April: No fooling, it's going up

March: In like a lion

February: The fun begins...

It was Marvin's house

The star of our story, built in 1908.

(Editor's note: Oops. Later research shows it was built in the early 1880s. See details here.)

I don't know how many times we walked by it when we were house-sitting for Sullins, and Marvin Hall was sitting on his front porch, always saying hey. Then Marvin died. Then we bought it.

It's a sweet little thing -- becoming a sweet bigger thing after a few months' negotiations with HARC.

Mile Marker 0

The sign from Willie T's is as good a place to begin as any.

OK, so I'm a late adopter in Blogsylvania. But I'm hoping this will serve a few purposes:

• Update y'all on the house progress here.
• Remind me to type in caps-and-lowercase again.
• Let me spin a picture and a thousand words every so often.

Most of the stuff will be about our little project -- but hey, there are other parts of life here, too, so expect the random byway and diversion.

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One great advantage of communicating this way is that the images are clickable in themselves (spawning in a new window, assuming you're Firefox-equipped and know how to find a center mouse button, or know how to do a "view image" click and then get back to where you were), and those new views display a full-sized image. That's handy if you want to count nails in joists.

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I'm going to mark May 1 as the official kickoff for this little web venture -- hence the background and catching-up in these April posts.

To get you up to speed: We bought the house in late 2004, worked with architect Dennis Beebe (and the irreplaceable Christine) throughout 2005 to get a design that would satisfy Robert and me and the sometimes cranky Historic Architecture Review Commission, and hired contractor Ref Stafford to make it happen. He cracked open the can of whup-ass in early 2006.

Ref, it turns out, has forgotten more about building a home (master carpentry, and human relations, and skilled concrete finishing, and professionalism, and roofing, and engineering, and stair-building, and life itself) than most of us would ever begin to know. I wish you could watch him making a fast free-hand cut with the circular saw, glancing up with a grin and saying, "Aw, I'm just showin' off."

He's the slim guy in the long dreads in the pictures above. The rest of the cast will show up by and by. Wander too close to Duval and Truman, and you might, too.

Hope you enjoy the trip, and thanks for stopping by.

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Original photos and text Copyright © 2006. All rights reserved.