TXvoodoo

We had to get the MLS ad placed before we had all the pictures completed, so here is the link again with 16 new photos of the interior that were not previously there. Looks like we might have two offers on the table by the end of the day. I think I secretly didnt want it to sell, I love this house...

http://search.har.com/engine/7818-Nairn-St-Houston-TX-77074_HAR14124248.htm

My 1956 Lucian Hood MCM will be available to tour this coming Sunday, August 19th, 2012 from 2-4 p.m. Here is a link to the HAR listing. Hope to see you then! http://search.har.co...HAR14124248.htm

We are selling because our daughter has graduated high school and will be heading off to college in Colorado. My wife and I are planning on leaving Texas and driving all the way to Patagonia. We plan on spending a year on the road traveling through Central America and South America. My wife is 38 and I am 43 so we feel young enough to take off a spend a little time on a grand adventure. If the house doesn't sell we will just rent it but it would be nice to have cash in the bank from the sale of the home so we can enjoy our trip a bit more. One day we will find another MCM home to restore, I can't imagine living in any other type of home. I would love to build a retro Mod and that may be what we end up doing.

Four more I took this morning. Sorry for the quality, they were taken with my phone. I will be having professional shots done to market the home for the sale.

Thanks for the compliments, I sincerely enjoy doing the work plus I think the house deserves to be brought back to its former glory (although the redwood has always been painted). The house is in Braeburn Valley a very small unique neighborhood of 97 homes that were almost all custom built in the mid 50's to early 60's. It was designed by Lucian Hood in 1956. This particular home was designed for a Swiss diplomat (Dr. Fuchs) and his wife who had no children but enjoyed entertaining guests so the home is quite large (2755 square feet) with large common areas. It is technically only a 2 bedroom 3 bath but could very easily be a 3 bedroom 2 bath with slight modifications. It sits on a 14,850 square foot corner lot with an incredibly gorgeous manicured Live Oak in the back yard. I have attached photos but please note that the photo of the front of the house is 6 years old so it does not reflect the mature front garden with Fig Ivy on the walls nor the stripped Redwood walls.

I have completed almost all the redwood restoration on the house and am very pleased with the results. It has made it a completely different home than it was! Oddly enough I think I am going to miss working on the house now that it is almost finished. My wife suggested I pick up my old hobby of fishing. The one thing I have learned through the process is that I would like to purchase another MCM to restore, although I hope it is a much smaller one this time. Too bad I can't make a living out of it.

I have included two photos. One is of the backyard and the large wall in the photo is 12' high by about 28' long. That was the one wall on the house that I dreaded, but it turned out to not be too difficult to finish. The front patio is another story. Lots of small areas that had to be sanded with various machines and a lot of hand sanding.

The house should officially be on the market by July 1st. It will be a for sale by owner for the first month and if there are no buyers we will list it with a realtor. I have been talking to Houston Mod about getting it on the Mod of the Month Tour but that does not seem too promising at the moment. Should it not make the tour I plan on posting an open house on this forum so tell your friends and come out to see this cool little piece of art!

Several months ago I started stripping the paint from the clear heart redwood on my home and this is the finished project. I plan on stripping the rest of the wood on the house in the near future. The post and beam in the photo were constructed of treated pine but I wrapped them in redwood that I salvaged from a home that was to be torn down in River Oaks. It was 1x6 tongue and groove but I milled each piece to a 4.5" board by cutting off the tongue and groove then stripping the paint and sanding each piece. I am very happy with the finished product and feel that it has added warmth, a ton of style and a more organic feel to the home. I also threw in a picture of the original doorknob. I put in a new front door and used steel wool to hand buff the doorknob which at that point was so tarnished that it was black. Let me know what you think.

These photos show the current progress of the redwood renovation. The back wall in the photos is complete having been stripped and sealed. The long wall to the left of the photos has been stripped but more sanding then sealing needs to be done. All the windows in the photo that are dark brown have had all the trim replaced as much of the wood was damaged. All the tan trim is soon going to be replaced also. You might notice that some of the beams coming from the wall that extend across the patio have been cut off. These were sagging from all the weight and 56 years of a 14 foot span with no center support. They will be replaced. Thus far the easiest part has been removing the paint, all the little tedious detail work is what takes so long. I've learned a few lessons along the way which cost me some time but in the future I will not be making these mistakes again. All things should move along faster now. Most of this work has been done on the weekends and I probably have around 30 hours into it so far. This is the back of the house which has the most damage to the redwood, the front should go really fast. I have had mixed reviews on the blonde coloring in the redwood. Some like it and some don't. I did some research on the internet and it turns out that this is clear heart redwood with sapwood. The article I read said that the two most sought after clear heart old growth redwoods are the pure clear heart and the clear heart with sapwood. I have attached a photo of a surf board I found on the internet that was made with reclaimed clear heart sapwood redwood, its pretty cool! So let me know your opinion on the sapwood. If need be I have enough salvaged redwood that I could remove the peices with the sapwood and replace them with peices that do not have the sapwood. What is your opinion???

