then we all eat together that night for dinner. So it’ll just be all local food. And if nobody wants to sign up for it and I’m cooking, you’re welcome to come join me and have a glass of wine or whatever. And you don’t have to do that at all, but we are going to put a big, huge deck on the back that will allow people to sit out there and look at the blue Ridge mountains and just kind of relax. We’re in a hollow. We do have internet now, but we would prefer people just to come unplug and just enjoy the land. And I’m going to grow lavender and have bees and-
KM: Oh it just sounds great! I might even drive down there just to see it.
KT: Yeah, do! you’re not far. I don’t know, I’m being told by the house that’s what she wants. She wants people in it and it was so apparent. There’s no possession by me. We had another fixer upper where it was an Airbnb and I felt very possessive, I didn’t intend that house to be an Airbnb. But in this house, I just feel like, oh my God, please come, please enjoy. Just enjoy because it’s never going to be perfect. It’s not going to be walking into some beautifully restored home. The Selma mansion is close to here and there’s another big mansion in Virginia that was just redone, and they bought their house at the same time we did. And they are well done. And this house isn’t that, you come and be who you want to be. Bring your book, lounge around, relax, go walk the field, just go sit by the spring house. Just a place where people can come and not be so wound up by the world.
Katharine MacPhail (KM)
Anthony Maschmedt (AN)
Abbey Maschmedt (AB)
KM: Hello and welcome to Talking Home Renovations with the House Maven. I’m your host, Katharine MacPhail. I’m an architect. I practice in Eastern Massachusetts, and my specialty is renovations and additions to existing homes. I started this podcast as a resource for homeowners who are thinking of undergoing the home renovation process and would like to learn as much as they can before they start. So today I’m talking about sustainable construction, high performance construction, with Anthony and Abbey Maschmedt, who are the principals of dwell development in Seattle. Dwell development is an award-winning sustainable residential builder, and they say that they strive to create the most energy efficient homes in the world, and they believe that sustainable efficient design can create a better tomorrow. So we had a conversation about how high performance and sustainability could apply to renovations, as well as new construction. Let’s just jump right into the conversation.
KM: First of all, there’s the question of how do you do a sustainable renovation if you’re adding onto a house and you have an existing house and you’re not necessarily gutting the existing house, then how do we kind of marry these systems together? So that’s one thing that I’m interested in. I’m trying to figure out how to approach people on this because I have previously said, are you interested in any sustainability at all? And they say, yeah, no, not really. Okay, I should have put that differently somehow.
AB: I think it needs to be rebranded is kind of what you’re saying, because I think the idea is that it’s too ambitious or too expensive. And thus people immediately, their knee jerk is to say no, that’s not possible when really you can do pretty small things that will have a greater impact on sustainability and your home for years to come. And the bottom line, your electricity bills—And I don’t know what they’re like in Massachusetts. I’m presuming they’re high—So anything that you can do if you’re looking down the road of years to come will be better for the environment and for your pocketbook.
KM: Right, it’ll save people money, yeah. I feel like people are tired of hearing about saving the earth. And I don’t know if they can care about saving the earth, but I feel like if we reframed it into saving human life on the earth—because the earth will be here after we can’t live here anymore—I mean, that sounds kind of extreme, but I feel like maybe if we had different terminology for that people wouldn’t block it out, which I feel like people are just kind of blocking it out now.
AN: Well, I think everybody, if you ask, if you sit down and talk- because we only know one way to build homes and that’s, we build the most high performance, sustainable energy efficient homes in the world, and we get recognized for it. And when we can actually take that message, when you sit down and talk to a buyer, for example, and that’s for one of our new homes or one of these homes that we renovated, and you have an open dialogue with them, everybody cares about sustainability, everybody wants to do their part, and housing and renovations are the largest contributor to CO2 off gassing and the ozone layer of any industry in the world. So little bits and pieces, everybody can do their small part and make better choices about how they put a home together from a renovation standpoint or a new construction, or just making small choices, like Abbey said. I’m part of the Built Green committee here in the city of Seattle and I get asked this question all the time and there’s five rules, simple things that people can do in their homes that aren’t fully renovated, but you can make a huge impact on your energy bills and sustainability just by doing little things that we could touch on as well. So everybody cares about it, people just don’t understand the little things they can do that make a big difference.
