The History of the House: What We've Learned So Far

All we really knew about the history of the house during the buying process was that it was probably built between 1840 and 1860 by someone who probably built other similar houses in the area. We knew it had been vacant for at least ten years and that the owner before us had been in posession for maybe a few years more.

On the morning of the closing Ryan went to the courthouse in town to start researching for some more details. He found the second deed for the house that details the transfer from the second to the third owners. The document pinpoints the birthdate of the house as 1855 and lists the builder and the original owner as Daniel Zeller, which is where the title of this Blog comes from. Although there is more research to be done, it seems that the house has changed hands quite a few times in its life.

On Thursday September 21st Ryan got some more information about one of the owners when Dale Johnson stopped by the house. Word travels fast in a small town and Dale had heard that someone was working on the house. Dale grew up in the Zeller house with his three brothers, Dick and Bill were older and have since passed away and Eddie was younger and now lives in Harrisburg. His parents, Joe and Betty, bought the house and moved the family in in 1933. When the Johnson's bought the house it still had a front porch that could be accessed by a second door on the front of the house. In 1936 Joe had the neighbor to the left, who was a carpenter, take off the porch, replace the second front door with a bay window and put on all the additions in the house including the two on the back of the ground floor and the third bedroom and bathroom on the second floor. He also moved the stairs added a half bath off the dining room.

The weekend approached and we decided to hold a garage sale on Sunday the 24th. To make a long story short, we didn't sell too much or for much money, but the real profit of the day was the wealth of more knowledge we gained about the house and the people we met. According to Fred Eppler and three others who stopped by, the Johnson's were a great family who everyone knew and liked all over town. We heard a lot about Joe's tendency to help out friends with clock repair. Apparently the workbench in the garage was for clock repair where he even made his own clocks and clock-parts. Betty seems to have been known for keeping a spotless house, two women recounted many evenings in her cozy living room. When a man stopped by and asked to buy the mailbox and the house numbers, were a little confused and said he could have the mailbox, but that the house numbers were really not for sale. We couldn't imagine why he would want something so simple that he could have bought at the local hardware store. Finally, he introduced himself as Fred Eppler. Fred explained that he was married in the living room to a granddaughter of Betty and Joe, the daughter of Dick or Bill in 1972. The two had mourned the decay of the house and he Fred was now planning to surpise his wife at Christmas with the items from the house. Ryan immediately removed the house numbers and the mailbox. Clearly, the items were more important to him than to us.

On the same day, someone came all the way from Allentown to check out the Mustang parts. To his dissapointment and ours, most are not new, factory direct parts, so they are not worth nearly as much as we thought. He bought a few things and we ended our Sunday. Week one ended ahead of schedule. Ryan was surprised how much had been accomplished.

Ryan was set to begin week two alone as we both looked forward to the arrival of friends Mark and Kate the next weekend to help with the work.

Work Begins

Finally owning the house was a huge relief. Ryan had moved specifically for the project and we had certainly put a lot of time, energy, and emotion into acquiring it. A birthday present for me a few days early, my birthday's the 16th, Ryan began work on the house early Friday the 15th of September.

I'm a rowing coach, and if you know anything about rowing coaches, you know that I work more than full time, so it was hard to finally be able to start the project, but not really be able to be a part of it right away. I will be putting in some evenings, weekends, and days off throughout the year and will of course be the primary blogger, but I won't be doing the labor day in and day out, which will be tough, but after all, I am the financial stability of the project as Ryan will be working on the house full-time.

I headed to work Friday morning feeling a little bit let down that I couldn't jump right in to the project, but I knew it was in good hands, especially that first weekend. Before I finished work that evening, Ryan's parent's Mike, a carpenter who taught Ryan everything he knows, and Marcia arrived and dove in. I was off to work again on Saturday, as Mike and Ryan headed for day two of demolition on the second floor and Marcia resumed her efforts to sort through the boxes of stuff, there's really no better word to describe it, that had been left in the house for more than ten year by the previous owner. Finally my weekend arrived and I spent Sunday morning on the second floor taking down lathe and plaster walls and making trips to and from the dumpster to clean up the mess that tearing down an entire second story can leave. It was tough, but satisfying work. The second floor had three existing bedrooms and a full bath, the home's only. By the end of the weekend, the two front bedrooms that spanned the width of the of the house and faced the front were one huge room. It was already easier to start to invision new layout ideas. On Sunday afternoon, I joined Marcia on the first floor to finish off sorting the junk in the house and the garage which required some aggressive pruning before the door opened freely. The garage is large, probably two and half cars wide. There was a workbench that had seen better days as well as a many doors, windows, screens, and some old furniture that we decided to tackle another day. The most interesting find in the garagw was what appeared to be many of the parts, interior and exterior trim along with engine parts, to a 1965 Ford Mustang. Mike was excited about these and we're hoping we may be able to get some money for them. More on that later. Most of what was in the boxes on the first floor was nothing more than a person's old stuff, not of much interest or value and the most intriguing thing we unearthed was the story of the previous owner that we began to piece together. We had heard all sorts of rumors from the neighbors about him and how he came to own the house, but we found a very different story.