P.S. I am looking for some of the bullet canister lights that were common in the 50's to replace the bare floodlights that are currently on the wall. Does anyone know a place locally to get them? I have found them on the internet but would prefer to see them before I buy them.

One wall is complete. Now some light sanding, a sealer then done. This wall is about 70 square feet and took me about two hours to complete the paint removal process.

I do hate to sell the house but I do want to leave the house as I feel it should be. The next owners may or may not appreciate the work I have done but I at least get to drive by the house in years to come and feel good about my contribution to its preservation. I can understand why people would think I am crazy to do this much work just so I can sell it in a few months but I do enjoy the work and it seems to be a noble thing to do for such a great house. All I really lose is my time. I did forget to mention one important stat about the Paint Shaver Pro. It can remove one square foot of paint in 20 seconds, so the work will go rather quickly. I have caught all sorts of hell both from my wife and my mother for taking on this job, LOL!

Okay, so most of you know I will be putting my house on the market in February. Until then we are doing lots of renovation and today I embarked on a true labor of love, something I have wanted to do when I purchased the house 6 years ago. Remove the paint from the clear heart old growth redwood siding and seal it naturally. Last week I purchased a tool that ran me about $1000 dollars that apparently is the best on the market. It is called a Paint Shaver Pro, google it. I did a lot of research and found that it truely is the best paint removal tool on the market, and it also comes with a sanding unit to get swirl marks out of the wood after grinding it. Not cheap, but after today I find that it is well worth it!! It is a grinder tool (see pictures) that attaches to a vacuum (less mess) it is rated by the EPA as a good tool for removing lead based paint also. So I start in on a few boards that I know I will be replacing because they are so damaged so that I can start to get the feel of the tool and how it works. When finished with a few of these boards I rubbed them with an oil based redwood sealer that had a red tint to it, this I did not like at all. No worries though, I plan on replacing these peices anyway. I move to a new area and start in on my first board. Blonde wood started showing. Holy crap, did I spend all this money to find out that large parts of the house have had the redwood siding replaced with cheap old pine??? As I move up the board with the grinder a gorgeous red streak starts to appear and I realize I have struck gold. Redwood sometimes has blond in it and this only enhances its beauty. Interesting note on that, I had salvaged a bunch of the same redwood siding from a house in River oaks before it was torn down and none of it has any blonde in it. Perhaps it is a younger wood. I only did a little bit of work today with plans to hit it hard tomorrow but I am very excited about what it is going to look like in the end. I am not crazy enough to remove the paint from the facia and soffit (there is a ton of square footage of soffit) as I do not want to be laying on my back for long periods of time with saw dust falling into my face. Brutal. Having researched the Eichler colors I came across a color swatch from Benjamin Moore paints that has translated all of the Eichler colors into current paints they sell. So the facia and soffit will be painted what is called Black Bean Soup. I took a piece of my salvaged redwood, sealed it and painted a strip of Black Bean Soup on it and found out that it matches and pulls out the dark grains in the redwood perfectly. Perhaps this was meant to be when Eichler chose the color because many homes in that era had redwood siding. One of the photos has that peice of wood laying up next to the recently stripped siding. I have two questions some of you may be able to answer. One is, I have come across some bondo ( it can be seen in one of the photos) that I am wondering how I might color it to look somewhat natural in the wood. I could just dig it out and stain the inside of the hole if need be. Also, I am not really digging the sealant that I used on the test board as it contains a red pigment that I think would be less attractive than the more natural color of what I have uncovered. In one of the photos you can see a patch that I sealed with the red pigment in it. I'm not diggin it. What suggestions might any of you have as far as sealing the wood with a sealer that does not contain pigment?

I plan on starting a blog showcasing the progress so in the future I will post a link should anyone want to follow. Its going to look like a million bucks when it is done. I hope you all will chime in with any comments or suggestions as it moves along. Thanks and have a great day!

Jason

Hey folks. I am getting ready to start stripping the paint from the redwood exterior of my Lucian Hood mod with plans to seal the wood for a natural look, the way it should have been in the first place. If anyone knows of a home being torn down that might have redwood siding (1x6 tongue and groove), fascia or soffet that I could salvage please let me know. I did manage to salvage almost 1600 linear feet from a River Oaks home that was being torn down, but I would like more of it to replace some of the more damaged wood on my home. Also, if you know of anyone that owns a Paint Shaver Pro or a certified HEPA vacuum that wants to sell it please contact me ASAP before I go ahead and drop the $1200 it will cost me to get them both new. Should I end up buying them new, I will be selling them after I finish the job on my house. Any help is greatly appreciated!

Latest update. Speaking of A/C, mine wasn't cooling last night so I had a repairman out to take a look. $3800 evaporater coil is all it needed. With a new compressor last year and a new coil this year, its practically new! On top of all these repairs the blower fan was replaced last week.