KM: Well, that’s great, I’m glad that they do care. In Seattle they might care. I don’t know, maybe it’s just the people I run into over here.
AB: Well I mean it’s different, your homes are all older. I mean, it’s humbling to talk to somebody from the Massachusetts area because I know, being that I was born in New England, I know that the homes are much older. We don’t have as much old construction and historic construction as you do. A home here that’s 1905 is very old. And of course my grandparents were in Jamestown, Rhode Island and the homes built around 1900 weren’t that old in Jamestown.
KM: Right, right, that’s true. And so it’s all kind of relative.
AB: Yeah, it’s relative.
KM: I went to graduate school in Los Angeles and it was a totally different mindset about what’s historic out there versus here. Here like 99% of my work is just work to regular old houses built in the 1920s, 1940s. There is a lot of old housing stock here, it’s just what people live in. I would love to hear about those five elements that you just brought up that are easily achieved for… what are you calling it?
AN: Oh, yeah for sustainability. Well, the first thing that people can do is change out windows, old windows in a house, you know, replacing windows is a huge source of heat loss and energy loss in homes, especially in older homes. So bringing any efficient double- we only use triple pane windows, but even going into a double pane window makes a huge difference in the homes. So that’s the first thing. The second thing is that a lot of homes built in that area don’t have insulation or a lot of the insulation has fallen down inside the wall cavity. So when you have leaky windows with leaky walls, you know, your furnace kicks on, your boiler kicks on, it’s trying to keep up and it’s just leaking out of the house. So the most efficient thing you can do is really attack those two things in an existing home. There’s ways you can put a little hole in the exterior blowing insulation in the wall cavity pretty easily in any home. So windows and insulation are two things to deal with the thermal envelope of the home, which is crucial. Then on the inside, changing all your light bulbs to LED light bulbs in the house. That’s simple. LED light bulbs, you can get all kinds of historical looking ones that look like they’re, you know-
AB: That’s involved, We only use LED. I bought many fixtures that were old fixtures that had been restored, and then I replaced all the bulbs with LED. So that’s a very simple, very cost-effective way.
AN: Yeah, incandescent light bulbs should be illegal. I mean, they’re illegal in a lot of countries around the world.
AB: They’re phasing them out.
KM: I thought they were, I thought they were illegal. And then I heard that they weren’t. And then I heard that there are definitely not going to be, and now-
AB: There was a lot of pushback on making them illegal. A few years ago they were talking about just getting rid of them altogether and then people started ordering bulbs. You would hear about crazy people buying up all the incandescent bulbs to save them, and now I think that there’s been enough pushback that they’re not illegal. But it’s a pretty simple cost effective measure. If windows are too much, too expensive, insulation, oh that’s too way too much, I can’t do that. And then you roll in the plumbing fixtures. We only use the Niagara toilets that are 0.8 gallon flush. They’re not a dual flush, it’s a single flush. Those toilets are I think, 400 bucks out the door. The trim and the toilet seat and the whole nine yards they’re like 350.
KM: Huh, I never heard of Niagara. Is that the name of the company, Niagara?
AB: yeah, the name of the company.
AN: the average toilet, just so you know, all existing toilets out there—especially on the East coast—a lot of them are 3.5 gallons of flush. New toilets that come out now, you have to be below two gallons of flush and you have the two buttons, which one for which, which button you push and people get kind of confused and all that. So this is just one button 0.8 gallons of flush, and it saves the average home, if you have three toilets in your house, say five to six thousand gallons of water a year just by switching out these toilets. And then what Abbey said is the WaterSense certified fixtures, all the fixtures now, California standards are 30% water reduction, 20% water reduction just by picking new fixtures that aren’t flushing all that water down the drain.
AB: One could do that over time. If you’re a homeowner and you’re like, oh boy, I can’t take on changing out all my plumbing, you can go room by room and sort of say, okay, every six months, I’m going to change out a fixture. you can be planning on that, that’s your goal. And that’s what we did with our renovations. At this point in time, you can get some beautiful fixtures that really can look historical. They can look like they go with the home. They don’t have to be modern looking fixtures.
KM: Yeah, that’s true. Can I say something about the dual flush toilets? I do not find those confusing. So I’m just going to clear this up for anybody listening. So there’s two buttons and there’s one that’s bigger and one that’s smaller. So I think if you don’t need that much water just press the smaller one, and if you need more water, press the larger one.
