Hello forum! Finally I'm coming out of the shadows to brave asking a question...and it's a doozie! Let me begin by saying I'm sorry for adding yet another "help me ID my house" post where I'm sure everyone sees too many of them as it is. However, forgive us for we have spent almost three years rescuing our beloved little house from ruin and we feel like we have NO idea how to start this process of finding our house's history. We've read books, read the web until we've wanted to nail-gun our computers, and taken the long slow stroll to nowhere with our City of LA resources, and here we are. Warning - this post is probably too long! Please be patient with us. We also posted this query on the American Bungalow Mag. forums, but didn't get any helpful responses.

As I said we own a small bungalow in the Los Feliz area of L.A. where Hollywood is our west, Silverlake to our south, Griffith Park to our north and Glendale to our east. We are hoping find the house's history, hopefully including architect and builder information. We have reason to believe the house's design came from a catalog or some other form of home plans sale due to the fact that LOTS of other houses (as in every third one or so) thru this part of the northeast corner of Hollywood share some or most of the same exterior and interior architectural details - right down to matching dimensions, materials, and color treatments.

Our house:
http://homepage.mac.com/wmld/ournewhouse/PhotoAlbum9.html

A few facts:

The house was built in 1905. No matter how hard I try not to believe it, every scrap of official city paperwork says so, as did the Previous Owners who grew up in the house and inherited it when their father passed in the late 1990s.

Produced for us during Escrow was a copy of a City of LA permit from the year 1920, allowing the owner to convert the sleeping porch into an 11' x 13' room.

The house is clad in 6" x 3/4" cedar clapboards, and cedar shingles clad the front and back facing gable walls. The eaves are minimum 3' deep, and the roof is stick-frame construction with 1" x 3" battens for the cedar shake shingles (underneath two layers of composite shingles from later maintainence.

The "tapered trim" motif for exterior window casements and even the 45 deg. cut of the rafter tails and floating rafter ends is not uncommon in this neighborhood (we're only maybe 15 minutes drive away from Pasadena and the famed "bungalow heaven" area.

Somewhat elaborate main windows are present - long divided light runs above 3 panels in a "casement-panel-casement" arrangement.

The entire house is trimmed in flat sawn fir with 3/8" bead separators, crown lintels, plaster walls/ceilings with box beams in the formal rooms and 2" cove moulding dropped to meet all the casement crowns as picture rail in the informal rooms. We've stripped A LOT of paint to reveal a beautiful dark reddish-gold "brown mahogany" type stain that deeply colored all the trim (probably an analine dye from those days!)

The floors are 1" x 4" Vertical Grain Douglas Fir planks laid directly on the 2-1/8" x 5-3/4" rough sawn floor joists.

Posts and Piers are formed from little pyramids of bricks on the dirt supporting 4" x 4" posts joining 4" x 4" girders every 8 feet or so across the footprint of the house, holding up the floor joists.

The foundation walls were (and some still are) red brick footers with cripple walls up to the floor joists.

All the interior walls are fir lathe and 3-part plaster, creating a wall covering about 7/8" thick.

The "pantry" is wainscotted in v-groove beadboard from floor to 5' up the walls. Lath and Plaster walls continue from there on up.

A very typical craftsman style colonnade between the living room and dining room is trimmed out, although two columns were clearly removed.

Knob and Tube wiring, in B+ to A- shape was throughout, but I'm about 60% of the way thru replacing it.

A little enclosed extension off the dining room houses a 5' wide built-in buffet, although the top half cabinetry and some posts or columns of some sort have clearly been removed to create a large window.

The original fireplace (since rebuilt as per original) was laid with NO foundation - courses of bricks began right on the dirt at grade. It really surprized the relatively young mason and mason's assistant that rebuilt the fireplace from the ground up.

All the framing lumber in the house is rough sawn, and actual dimensions - clearly predating modern mill sizes for framing lumber.

There is plumbing left over from one gas entry point in the overhead to service the dining room chandelier position. This plumbing appears to have been cut into later to add a heater in the bathroom, and add (then later again remove) a gas feed down into the kitchen.

The fireplace rebuild revealed a clay flue tube coming from an apparent vent position in the adjoining Kitchen wall that clearly by design joined the masonry for the Chimney and shared it's venting duties. The masons surmized it could have been a vent for a wood stove, and the later cutting into and back out of overhead gas plumbing would bear that out.

VERY faintly on a 4" x 4" gird under the floor joists, one can read "GANAHL LUMBER" - a company here in the LA area (and elsewhere I'm sure) that's still in buisness today.

