Heritage House

Wow.

Summer’s over and I didn’t blog once.

Not even a single time.

It’s certainly not that it was a boring summer by any means; the highlight was our week-long trip to Portland. I’ll blog about it soon.

Right now, however, I want to show you something very interesting going on in my neighbourhood.

“There is

a house

on Prince Albert Street…

they call

the Rising Sun…”

(sung to the tune of “House of the Rising Sun” by The Animals)

To be honest, I didn’t think there were many Rising Suns left in this particular old house. It’s been an eyesore for the 8 years we’ve lived here. So much so in fact that a neighbour of ours wrote a complaint letter a year or so ago to the Editor of our local Vancouver Courier newspaper. In it, she asked the owner of the house to either fix it up, or do the neighbourhood a favour, and sell it.

It was to the point that large built-up beams had been installed on a steep angle, affixed to stakes pounded into the front lawn, to support the second storey that overhung the front porch. At some point in the relatively recent past the original vertical supports had been removed from the porch rendering the 2nd floor a cantilevered structure, a task it had never been intended to perform.

Upon review of my digital photo archive stored on CDs and DVDs, I discovered that I did not have a “before” photo of that house. A quick Google query directed me to a site that taught me how to save an image from Google Maps Street View.


Voila; now I have a photo from early Spring 2010 showing the angled beams supporting the 2nd floor. Compare this to the shot I took this morning which shows a mini excavator sitting in the now scooped-out basement. I was thinking the other night it must be a bit of an eerie feeling to be operating machinery underneath a several-ton structure perched upon 4 stacks of wood.
It’s certainly an interesting project. Recently an article appeared in the local paper informing us that this 110 year old house has new owners, an engineer/ design graduate married couple, and their plans are to completely restore the house, with modern amenities of course. It looks like Stage One is to raise it to install a functional full-height basement.

I’m pretty excited about this one. I’ll keep you posted.

Actually there are several more extensive renovations afoot in my ‘hood. I’ll post “before” and “current” restoration shots soon.