AN: Yeah, in theory, that’s it. But a lot of people don’t know that and they’ll push them both and they get confused so regardless, unfortunately the user experience on those is confusing. That’s why we like this one button.
KM: No, I get it. It was just a PSA for dual flush toilets. Also, if you live in the house, you should be able to learn after a while how to flush the toilet. And sure, you might have guests over who get confused, but maybe a little tour ahead of time. Anyway, I have dual flush toilets and I love that. I go to my parents’ house, they used to have an old farmhouse from the 1830s and they had these, I swear they are seven gallon flush toilets. It was like, how much water could you possibly waste? You don’t need that much water.
AB: Well, the Niagara toilets are a patented vacuum technology. They’re amazing. Since we’ve been using them, in the Seattle area, they’ve grown their business because they’re such a great toilet above and beyond the fact that it’s a 0.8 gallon flush. It’s also a really good toilet and we have limited with our homeowners, we have not had a lot of warranty calls with regard to their toilets.
AN: Never, never one.
KM: Well, cool.
AN: Those four things are the things that kind of get you to a place. You’ve got lighting, you’ve got conserving water, and just last on the water before I move to the fifth thing is that, people don’t understand that when you flush the water or water goes down the drain, obviously you’re paying for all that water coming in, but that’s also your paying- that’s your sewer bill going out. And people don’t get it. They just don’t care and they let the water run and everything. And that’s why people’s sewer bills are so high because they calculate sewer based off of water in water out. So, you know, it’s a double win when you conserve water, you’re not paying for it in, you’re not paying for it going out. And that’s a huge, huge money saver for a lot of people. And the last thing I would say is, you know, related to the first two items- insulation and windows. Once you get your home, that’s less drafty, less leaky, as best you can because insulation is what’s going to help air seal those cavities up a little bit, now you can look at reducing the size of your mechanical loads in the house. So maybe that’s a good time to get that big ol’ boiler out of there, or the big electric furnace out of there, and you can go to heat pumps, ductless heat pumps, and ducted heat pumps. Really energy efficient and they have the option of adding cooling to the home as well. So, you know, the East coast, you have those hot humid summers and you can go to cool mode on these things and you can put up that five heads on, on one heat pump that go outside and they’re easy to install, they’re great for renovations-
AB: And they’re fairly affordable.
AN: Yeah. And they’re used worldwide. So going to a heat pump, a heating system, that also does cooling. And then heat pumped water heaters as well. You know, super high, efficient heat pump water heater is about 300% more efficient than a standard electric water heater, and so when that water heater goes out, you can get a really nice upgraded water heater that’s more efficient and saving you a ton of money on not wasting all that electricity. So those mechanical loads go way down when you make the thermal envelope of the home more consistent.
KM: Yeah. And just in case people don’t know what a heat pump is, those are the through the wall units that you might see.
AN: That mount on the wall, yeah. So those are ductless heat pumps and they’re individual units that have a refrigeration line that goes to a heat pump that’s outside. Those can be mounted anywhere and they’re great for renovations and retrofits because they’re simple to run and they’re easy to get to and repair. And we hear people say, Oh, I don’t like the way they look. Well, you can put them somewhere that it’s not as visible and people can do cool little grills around them and build them into things. But really they’re more and more acceptable right now because they make the house so comfortable and balanced.
KM: That’s very true. And most of the old houses around here, unless they’ve been renovated, do not have air conditioning. I’m holding out because I feel like if everybody got air conditioning, it would increase the problem that we need more air conditioning, But it’s getting pretty hot, so I’m thinking about a heat pump.
AN: Yeah, and these heat pumps, these ductless mini splits are really, really efficient. I mean, they’re super efficient. So it solves that question. You’re going to be, everyone gets air conditioning. This isn’t air conditioning. This is just a unit that can do heating and cooling. You get two for one. And the energy consumption is a fraction of what a typical air conditioner is.
KM: Yeah. So tell me about these renovations that you did. One of them was a really cool Sears kit house I saw which, I love those. You don’t hear about them a lot over here, but on the West coast, when I was in school over there, we heard maybe these are still more around, I don’t know where they were more popular.
