When Sheldon Wagner first bought a house in the Edmonton neighbourhood of Holyrood about eight years ago, he envisioned doing all the renovations on the 1924 home himself.
He quickly realized the labour of love would take much more than good intentions.
"My dad almost had a heart attack when he saw what I bought," Wagner recalls with a laugh.
Now, thanks to help from trained professionals, Wagner and his partner, Christine Causing, have completed their home renovation, an ambitious undertaking they lived through for eight months.
The 1,650-square-foot home was one of the original farmhouses in the area just southeast of downtown. Most of the houses that now make up the surrounding Holyrood neighbourhood were built in the 1950s.
Wagner loved the character of the home -- its abundance of wood, beautiful windows and enclosed front porch -- as well as its central location. But restoring the home to anything close to its original condition required an enormous amount of work.
The original walnut floors were too damaged to be restored and had to be replaced. An inspection revealed there was virtually no insulation behind the plaster walls.
"The R-value was zero," Wagner says.
They tore out all the walls and replaced them with drywall. The original wood pillars and trim had to be stripped down and refinished; some had to be replaced. The wiring needed to be redone. And the kitchen, which had been renovated by a previous owner in the 1980s, looked shabbier and more out of place as the work on the rest of the house progressed, so Wagner and Causing renovated it, too.
"We actually decided halfway through to do the kitchen, because if we left it, everyone would notice that this was the room we didn't renovate. It was so noticeable," Causing says.
Before embarking on the main renovation, the couple had already redone the enclosed front porch themselves, painstakingly replacing many of the tiny panes of original glass in the windows that surround it.
Wagner also installed stamped tin ceilings in the foyer and dining room of the home. While they weren't original, such ceilings would have been found in homes of that era, he says.
Upstairs, all three bedrooms and the bathroom were gutted. A compact wooden staircase was added from the second floor to reach a studio/loft space above, where Wagner, a manager for Capital Power, paints in his spare time.
At one time, the house was topped with a "widow's walk" -- a small, fenced area on the flat part of the roof where people could sit, Wagner says.
The basement space wasn't really usable, so it remains unfinished.
Previous owners had done smaller fix-ups along the way, but that, too, was part of the problem.
"You get 30 years of people doing bad work and you can really tell," Wagner says. "Even when they were gutting out the plaster upstairs, they found remnants of showers in three different locations. Over the years, the walls got moved and different plumbing was put in."
Since they've moved into the house, the couple has heard from several previous residents who have told them their own stories. Just last year, a woman who grew up in the house contacted them after her mother died. The house had been so special to her mom that the family wanted to plant a lilac in the front yard and have a ceremony there, Wagner says.
The personal stories and history of the house enhance its appeal, he adds.
"Especially when you find a special place to live, it makes (the renovation) worthwhile. In retrospect, when you add up the bills, you might think, 'really?'
"But you have a big chunk of your life attached to the house. There's a history there, and to not keep that up is kind of a waste."
-- Postmedia News
