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.