AB: Oh there’s tons of them. We found in our research that there were hundreds of Sears and Roebuck catalog homes. There were a few other catalogs, but that was the biggest seller of it. Because during the Western expansion, they blew up in Seattle and they were all over the place. Generally American Foursquare seem to be the design of choice in a lot of our neighborhoods. And I, probably from having been born in Boston and then come migrating west, I am a big, big lover of old homes. I feel like Victorians- and there’s not, there’s only a smattering of them in Seattle. So we decided we had a little bit of a lull in our schedule with our new construction-
AN: A big lull in our construction schedule.
AB: We love challenges and we decided we were going to take on a renovation, and that exploded into two more. So we did three all within a year. And they were all within about a mile and a half of each other, so it was easy geographically to get around to all of them and it was- They were all different. Two were Foursquares, and one was a Victorian. And the Victorian was 1896, which is really, really old for Seattle. There aren’t a lot of homes pre 1900 in Seattle. So that was exciting. It had a turret, it had all of the elements of a Victorian that make them so special, the bric-a-brac, and they were all in different levels of disrepair. And we applied the same thing. We decided to use the basis of our business, the foundations of our business are the sustainability piece. And we knew that in practice we could do it in old homes as well, and on a budget because we’re spec builders, so we don’t have a client, we’re not working for somebody else. We have to put it on the market and actually we’re a for-profit company. So it was not only a learning period, it was also like, hey, can we make this work as a business model? And they were all challenging, they were all really exciting, and I spent lots of time in them just sort of re-imagining what they used to be used for, what the spaces used to be used for because of how somebody may have lived in 1896, how they built their home, what they needed and how we live now. So we’re trying to update the homes in terms of their systems, but also update them in terms of use, because you’re all of a sudden in a home and you use it differently than you did before.
AN: Yeah. And then, but not to lose the character. So when you walk and you walk up to the grand steps and you see the turrets and the bric-a-brac and the moldings, all that stuff is beautiful and we want to preserve all that. What’s happening behind those walls and make sure that there’s insulation, you’ve got to update the wiring, update the plumbing systems and heating systems in those homes- all those things that you don’t necessarily see, but that makes a home really, really comfortable. Those add, to me, to the efficiency and the beauty of the home. So visually Abby is fantastic about making that home look historic, but still have those new creature comforts, the nice cabinets, the newer windows that operate, we’d like to keep some of the windows and replace the ones that are in more disrepair. So we kind of picked and chose where we do certain things and really put this thing back together. Like Abby said, we need to market it for today’s home buyer. They want to have a nice master suite. One of the houses that you referred to had had a hallway bath that was shared by three bedrooms. It’s very common in a Foursquare Sears Roebuck house. So, how can we make this bathroom bigger? How can we make it feel like a master bathroom, but also knowing that it’s going to be shared by the two other bedrooms? So we made a big double shower in it, and we did a big double vanity in it, and we use the space as best we could to give that current home buyer that feeling that I have this big, nice bathroom, but I don’t have that master suite bathroom anymore, but I’m going to share this with my kids. So there’s little things that we had to choose. How can we do this without breaking the bank as well?
AB: In every home we saved all the flooring, because we thought the flooring was important to maintaining the house and continuing the legacy of the house and not completely stripping it away and throwing in brand new flooring. So we really tried to, as much as we could, save what was there, what was relevant to the house and what the original architect had- you know, you want to pay homage to that architect and see how they had their vision of the house. It was amazing to me the iterations of the houses because they were old and many of them had had multiple iterations. They’d been used as a boarding house at one point, because during the war people were living in it-
AN: A speakeasy.
AB: A speakeasy, yeah. We were told by one of the homeowners that, oh yeah, there was a speakeasy when alcohol was prohibited in the central area of Seattle.
KM: That’s why I think I love houses, because of the lives that have been lived through the houses. And I know you had mentioned in the article that I read about the renovation you talk about imagining how people lived in these houses and what they were, what they, the actual people, what they were doing in there. I dunno, to me it has an energy to a house or has sort of a spirit or energy, I think.
AB: Well the grandest of the three homes that we did, the last one, had a room where you would have somebody come, like perhaps a sales person would come calling and you wouldn’t want them in the rest of your house. It was a formal entry area where you’d sit- or perhaps somebody taking somebody on a date, you’d have them sit and wait in a waiting area. And I always just kept closing my eyes and walking around and thinking, wow, this was somebody actually designed a home now we never have that much space that you think about an area where somebody would wait, a waiting area.
