Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Time to begin

I originally intended to start a blog about our house and modern life nearly 4 years ago when we bought our 1953 Ben Dombar designed Mid Century Modern house. Then I could document its condition and our intent on renovating and adding to it. Having found out we were pregnant a month after moving in, lots of things changed. I will attempt to start at the beginning and catch up to speed over the next months as we continue to renovate our house.

So after 4 years of living in a 500 sq. ft. attic apartment in Clifton while I went to college, we upgraded to a 3 bedroom, 1-1/2 bath 2,500 sq. ft.
mid century modern in Paddock Hills, a small suburb of Cincinnati. Granted this was the only modern in town we could afford at the time, we were lucky enough to land in a quiet unknown neighborhood, complete with 10+ other moderns staged in between very large tudor homes and one right next door to us.

Though the house is very simple (not much modern bling) the spaces inside captivated us, and the simplicity of the house would allow me to apply my design intervention. Unfortunately the house had suffered many setbacks along the course of its history, the worst of which was the 1980-izing it went through with the previous owner, Gene. These applications will further be deemed as "Gened up" in future posts. Our initial interventions became mostly an exercise in purging.

The house layout consists of main living / dining area upstairs adjacent to a gallery kitchen and powder room at one end of the house and a large studio off the front of the main space. Downstairs are the three bedrooms, full bathroom, laundry room, & utility room. The house also has a very white vinyl 2-story solarium attached to the back of the house. We have been told it originally was a screen porch upstairs and open downstairs. The house next door has an awesome
screened in porch that cantilevers off the back of their house.

4 comments:

  1. great house! should be interesting to see the progress.

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  2. Just stumbled upon your blog. Your previous owner reminds me of ours...Wendall. He 1980-ized our 1960 ranch style home. I am pretty sure we say his name and talk bad about his style choices at least once a week. Nice to know someone else is out there bad mouthing their previous owner as well. ;)

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  3. It's amazing people could be so disrespectful to the original style of the house. I don't mean to badmouth him so much, but it adds some humor.

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