Wow. Looks gorgeous.

Yes that 3 phase does save money, I will stress that to potential buyers. Regarding the living room, it was the first room I saw in the house and it sold me immediately! I absolutely love that room. One day I plan on building a retro mod and you can bet on the fact that I will build a living room closely resembling this one. The ceiling and the fireplace will be the main features of that design. Thanks!

Sometime before December I will be putting my house up for sale, pricing it in the high $200's. It is a 2755 square foot Lucian Hood Mod custom designed and built in 1956 and sits on a 14,850 square foot corner lot. In the past 5 years the foundation has been leveled, a new $25K Duro-Last roof has been put on, new a/c duct work and insulation have been put in. The A/C is a 5 ton 3 phase unit and the compressor was replaced this year and was still under warranty, so it is good to go for quite awhile. When I first moved into the house my A/C bills were running $600 a month in the summer time but with the Duro Last roof my bills during this ridiculously hot and dreadful summer have run no more than $260. Not bad for a large old house with lots of floor to ceiling glass. Unfortunately my once lush lawn has been destroyed by the drought but it will come back soon enough. On that note, it also has a 6 station lawn sprinkler system. I am in the process of patching, painting and various other odds and ends, getting it ready to put on the market sometime in the next few months. The house is located in Braeburn Valley, a small pocket neighborhood of only 97 homes and bordered by Braeburn Country Club. My house looks out over part of the course. Braeburn Valley consists of all custom built homes in the mid 1950's and contains a few fantastic mods along with lots of new and friendly young residents that really appreciate the architecture. If any one knows of someone looking for an incredibly elegant mod with fantastic lines and a very sound structure then send me a pm. And remember, I've already done all the expensive work!

There were two Cadet Don actors. The first was Don Travis, the second was known as Cadet Don Davis. Cadet Don Davis was played by my father David Jones. I was only 2 or 3 when he was on television but I remember riding my tricycle through the studios while filming and I do have some footage of my father, brother, and myself touring Seaarama Marine world down in Galveston. My father apparently made a "celebrity" appearence while the cameras followed him wrestling an alligator, brushing the Killer Whale's teeth, and water skiing in the marina. I guess they aired that footage on the show. I went to channel 13 some years ago and asked if they had any footage but it had all been destroyed. The film they used at the time would not have lasted this long anyway. My father has been a folk singer since he was in highschool and now resides in northern California, not far from Mendicino........

If you are moving to Houston and are looking to purchase a MidCentury Modern home, I have one that I would sell. It is a 2755 square foot custom designed Lucian Hood home built in 1956. Lots of glass and a ton of improvements. Email me if you are interested.

Less desirable. I live close by and you only need be vigilant and have a good alarm system. I have never had a problem with this area except I do get tired of all the apartments.

The ad is back on craigslist

new link

Also;

Tragically Hip - a rock band out of Canada; The name, The Tragically Hip, was taken from a Michael Nesmith video called "Elephant Parts." The video contained a clip asking for contributions to The Foundation for The Tragically Hip: poor, afflicted people in need of jacuzzis, Lamborghinis and cocaine.

Good or Bad I don't know but a cool name none the less.

This is probably a stupid question, but how do you delete an entire post such as this one once you have started a new topic?

Copy and paste. It will work. I don't know how to insert a working link on this forum.

Thanks for the input. Actually I already live in Braeburn valley in the Lucian Hood mod on Nairn Street. I have first dibs on a house facing the golf course that is a prime candidate for a tear down (not a mod). Elderly man, many cats, house in need of too much repair, so I think I can get it for less than 100K. I have talked with his son and he is interested in doing a deal. I love the neighborhood as there are only 97 homes and the golf course is a great buffer to much of the 'riff raff' in the area. I do understand that city code prevents the small narrow windows that you find on many mods, but I am not aware of other things they might prevent. What else do you know of that would be against code? Maybe I'll just have to move out to the county where there are no restictions or city code.......................

Jason

Good Morning Folks,

I am looking for an architect that understands midcentury design to help design a house for me. I plan on building a house in Braeburn Valley that is completely retro, more than just 'influenced' by midcentury design. I want the house to blend in well with the 50's contemporary style homes that are so prevelant in the area. Also, my brother is a builder/developer and I am trying to convince him to do a small development featuring 1950's style mod homes in the range of 1200 to 1800 square feet. What's your take on this idea? Do you think there is a market for this idea? Is the current interest in these style homes just a fad? Suggestions? Opinions?

Jason

I used Starfish roofing for my roof, almost 4200 square feet and it has been great. I wasn't completely happy with their work but the quality of the roof is fine. Fairly inexpensive (as far as some of the other bids) and they went right over the top of my tar and gravel. I opted for a white roof for energy purposes and worried if it would look horrible but now we don't even notice it. The energy savings have been tremendous. Feel free to send me a message and I would be happy to show it to you or talk to you over the phone.