KM: I love that! I love that idea because there may be people coming to your house that you don’t want in the heart of your house. But especially now with the whole pandemic, you think about visitors in a different way, maybe. So you can have a little area where visitors are allowed- I mean, I guess that was more like the formal living room back in the day, right. We don’t use it the same way anymore, but I mean, do we really want everybody in our houses in the same way?
AN: No, no. It’s interesting because now, new construction- everybody wants the grand room, the big open concept. They want everything to kind of feel the kitchen is right, connected, it’s all one big room and that the dining room and the living room, all one big space, and all these houses have those formal- that’s what’s neat about these older houses, they all have their little formal elements: Here is the living room and it’s its own room with a door, a pocket door or whatever. Here’s a social area of the kitchen, where you would sit by the fireplace, in a separate area. Here’s the formal dining room, you have these places that can be shut off from each other, but then they also flow, and that’s what a lot of new construction, you know, unfortunately you get now. you get big open concept, which is what people want.
AB: We had to find the balance between the two. We had to take out some walls because we acknowledged the fact that the current home buyer does want spaces that are multi-use. So we had to re-envision those spaces as multi-use. And in the first one we did, the Sears Roebuck, It had some constraints, spaces that we knew, well, people don’t live like that anymore. They don’t have necessarily this need for all of these formal spaces. They want to be able to use them for different things. And certainly with the pandemic we were forward-thinking then. We thought we needed, because we were thinking, yeah, there’s a lot of these extra spaces. And now we’re finding, there’s sort of a pushback with our construction where people do want more carved out niches within the house. So they can sneak off and do a zoom call in private.
KM: Right, right. You don’t know what’s next, that’s the truth right? What’s the next thing that people are going to want in their homes. Which one was the house that had the ladies’ home journal or something all underneath?
AB: Yeah, the last one we did, the blue spruce house, it was the grand American Foursquare, definitely built for somebody prominent in Seattle. We did some digging and I had linked the house to somebody who set up the first electrical grid in Seattle, so it had an amazing heating system. When we bought the home, we couldn’t figure out this hole in the basement. We came down to the basement and there was this giant hole and-
AN: It was like a concrete pit that had about a two foot ledge around it. So as I was this like a baptism pool, or it was it like… We’re trying to figure out what the hell… There were 10 foot ceilings in there. And we were trying to figure it out, we finally realized
AB: The neighbor, the neighbor, we pulled out this old piece of metal that we didn’t really, we were sort of like, oh, is this some sort of a stove? Or what is this? We pulled it out, we put it outside, and the neighbor came over and he’d lived there for about 40 years and he came over and he said, well, you know, that’s a part of the old coal pit. You know, those stairs that you guys unearthed in the back, it was a ramp where they’d unload the coal, dump it down into the pit. So it was a coal pit. So mystery solved. And then we got to pass that information along because initially our real estate agent was like, you’re going to have to do something about that weird hole in the basement. That’s really weird. So we were like, is it a wine room? And then we had the story and that was enough. We were able to tell the buyer, hey, this was the coal pit. It’s original, it goes with the house.
KM: Yeah, that’s cool. It’s convenient to have old neighbors who knew about the house, you know.
AN: The idea of us doing three in one year, and we got through them and they’re all successful and we’re all very proud of it. You know, and then being recognized by the Seattle times, like, wow, those homes are really significant, we want to do a whole feature story on these homes. I mean, we were like, wow, that was interesting. And there’s a market for that. And it led us to this place where as we kind of navigate new construction sustainability, that we do want to commit to preserving and saving these old homes that normally would be knocked down and, you know, multi-units be put up where it’s like there’s bits and pieces where, you know, we’re going to do one a year or one every couple of years and have a model for it, cause we get called all the time. Hey, will you help us renovate our house and give us some ideas and thoughts, and that’s a whole different business model and we’ve considered having a separate division focused on that. And we’re not ready to do that right now because it would be such a shift from what we currently do. But one model will be to try to get these old homes to be net zero. And if we could kind of figure out a way to renovate and restore these old homes, like we have done it, but then add the component of making them really, really super efficient, make the energy consumption really low. And then you can add solar panels to them to get them to net zero. I think a lot of people would love to have a super high performance 120 year old Victorian. Huge market, huge market for that. So we’re putting our toe in the water over there and see if that’s going to be a viable option for us.