That's about all for now. Our hope and dream is to track down either a copy of the original plans, an architect and/or builder's name, or identify a home seller's catalog or publication that this house's design may have been sold from.

We're happy to shell out a little money to a local historical architechture type person or restoration expert that might help us find out our house's history. We confess we have NO idea where to start, and we feel like we've exausted the City of LA options (if you can call them 'options')

That's just about all the info we can think of that might be helpful to some of the experts out there hopefully reading this, and we've got our fingers crossed some kind soul will have some help to offer.

Thanks in advance to any and all for pointers to local authorities or experts that might want to help us out!

Cheers,

William

sorry, can't help on the id but good job on the house, i like the way you work.

great looking house and very nice work so far.

what makes you think there is a possible "id" for the house? is there something to make you think it is a kit house? or by an architect that may be traceable? it would be nice to know the history of the house i agree. but not sure anyone here can do that.

keep posting updates on your progress

Thanks for the compliment! We've got a long way to go. I'm also not sure anyone can help me, but why not ask, right? I hear that Ms. Thornton and others are quite the experts on the topic. We're not expecting anyone to perfectly match our house to a plan from a famous catalog or book or something, we're just hoping someone might see the exterior and interior details and recognize them from a home of their own, or from a plan or catalog they've seen. We have poured over plans and plan books that we can lay our hands on either online or in print, and we have never found a close enough match that we thought we should follow up on it. The biggest thing that stops is is the house's age - built in 1905, and most catalogs and kit house books seem to start about 1908? Seems like the best we can hope for is maybe our house is from a basic similar plan that was carried into the years of the catalog home. We realize this may not be true, but it's hard to imagine our house did NOT come from a kit or catalog, or at least plans offered by a lumber company or something because SO MANY OTHER houses share SO MANY MATCHING details. When I say matching, I mean duplicate. It's uncanny from the outside, and with a few of our neighbors sort of amazing on the inside.

That tells us that even though our home is most likely not from a famous catalog or something, it's highly likely it's plans and details were offered in some sort of "kit" fashion, and as such might be able to be tracked down. Add to that the fact that there are so many of the "modest" types of bungalows around us in this area that also share details with each other, and we can't help but be this curious. For example, there is one house on the next block over from me that is a dead ringer for this plan - http://architecture.about.com/library/bl-bungalowplan-planry-155.htm

My guess after noticing the girder under the house with the faint black stencil of "Ganahl Lumber" on it (they're still in buisness today in some form or fashion but I'm not a customer), that back in those days they may have been in the business of selling pre-cut or partially cut kits, along with a selection of plans and details to get customers or contractors in the door. I've read that a business called Pacific Lumber Company in the era of our house was buying newly designated tracts of plots in and around the LA ara and selling homes from plans for which they also supplied the materials kits and subcontracted local builders.

Anyway, we're not looking for the exact history - we invite people to take a look at the photos, and if you recognize the details or trim or windows or something, share it here. Who knows? Maybe someone will have seen a catalog or a millwork detail that will ring a bell after seeing our pics.

One day next week I'm going to pay a visit to our local LADBS (LA dept. of building and safety) walk-up counter, deed in hand, and ask them for everything they've got on my address. I've already got the copy of the 1920 permit for the sleeping porch conversion.

That's all for now, and looking forward to anything anyone wishes to share.

Cheers!

I should add - two big motivations for us are #1 getting a clue as to how the house's front porch looked originally. We have lots of clues but feel it was substantially altered/extended/torn off and redone. We want to know what it was, compared to what it is, so we can decide what it will become when we fix it. #2 A dining room buffet and original wainscotting + plate rails, a living room butler, and large parts of the kitchen were completely removed for no imaginable reason and if we nail down any book or catalog or group of plans this house might have come from, chances are we'll find a clue as to the original millwork too.

Cheers,

WM

Hi William;

Are you absolutely sure of the construction date of 1905? Because that pretty well precludes it being a kit home.

According to Dale Wolicki, Aladdin Kit Homes was the very first company to offer kit homes by mail, in 1906.

If your house *was* a kit house, my first guess would be that it's a kit from Pacific Ready-Cut Homes, but they didn't start selling kit homes until 1908. Pacific Ready Cut Homes was based in Los Angeles and sold about 40,000 kit homes in and around California.

But again - if that build-date of your house is correct (1905), it can't be a kit home.

Sorry I could not be of more help.

Rose