This old house...

...is a very, very, very fine house!  Oh, wait, I think I'm mixing my entertainment mediums with that one...

But seriously, this is the first in a series of posts that most people have been waiting and asking for!  Pictures of the house and details of my plans for it!  It's been a busy and hectic couple months since I closed on the house just over 2 months ago!  In that time, I've measured and remeasured the house so that I could make plans for some of the repair/remodel work, run all over the DC area trying to figure out what to put in the house, and met with many contractors to get pricing estimates.  I had hoped to detail every step along the way, but there was so much to do that I ran out of time to write about it...  But now I finally feel like I'm making enough progress to take a step back and look at it all, so here goes!

In the beginning:
There was a house!  It is an attached rowhouse, as are most of houses in the area, and was built in the style of most of the buildings of its time, using brick exterior walls with wooden floors and walls.  It was built in 1918, on the very eastern edge of the burgeoning Capitol Hill district of Washington, DC.  Capitol Hill is one of DC's oldest neighborhoods and was established by early workers that were building the young US's Congress House and the Washington Navy Yard on the Anacostia River.  It also was a place for the representatives in Congress to establish part time housing while they were in the nation's capital.  As the young city grew, so did Capitol Hill.  Shortly after the civil war, there was a renewed interest in building in the neighborhood, which then extended only about 8 to 10 blocks eastward from the Capitol Building.  Between 1880 and 1910, there was a huge building boom, and most of the houses there today were built in this time period.  Also, around this time, the neighborhood pushed further east, extending almost to the Anacostia River.  This growth was spurred by the newly introduced electricity lines and water pipes, providing convenient utilities to the new homes.

Washington, DC, in 1917

My house, located near Lincoln Park, the large rectangular park due east of the Capitol Building, was built at the tail end of this building boom, and is right on the edge of historic Capitol Hill.  The neighborhood continued to grow through the 20th century, remaining one of DC's busiest neighborhoods.  The entire neighborhood was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1976, and if an eclectic mix of architecture from various stages of the 19th century, including the US Capitol Building, the Supreme Court, Eastern Market (a lively flee market and farmers market surrounded by shops and restaurants), and the Navy yard and Marine Barracks (along with nearby Barracks Row, filled with more shops and restaurants).  It's within easy walking or biking distance of the National Mall and most of what downtown DC has to offer.

Capitol Hill in 1917 (My house is not yet there!).  Lincoln Park is the large rectangle due in the middle of the image.  At the time, Capitol Hill extended only a few blocks east of the park.  Today, the neighborhood extends to the banks of the Anacostia River, which is now off the right side of the image!

Choosing to buy such an old house posed some unique problems, but is also exciting!  Atlanta is a very young city, even by American standards.  100 years ago, Georgia Tech, which is right in the middle of Midtown now, was out in the country, and the city was more a transit hub than anything else.  So my condo in Atlanta was pretty new.  Basically all I did when I moved in was paint!  It was just a place to live, nothing special.  But here, my home has so much history!  Part of that history is that it is built of materials that are 100 years old...  Construction standards were very different then!  On one hand, the building is solid brick, so it'll hold up to just about anything and is well insulated.  However, they had no qualms with narrow walkways and there were no standards about room size and shape.  In fact, my house is near an angle where one of DC's diagonal streets intersects a standard grid street.  So to compensate, the property is actually wedge shaped, which led the builders to make the whole house wedge shaped!  I can no longer assume that any room in my house is square or that any angle is 90 degrees...  I'll come back to this later, but it makes drawing up a floor plan and figuring out what walls can move and where furniture will fit much harder!

This is the shape of the exterior walls of my house!  The top and bottom one are shared with the adjacent houses.

The flip side of all this, though is that much of the actual history of the house I have yet to discover!  Who has lived there in the past?  What exciting events has this house seen?  And even more excitingly, God willing, I will be there to celebrate the house's 100th birthday!  So while buying such an old house has it's challenges, the house also has a lot of character, as hey say, and I'm looking forward to the adventures to come!

[And don't worry, there will be more posts to come in the next few days.  I've decided to break things up a bit rather than throw one gigantic post with a couple dozen pictures at you!  ;-) ]