KM: So in order to get a net zero house on an existing Victorian, you would pretty much need to gut that, would you say?
AN: Yes. You’d have to get it down to the studs, expose all the exterior walls, you’d have to air seal it. And air sealing is the most important thing that we do because we attack the air sealing in two ways: One from the exterior of the home, before we side it and put a fluid applied membrane on the home. So it basically makes- it’s a permeable product, but it makes the home waterproof and airtight from the outside. But for a renovation, there’s a product called AeroBarrier, which is a newer product that came onto the market about a year and a half to two years ago, and it’s won all these awards and it was based off of the concept of duct ceiling. And it was called Aeroseal. And these guys came up with these ideas. All these leaky ducts in people’s houses are just shooting air into these dead spaces, and it’s really inefficient. So they pressurize the ducts and they would airborne these little beads of caulk and they’d fly around the air and they just would build up on all the areas where, every little hole, nook and cranny so it’d seal all these ducts and it will make your existing duct work instead of tearing everything out and redoing it, it really was an efficient product. And one of the people who worked on this said if you can do it for ducts, why couldn’t you do it for a house? And then they created a new company called AeroBarrier, which reached out to us about two years ago and asked if they could come out from Ohio, I believe they’re based out of, where their manufacturing is done and they read something about us. And I said yeah, come on out, and we did a couple of our homes that were in construction. And the idea is right before you add the insulation, everything’s roughed in, you’re about ready to cover everything up, you come and you put up these little tripods that are connected to this fluid caulk on the inside. And the house is totally pressurized and there’s little beads of caulk go flying around the area and they just land everywhere that air is being out of the house.
KM: That’s amazing!
AN: And they build up until that leak has gone. And you sit outside on the computer and you’re watching the air exchanges come down. And how we measure efficiency in the house is called air exchanges, ACH. And so you gotta pressurize a house to what we call 50 Pascal and it, and it shows you how many times an hour the house will leak, and code in the city of Seattle is five air exchanges per hour, okay. And what that means is five air exchanges is really efficient compared to, from an older home standpoint, but it’s about the size of a front door being left open year round 24/7 throughout the house, all the nooks and crannies that a front door. That air exchange of two is about the size of maybe about an eight by eight inch square. So it’s dramatically different. Our homes we get to one, 1.2, down to even below that, you know, getting to zero is the key, because then you’re really really really efficient with the heat loss. So AeroBarrier is a fantastic product for renovation that you can hit from the inside. So when you’re talking about getting an existing home to net zero, you gut everything out, you get all your roughing down, your new plumbing and your electrical, your new HVAC, everything’s in, before installation. And then you do the AeroBarrier on the inside of the house, and that seals that house up really, really well. So that’s a fabulous product for air.
KM: Wow, so you keep the siding on through that?
AN: Yeah, all from the inside.
KM: That’s amazing.
AB: It’s a game changer. I mean, they’re introducing it out here and it’s going to be- there are all these code changes for us in the city of Seattle and it’s going to be required for new construction.
AN: Well, the national energy code changes every two years. So once that updates it’s going to be required, people aren’t going to be able to get permits for new construction without making these energy credits happen. And this is going to be the one product like Abbey said, it’s the game changer. They won national Einstein award product of the year in the housing industry. So it’s going to be the only way for new construction to get to net zero. Like California requires all new construction to be net zero, Washington, we’re probably at about two years behind that. And pretty soon everybody, all new construction, commercial and residential is going to be required to be net zero. And this will be the way to get there because you need to make that house tight as possible.
AB: And all of these elements can be applied to an existing home. They may not have the same sum total, you know, net result, but it will make a difference.
KM: How did you get into sustainable building? Anthony, you were a contractor?
