Gingerbread 'abyss'

Facelift for Moon house into descends into major surgery

Posted

 

For a homeowner with a gaping yellow hole 10 feet deep under her front door, where a porch would normally be, Carol Skilling was microwaving cat food pretty calmly last Tuesday morning.

"Its quite an abyss," Skilling said matter-of-factly, as if the front of her house werent being shored up by scrap lumber.

The storybook porch that graces one of Lansings most important buildings, the former home of architect Darius Moon at 216 Huron St. (south of Martin Liuther King Jr. Boulevard between Kalamazoo and Allegan streets), is under repair this summer — big time.

What started as a delicate restoration of Moons artful curves and curlicues turned into a drastic structural "correction" and local history lesson that will end up costing the owners, Skilling and Tom Stanton, more than $75,000.

Stanton and Skilling bought the house in 2007, knowing its most prominent feature, the porch, might someday bring a financial day of reckoning.

But they were happy to assume stewardship of the 124-year-old "stick Victorian" style house where Lansings foremost architect lived from 1891 until his death in 1939.

"Tom and I werent going to have kids, so instead of kids, this was something to take care of," Skilling said.

They started saving money for the porch project years ago.

"Now were tapped out and going to the bank for a loan," Skilling said.

Moon built nearly 300 buildings over a 60-year career, only about 30 of which survive. His own house was one of his best. The porch, a curvy confection of gingerbread, was baked to entice clients.

"An architects house was his calling card," said project leader Amanda Harrell Seyburn of Sedgewick & Ferwada Architects. "Your house says, This is what I do, this is my style. Architects still do that."

In February, Harrell Seyburn and a builder specializing in historic restoration, Clayton Shafer, inventoried every piece of the porch to determine what was original and what was not.

Besides the expected wear and rot of 124 years, they found that many pieces were replaced incorrectly or missing. The porchs grandest flourish, a huge curlicue fiddlehead, was gone.

Working from century-old photos, Harrell Seyburn designed new pieces to match the originals.

Meanwhile, Clayton and his co-worker, Jared Browers, began stripping away 15 layers of paint, revealing intricate details that have gone unseen for decades.

"The quality of wood is incredibly high," Clayton said. "Vertical grain Douglas fir, the most durable soft wood there is."

The most intricate bits are now taking shape in the workshop of Steve Hopkins, a Mason craftsman who specializes in fine old wood detailing, using lathes and saws from the period.

So much for the fun part.

The abyss opened when work on the porch got underway in mid-July. First, the team tore out the floor and found that the joists under the porch were rotten — costly to fix, but not unusual.

Then they dug into the foundation.

Most porches sit on concrete footings, over a crawlspace, and more or less hang off of the house.

At the Moon house, the basement and underground foundation walls extended all the way to the front of the porch.

"Theres a room under there," Skilling said. Demolition revealed a cheerful yellow dungeon that will eventually be linked, via trapdoor, to the porch above.

It sounds like fun, but Skilling and Stanton are paying dearly for this feature.

A basement under a porch is a rare thing — for good reason. It moves a major support wall from the front of the house to the front of the porch, where it isnt needed.

"Instead of the porch hanging from the house, the house was hanging from the porch," Harrell Seyburn said.

It wasnt Moons fault. In 1975, the house was moved to Huron Street from its original location at 116 Logan St. (now Martin Luther Kin g Jr. Boulevard).

It was a miraculous, but hasty, save. Logan Street was set to be widened that year. Lansing put the Moon house and others on the demolition list. A grassroots nonprofit group, Save the Moon House, swung into action, raising money for a frantic, traffic-stopping, one-day move. (The story goes that sympathetic city officials moved the demo order to the bottom of the inbox to give them time to raise the money.)

The house made it safely to a vacant lot donated by the city, but the foundation wasnt put in with "proper understanding of construction principles," Shafer said.

"Everyone involved has asked how it passed inspection the first time," Shafer said. Last week, a course of bricks under the houses north wall were bowing a few inches outward, as if to say, "Hurry up! We cant hold this house up much longer."

In addition to putting proper joists under the porch, the restoration team plans to cut out part of the basement floor, take the north basement wall out and replace the foundation.

Tuesday, Mark Fineis, the concrete man, came by to check out the "abyss" and got a surprise.

Fineis told Clayton that his grandfather, a master carpenter, worked on another Darius Moon house, the R.E. Olds house, demolished in 1971 to make way for I-496.

"My father used to go out there and work on the mansion with him," Fineis said. "Olds never liked to back his car up. He had a turnstile, like the old locomotive turnstiles, in his garage."

Fineis was delighted to learn that Olds house was also designed by Moon.

"Youve come full circle," Clayton told him.

By early fall, the porch should be back in trim, complete with solid foundation, giant fiddleheads and trap door.

There will likely be one more feature on the front porch — the owners. If more problems crop up, the bill could approach six figures, but Skilling figures if youre in for a dime, youre in for a dollar.

"Its a few European vacations, isnt it?" she said. "Ill enjoy sitting on my porch instead."

 

Comments

No comments on this item Please log in to comment by clicking here




Connect with us