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Pardon Our Dust
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Home Buying Strategy
The Price Is Right on Vacant Home
A long-abandoned 1927 Del Rey house gets a face-lift from a couple who value its vintage
Thirty-three years ago--when Luis Gonzalez was born and Heide Jenkins
was a schoolgirl--the house they would one day buy and renovate had already
been vacant for several years.
Surrounded by chain-link fencing, overgrown by shrubs and said by neighborhood
kids to be haunted, the modest 1927 bungalow remained vacant through the
'70s, '80s and '90s, until the couple tracked down the owner and persuaded
him to sell.
"This house was meant to be," Gonzalez said of the two-bedroom,
one-bathroom house the couple bought in 2000 for $150,000.
Jenkins, a teacher in South-Central L.A., and Gonzalez, who works in the
clothing industry, had been looking for a fixer-upper a few years ago
after outgrowing their tiny Venice cottage, minuscule lot and noisy neighborhood.
That house had been fixed up by Gonzalez's Uncle Fernie, contractor Fernando
Linares.
The couple wanted to live in Silver Lake, Echo Park or Mt. Washington,
but they found prices too high and gave up the search. While going to
visit Linares in the unincorporated Del Rey community near Culver City
one day, they noticed a deserted house down the street.
"We'd seen it so many times before," Gonzalez said.
"And it never clicked," Jenkins added.
Jenkins' mother, real estate agent Margret Jenkins, looked up the name
of the house's owner. No phone number was listed, but she offered to write
to the Northern California address on the title.
When no response came, she wrote again. Finally owner Philip Padley called.
The house had been left to Padley by his aunt, Violet Keller, who had
lived there for 40 years and whose husband built it in 1927 when nearby
Jefferson Boulevard was a dirt road. As a youngster, Padley lived five
houses away from his aunt, in the house now owned by Linares.
Padley made arrangements to visit and brought an album of photos. One
showed his aunt in front of the trim white stucco house with an arched
window, a wood gate leading to a small entry courtyard and wood French
doors.
By Keller's later years in the house, however, the wood windows had been
replaced with aluminum ones, and the French doors with aluminum sliders.
Black iron bars covered every window, and black iron mesh enveloped the
courtyard.
Padley wouldn't say why he had never sold the house, but a neighbor told
Gonzalez and Jenkins that others had offered to buy it over the years.
In the 1980s someone forged documents to take the title, and Padley went
to court to get it back.
When Jenkins and Gonzalez saw the inside of the house, they were stunned,
Jenkins recalled, both for its underlying '20s flair--wood floors, tiled
kitchen, tiled bathtub cove, arches, coved ceilings, nooks and built-in
bookcases--and for the damage the years had wrought.
"It's hard to describe how bad it was," Gonzalez said. Where
the tile roof had leaked or fallen in, the plaster walls had turned to
mush and floors had rotted. Fist-sized mold spots covered some walls.
Old linoleum curled from the floors. And the house was gloomy behind the
bars and aluminum awnings.
The couple wanted it nevertheless. "What we saw underneath all this,"
Jenkins said, "was all the things that we were looking for."
It took months for the couple to convince Padley that he should sell to
them. Finally, early in 2000, he agreed and set a price calculated for
the land value only, as the house was considered a teardown.
Rather than raze it, Jenkins and Gonzalez had one overriding goal: to
bring it back to the way it was when Keller first lived there.
Their primary objective was aesthetic--install new wood windows and French
doors. Vinyl and aluminum windows, Gonzalez said, "are not our cup
of tea."
Other goals were fixing the rotten walls and ceilings, salvaging the wood
floors where possible and protecting the antique tile during the construction
phase. To make the house lighter, they removed the bars and awnings, and
Linares suggested adding four skylights.
Linares also recommended taking space from one of the two bedrooms for
a second bathroom and then extending that bedroom into the backyard. He
suggested cutting an arch in the wall between the dining room and the
kitchen to make the small kitchen seem larger.
To keep within a budget of about $75,000 for the major work, the couple
made some concessions. An arched picture window would be inordinately
expensive, so they settled on a rectangular one. They also left the jalousie
windows in the bathroom and kitchen. Luckily, most of the old redwood
framing was still in good shape.
The price was further kept down because Linares gave them a family discount
and because he did much of the work himself with a few helpers rather
than hiring subcontractors. This method of renovation can save money in
subcontractor profits but generally takes longer. In this case, the project
was slowed down by two events: a death in the family and a monthlong bus
strike that made it necessary for Linares to pick up his main helper.
Construction started on the house in May 2000. Jenkins and Gonzalez worked
on it too, scrubbing, cleaning and even hanging drywall. In August of
that year, they rented their Venice house and moved into the front bedroom
of the Del Rey house, living there during the last months of construction.
Many of the wood floors, hidden under black grime, could be salvaged.
Where they were too far gone, slate tiles were used in their place. At
only $1 per square foot, it was an economical yet elegant substitute.
The fireplace and its tile could not be salvaged but a new fireplace matches
the old one.
Safeguarding the existing tile during heavy carpentry and drywall phases
took extra effort, including laying heavy planks over the pink-and-maroon
kitchen counters and the green-and-black bathroom counters. The bathroom's
original black pedestal sink was retained and the chrome on the old Thermador
heater restored. One item was broken during construction: the black porcelain
toilet tank cover.
Some tile was lost when the arch was cut through the kitchen wall, and
more would have been lost if a side wall had been removed to incorporate
a service porch into the kitchen space. Gonzalez was in favor of that
but Jenkins couldn't bear to lose that wall of history, as well as the
old icebox on the other side.
Outside, a small wooden gate was built to match as closely as possible
the gate on Keller's house.
After Linares was finished in March 2001, the couple worked on the house
for another year. They painted the exterior a dark gray-green, the bedroom
tangerine and the bathroom its original lavender.
The landscaping design revolves around pathways of broken concrete and
existing plants they chose to retain, including banana trees, castor bean
tree, bamboo and creeping fig. The rest of the large lot is filled with
drought-tolerant natives or Mediterraneans that attract birds and insects.
The couple invested about $225,000 in the house and its renovation, along
with countless hours of labor. They have seen two other homes sell in
the neighborhood for $450,000 or more.
Gonzalez is already searching for another fixer. "It's a hobby,"
he said.
But he and Jenkins don't expect to sell this house. They haven't even
sold their tiny Venice cottage. As Gonzalez explains it, "We get
attached."
* * *
Sourcebook
Project: Renovate a 1927 bungalow vacant for more than 30 years.
Contractor: Fernando Linares, Culver City, (310) 837-2548.
Duration: One year
Cost: About $75,000
Where the Money Went
Plans, engineering, permits, inspections... $2,000
Demolition and hauling... $2,000
Windows and French doors... $4,000
Plumbing repairs and fixtures... $7,000
Electrical, new... $7,000
Wood floors restored, slate, kitchen tile... $10,000
Plastic stucco... $1,000
Construction materials and labor... $37,000
Miscellaneous... $5,000
Total... $75,000
Figures are approximate, for house only.* * *