AN: Yeah, I was in business with my family in a design build firm that I left in 2005. And because I wanted to go into a sustainable pathway and I wanted to shift into more of a modern aesthetic because there wasn’t much modern, new construction going on in the city of Seattle back then. So I left to create my own pathway and I started to do all the development. And thank God I did because you know, the fact that we went sustainable and went modern was the thing that grew my company by 300% during the downturn when everybody else was going out of business and the real estate market crashed, we were sitting there with homes that we were pre-selling in foundation because the buyers that were out there wanted more. And the fact that we can deliver them a product that was really, really interesting architecturally because it really starts having an interesting architectural element for people to get out of their car. They go, that’s a cool house, I want to go check that out. But then look at all these things that the homes does with the efficient windows and insulation, the heating cooling system, and then the design all has to come together. And so when we went down that path, we decided to get way out in front of the marketplace. So when the real estate market does come back—and it did—we would be way out in front pushing the envelope on net zero, passive house and building these really super high performance homes, because we said if we could show everybody how to do it, then the market will follow. And we want everybody to build homes like this.
AB: And it doesn’t have to be cost prohibitive. I think that’s the thing is that most people think it’s too expensive and they just don’t want to do it. I think that’s why a lot of people don’t do it, is ultimately the cost.
KM: Right, because if it’s the same cost, why not do it?
AB: Right. And for us it costs us more, but that’s part of the challenge is coming up with ways that we can do it for the same price, because there are ways to do it. You just have to continue to innovate.
AN: Yeah. I mean, cause when we put a house in the market, the market tells us what it’s worth. We can’t say this home is so much better. It has X, Y, and Z behind the walls and there’s all this- And people have to A) be willing and understand it and it and B) be willing to pay for it. So one example that I like to share is that we built a sustainable micro-community here in the Columbia City neighborhood of Seattle. It was 54 units that we built over a five-year period. And one home we built, one of the first ones we built was three bedrooms, two bath, 1500 square feet. It was zero days on the market. And back then we sold that house for $400,000, which was a great home. It was a great start. It was an age in place style home, where you didn’t need to have stair access. It had everything on one main living floor, which is really, really nice. Another builder in the same community—there’s only two of us in there—built a three bedroom, two bath home, 1500 square foot. It was a beautiful home by a very reputable builder. It was on the market for 175 days and sold for a hundred thousand dollars less. We were like, wait a minute. You know the design’s working, you know the sustainability people want it and they’re willing to pay for it. We didn’t tell the market our home was worth that much, someone was willing to pay for it before the home was even done. So it really validated what we were doing. And as the company grew, Abby came on board. You’ve been almost 10 years now? She took over all the design and really helped push our product to a different level from an aesthetic standpoint. We hit a little lull in our schedule, like I mentioned earlier, where we had a bunch of permits get caught up in the city of Seattle, so we decided we want to keep our guys employed. Let’s do a renovation and-
AB: And that grew to two, then it was three pretty quickly.
AN: Yeah. And each one was a little bit different from a renovation standpoint. The first one was let’s try to do this and try to figure it out. And we navigated the nuances: Do we keep the lath and plaster on that wall, you know, because our wiring doesn’t necessarily need to get there or do we gut it all down to the studs? And so we kind of had to do bits and pieces to figure out how to navigate the renovation.
AB: There was definitely a learning curve. So by the third, we were really good.
KM: Right. Well, that’s part of why I feel like this podcast is necessary, because a lot of people aren’t going to be doing more than let’s say two renovations in their lives, so if they could learn from other people ahead of time they’ll have an easier time of it. So if you had one, the most important piece of advice for somebody who has this, let’s say an old Victorian and they’re trying to add onto it and make it more efficient or more sustainable. What would you have?
AB: One piece, wow.
KM: Okay, or you could have five or however many pieces.
AB: Well, I think ultimately the thing we learned by the third and final is that keeping plaster and lath wasn’t necessarily- I love plaster and lath, yet having with no insulation when we would open the walls and then try to patch the plaster and lath- I would tell a homeowner, you probably need to scrap—if it’s an extensive renovation—you need to scrap the plaster and lath, open the walls, get access to your knob and tube wiring (which we upgraded) and give yourself a little bit more of a blank canvas. Rather than trying to go at it, you know, poking holes and then it ends up more expensive. I think we thought we were going to save money by doing it in bits and pieces here and there. And opening it, make a hole here, patch a hole here. And really, we discovered it’s probably better just to scrap your plaster and lath, open your walls, have access to everything, reinsulate and then put it all back together.