It seems that he arrived in Lewisburg in the 1992 a graduate of the University of Virginia and later its medical school. He spent quite some time in the army as both a medic and pilot prior to that, but in the early 90's took a job at Geisinger, the large medical center in a town called Danville, about 20 miles away. It seems that he, as well as the man who owned the house from '90-'92 intended to renovate the place, but both ran into major financial trouble, as evidenced by paperwork throughout the house. Before he could renovate or sell the house, he was called back up to active duty and it seems that he left one day, probably in November of '94 and possibly never returned. The closets had clothes hanging in them, still in plastic with stapled bills from the dry cleaner and it seems that the contents of this man's life, from high school, we found cards from his 1978 graduation from Deerfield Academy, through his stint at Geisinger, there are plenty of medical books, even patient files, have been collecting dust in an empty house for over a decade.

So Sunday the 17th was my first day working and I have to say, based on my limited experience, that the early stages of home remodelling are quite satisfying. Ryan ripped out the bathroom on Friday morning before his parents even arrived and by Monday afternoon when his parents left town the second floor was opened up and ready for fresh ideas. With the contents of the house sorted, the front room on the first floor was prepared for a garage sale that would include anything interesting form the house, extra doors, windows and some old furniture not worth saving along with the cast-iron sink that we found to be too shallow to keep and the cheap, ugly kitchen that was installed in the early 90's, but clearly never used. We placed an ad on craigslist for the Mustang parts and the first weekend was over.

I resumed work on Monday and Ryan continued to work hard at the house all week. Removing the second floor ceiling proved to be more time intensive on cleanup duty than anything and by Thursday, less than a week into the project, the third twelve yard dumpster arrived.

Zeller House: The background Story

In August of 2005 I moved to Lewisburg to begin a new job. Lewisburg is a beautiful small town recognized as a historic district. I moved into a rental house on a street lined with pre-1900 federal style homes. It wasn't until Ryan asked about the run-down house across that I even noticed the place. Once we took a look, it was clear that the place was vacant and the more I studied it, the more apparent it became that no one had give the house any care in quite some time.

We had talked about getting out of rentals and buying a first home, but until I moved to Lewisburg, finances did not truly make this a possibility. Ryan is a carpenter by trade and when it became clear that he would be able to join me in Lewisburg by the fall of 2006, we began to seriously investigate the house. By February of 2006 we had the name of the owner and with his address in hand, crossed our fingers and mailed a letter of inquiry. To our surprise, he replied quickly and granted us entry to the house.

The little we could see in between the rusted blinds was nothing compared the disarray we found inside. Despite the neglected state of the house, the prospect of the project became more real and more exciting. Ryan and I began talking to the neighbors, trying to extract any helpful information about the owner or history of the house. Much of what we found out later turned out to be mostly rumor, but we'll get to the real story later. In March we had both an inspection and appraisal performed. By April, an informal offer was in the mail. Now you might be wondering, when did the owner put the house up for sale? Well, he never did, but the place was clearly in need of care that it had not seen in some time, so we decided to see how far we could take things. The phone conversation following the offer was tense, to say the least, but it did end in a request by the owner for a contracted offer.

Without hesitation we found a local lawyer and made it official. Within a week, our offer was accepted, signed and returned to the lawyer! It was hard to believe that we could actually be on the road to our first house. Not just any house, a beautiful brick, federal style home built in 1855. It was the perfect house for a remodel, structurally sounds, but not much else. As a builder, Ryan had come to be torn between his love of construction and fine home-building and his social responsibility to promote green and sustainable building practices. This house was an existing, beautiful historic structure, ready to be transformed into a lasting, sustainable, structure.

The summer seemed to craw by slowly with little communication about the house. We worried that the owner would become impatient if things did not proceed quickly enough. It was our first time through with all this, the lawyer, the bank, everything. Suddenly, though, it was the end of August. I was preparing to go back to work, Ryan was tying up loose-ends in Philadelphia and we were moving into a new apartment in Lewisburg. As work started up for me again, we got the good news. Finally, a closing date: September 14th, 3pm.

I broke away from work, Ryan had arrived in Lewisburg to stay just a few days before, so we met up at the bank. Just after 3:30pm we emerged, homeowners!

Ryan began work the next day. Our plan is to keep very detailed records, through this blog, of the process this house goes through. If all goes well, we'd like to do this again. We would also like to serve as an example for anyone, but especially young people, who are moving toward becoming homeowners and looking to improve the world in which they live by building or converting a home into a sustainable living space that takes into account the needs of a growing planet that will not be able to continue to sustain our civilization without education and change. The task at hand, the fragile state of the planet, can seem overwhelming, but we feel that the best way to tackle it is one person, one house at a time. I hope you enjoy spending the next year or so with us and the 1855 Zeller House.