Well, the restoration is finally underway.
As you may recall from an earlier post, it was decided that the plaster on the house was beyond repair…
unless I wanted to torture myself with constant repair of new cracks every few years.
Back when these homes were being built in the late 1800’s and the turn of that century
Labor was CHEAP
Materials were EXPENSIVE!
They used whatever they had around at the time, unless the home was being built for someone wealthy.
In the case of the Queen, we now know that she WAS built for The Crocker Family
but we don’t know what the circumstances for her being built were.
The Crocker Family cared enough about her to make her one of the prettiest designed houses in the area
but…they used cheaper materials to construct her.
All of her woodwork is old Doug Fir, but maybe that was just what they used in the old homes here in San Pedro.
Kerckoff Lumber Mill was right down the street.
And as mentioned before, they used sand from the ocean a couple of blocks away
rather than use cleaned and washed sand without the high salt content.
So…the plaster was just doomed to fail
and it did..
TERRIBLY!
We had planned to just remove the plaster from 1 room at a time
The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry.
WHY???
It started innocently like this:
YIKES! I know, it’s hard to see. My poor little Queen!
And this:
And then the wood lathe came off…
You can see that someone slid this hard foam insulation up there, which explains why the house kept a decent temperature in hot and cold weather.
Then the ceiling…
I immediately fell in love with that soaring gable…uh oh!
Is that a Ghost up there?
I just put my phone Camera up blindly into the ceiling
But I see something floating around…
You can see some of the old knob & tube wiring.
Shockingly this is ALL of the plaster that came off the walls in that 1 bedroom
Doesn’t seem like much!
And this was the wood lathe
And then it went a bit further…
Ok, a lot further!
You are looking in from the 2nd bedroom into the first bedroom
You can see where a closet used to go across the entire width of bedroom 2 that was divided into 2 closets
(Where the molding is a dark brown color)
Now you are looking from bedroom 1 into bedroom 2
Yes folks, on to bedroom 2, just like that!
Don’t panic friends.
ALL of the original moldings have been carefully removed
and labeled
and set aside
to be reinstalled after the drywall goes up.
I was surprised how clean it was inside the walls, but also just how drafty this house must be as I can see outside in some areas.
Sadly, I didn’t find anything exciting in the walls.
I did find out that people started to make changes to the house in 1950, which would have been the Fitzgerald Family.
They are the ones who added the closets in the bedrooms.
This was etched into the plaster on the inside of the closet.
The closets were poorly built, crooked doors, thin walls, etc.
And this is bedroom 3 getting stripped of it’s plaster.
This was the worst room
It had the gaping hole in the wall above where the bed was and the chimney ran up in the wall.
Removing it was an easy choice.
This room also has the windows with the most damage to them.
You can see where the fireplace chimney was.
I had been wondering if they had a stove in this room to keep them warm
They did!
That’s the flue all plugged up with plaster
Someone filled it in at some point.
You can see there was a major leak.
Whew, Okay, that’s it for now.
Frankly, it’s overwhelming to see my dear Queen so naked like this
But…seeing her opened up
I see some new possibilities to make her shine
Like the star she deserves to be!
If you missed the last post about who the house was built for
What are you waiting for?
Head over and read about this exciting news of The Prominent Figure The Queen Was Built For
Me? I’m gonna shake this dust out of my hair and pray to God
the Queen will excuse this major intrusion!
Thanks for stopping by!