AN: Yeah. And don’t try to save that novik too, but if you’re going to be replacing your electrical panel, you know, or if you have an old fuse box, whatever, don’t try to save the knob and tube because it’s virtually impossible to do that cost effectively and safely, because of the way it’s non-grounded and so forth. So just get into all your systems, and be able to put them in and put it back together efficiently can save so much time and so much money. And people are like, Oh, I don’t want to take- people think of punching a hole in the wall is, oh my God. Now I gotta fix that. What’s more expensive than fixing the patch would be taking out the whole wall and putting up a new sheet of drywall.
KM: And it might not even look good in the end.
AB: Yeah. It ends up cobbled together. And that was the hard part, is then marrying the two and making it look seamless was difficult.
KM: Yeah. Well, that’s a lot of information for people, so. I really appreciate you coming on and sharing your experience and advice.
AB: Well, hopefully we can help anybody. We love, we really, I mean, when we were in the throes, we were like, wow, this is too much. But just like, you know, birthing a child, when you get done you’re like, wow, that so easy, that was amazing!
KM: Let’s have another one.
AB: Yeah, let’s do another one!
AN: And we’re an open book. If you can pass this on to your listeners, if anybody has a question or wants to reach out to us, I mean, I’m the chair of the Built Green executive committee and doing things sustainably is real important to us, It’s a core value. So if we can help a renovator anywhere in the country make good choices, and that are cost effective, we’re happy to share that with anybody.
KM: I’ve found that even if the homeowner wants to do certain things, it depends on who they get for a contractor. Because they might get talked out of it, depending on who it is, because it’s not the same old way everybody does it. They just seem overwhelmed. Maybe they don’t understand it. So yeah, I may be sending people to you with questions. Contractors-
AN: Contractors don’t have the best reputation either and they have a self-interest of, you know, let’s do this and it’s really expensive cause the contractor then makes more money, right? They’re not always thinking about what’s in the best interest of their client. Now, I don’t want to put everybody in that same bucket. There’s really, really good reputable contractors out there, but there’s a lot of guys who take advantage of people and that’s just known. So really getting the right general contractor, or the right subcontractors that you can manage yourself, is really, really, really important.
AB: Well, and part of what we did last with doing those renovations is adapt. And I think often there are contractors that are set in their ways and they have one way of doing things and we’ve been pivoting a lot in our business and embracing new innovations and new technologies and realizing that those can be applied to old homes as well as new homes. It’s not one or the other. They coexist together.
KM: How can people get in touch with you, do you have social media?
AN: Well we can be found all over social media. We’re on LinkedIn, we’re on Facebook, we’re on Instagram.
AB: Our website is dwelldevelopment.com, so they can look us up and access all of our social media links from there.
AN: Yep. And then you can also email us directly through our website, and if you want to share with your listeners our direct email addresses, you have those. So feel free to, you know, again, I’m all about raising the bar and I want people to make good sustainable decisions. So anything we can do to chip away at what we talked about at the beginning of the conversation about climate change and how this earth is being impacted by what we do. I mean, if everybody can make those good choices, it all adds up. It really does.
AB: We’re willing to share. None of it is proprietary. We’re happy to. We’re not good poker players.
KM: Yeah I’m not either. Well, thank you. Thank you so much for sharing your work and for doing your work and for being here with me.
AB: All right. Thanks for having us.
AN: Thank you for the platform to be able to share what we know, because it’s really important work and we really enjoy it.
KM: Thanks again to Anthony and Abbey for joining me, I’ll put all our contact information in the show notes. And thanks to you for listening to the episode. And I’ve got an exciting announcement. I’ve been asked to join Design Network, which is a group of podcasts. You can check out the other design shows in the group at designnetwork.net. Please join my mailing list. I’m trying to put them out with every episode. The link is in the show notes and I’ve still got that guide book for green renovations that I used to mention. I’m making some changes, so it’s not downloadable on my website anymore, but it should be ready soon. If you’re interested in a copy, send me an email at the house Maven at talking home renovations.com and it has a lot of other kind of low-hanging fruit as I like to call it. Things you can do that will help with the energy efficiency and sustainability of your renovation. So it pertains to what we were talking about today. Also email me any suggestions for episodes or questions you might have, and I’ll try to get back to you with answers. You can also find me on Facebook and Instagram as talking home renovations and on Tik Tok as the house Maven. And this podcast has been a production of my architecture firm, Demios architects, where we believe architects are for everyone. Well, I’ll be back with another episode next week. So keep your eye out for that. And until then take care.