Diary of an American Foursquare Remodel 1

I am attempting to buy my parents' house in North Providence. The "attempting" part is a long story, reserved for another time.

It's not the house in which I grew up with my parents and brother. My mother wanted a larger house - a dining room in particular - after my brother and I left home. Even with a second kitchen, lavette, and large family room on the lower level (yes, that's the basement), the 5-room ranch in Pawtucket was just getting "too small" to accommodate the new grandbabies being born and family dinners my mother loved to host.

So, my parents found a lovely three-bedroom two-story home - with a nice dining room - in a quiet, modest, residential neighborhood in North Providence. For years, I considered the house a colonial.

Wrong.

It's actually a very typical example of an American Foursquare, a simpler architectural style that succeeded more ornate Victorian architecture (which I adore, by the way) from the mid 1890s to the late 1930s (this house was built in 1932). It's actually two-and-a-half stories, with basically a square footprint, a front porch with wide stairs, a walk-up attic with a center dormer in the hip roof, and a bump out or bay in the dining room - all telltale traits of the American Foursquare. As soon as the weather gets better, I'll take a few exterior photos. In the meantime, I used an image from artsandcraftshomes.com.

Because I was so attracted to Victorian style, this house never did anything for me. But that was OK - it was my parents' house that I only visited, not anything I had to live in or decorate.

All that changed about 8 months ago when, three years after my Dad passed and four and a half years after my Mom passed, my brother insisted we had to do something about getting rid of the "albatross" of a house, as he called it.

I had reservations, though. This economy was (is) terrible, and the housing market tanked right after my Dad died in 2006 - probably the biggest reason we were still holding on to the mortgage-free house three years later - and was even worse now. Could we hold out a little longer? Or maybe one of us might need a place to live if we lost a job and our financial situation tanked, too. My brother would hear none of it. So I agreed, and he set about getting it appraised for sale.













In the meantime, I was happy living in an architectural gem of an apartment in a Victorian mansion in Pawtucket, the city where I was born and raised. Besides, I didn't like the North Providence house much anyway, right?

But I kept thinking that desperate people were selling, but smart people were buying now. I weighed the pros and cons, and darn if the pros didn't constantly outweigh the cons.

I toured the house and critically analyzed each room, asking 'what is it I don't like about this house?' The list came down to cosmetics. :)

So, here I am. Typing the story from the den of my very own home. I moved in November 25 over the Thanksgiving weekend. It was supposed to have been after the closing, of course, but it didn't happen that way. But I'm getting ahead of myself again...