#673 Ozarks Bungalow Research via Social Media

As our Ozarks Bungalow research continues, we turn to social media to learn all we can about the history of our home.

Stories from Aurora is a Facebook group of about 1900 members.  Who better to ask? 

So last month, we posed the question, "what memories do you have of this 100-year-old house on College Street across from Oak Park?"

Here are some of our favorite responses:

I believe Mrs. O. E. Moore lived in this home. I remember visiting her in this home in the 50's. I in particular remember built in mirrored cabinets in the dining room. Sure hope I'm not leading you astray and thinking of Bob and Irene Moore's original home which was on Elliott. Beautiful picture of this home---it has been well cared for and loved thru the years. Enjoy!

I used to mow the lawn at that house for several years when Mrs. Moore lived there.... Took two and a half hours and paid $10. She built the house next door too and I had to do both.....Kept me skinny long time. She was always very nice to me. Time line 1971 to 1975

They always bought girl scout cookies from me.

It has kept its age very well, I've been in the house when the Moores lived there and they were very picky about the house. I thought the living room was odd and not very big with lots of doors all around. It was pretty with the fireplace going as you walked up the steps to the front door. I always enjoyed the room to the right, I think it was a study or a family room, it had lots of light shining in. But its still a beautiful home today. I didn't know it was that old however. Enjoy your stay in a landmark home.

Does the kitchen still have pink appliances? I had never seen pink before.

I walked and jumped all over the concrete wall around it while waiting for the bus every day! Still live just down the street!

One of Aurora's finest homes of the past. They don't build them like that any more.

That home should be on the National Registry. Also can you fit your car in the garage, its so narrow. Are the flower beds still there, Mrs. Moore was really picky with those and worked in them all the time.

I always loved that house. I cleaned for Mrs Moore in the late 70's. I thought the ceiling in the living room was awesome. Mrs Moore said she got the idea from Better Homes and Garden.

This is one of my favorite houses in Aurora!

I have been your neighbor for the last 9 years and have admired the simple elegance of the home.

I have looked at that house almost everyday since I was a small child. I have always loved how beautiful it is.

Yours in appreciating the benefits of crowd sourcing and the kind words of our neighbors,
Mary

#672 Ozarks Bungalow Research

Research continues on the history of our Ozarks Bungalow.

Research is fun - no matter where you do it.  I especially love research at the library.  And I've been known to spend a lot of time searching online sources from home.  This time, though, our successful research started at the Hair Shed. 

Through my hair stylist, we are lucky to meet Margaret, a descendant of the family who owned the lot before our house was built.  Sadly, this grand Victorian house burned around 1910, four years before the 1914 construction of our bungalow.  Here's how it stood proudly on our corner lot in 1907.  

Hinchey, R. E., & Berninghaus, O. E. (1907). Aurora: Lawrence County Missouri. St. Louis, MO: Buxton & Skinner, Printers and Publishers.

Through Margaret and her friend Carol Ann, we are introduced to Betty, who lived in the Ozarks Bungalow in the 1930s.  Betty's grandparents, the second owners, purchased the house in 1930 and lived in it for 50 years.  Here's what the house looked like in 1937 while Betty was living here. 

Lawrence County Historical Society (Mo.). (1900). Lawrence County in pictures, 1937. Mt. Vernon, Mo.: Lawrence County Historical Society.

Betty stopped by last week to help us figure out the alterations made by her grandparents in their big 1958 renovation. We still haven't discovered the original floor plan, so we're thrilled to hear Betty's stories about the now nonexistent back door, the pocket door that may or may not be still inside the wall, and the back porch that was re-used for the expanded kitchen.  

Yours in researching our house and meeting our neighbors,
Mary

#671 Ozarks Bungalow featured in American Bungalow

After years of subscribing to American Bungalow, we now receive our copies in the mailbox at our very own Ozarks Bungalow.

The latest issue is of particular appeal.  For one thing, we love the wisteria on the cover.

And inside (on page 8 to be exact), we find our Ozarks Bungalow included in the family album:

We're excited to be included and we look forward to continuing our renovation documentation here in our blog.  To see only our posts about bungalow renovation, just click on the the bungalow label at the right.

Yours in being part of the bungalow family,
Mary

#670 Overhead Garage Door Returns Home

They just don't make them like this anymore.

Our Overhead Door opener Model H is is 60 years old, has been in constant use since the 1950s, and still works well.  

We decide to replace it in order to take advantage of the modern-day safety stops and remote controls. But what to do with our classic?   

We offer to donate it back to the installer, Overhead Door of Springfield, and they snap up our offer.  Soon our Model H will be getting the rest it deserves, in an exhibit at the Overhead Door district office in Kansas City. 

Yours in recycling,

Kelly

#669 Thanksgiving donation to Habitat

Shortly before Thanksgiving, we empty our house of unneeded items and make a donation to Habitat for Humanity.  It's a win win.

Steve and Glen from the Springfield store pull up out front right on schedule.

And soon, they're carrying out two built-in cabinets.

The fireplace mantel goes too including all that lovely pink marble.

There are lots of other building materials to donate too, so that gives us time to get to know each other as we fill up the back of the truck.

Springfield's Habitat for Humanity is doing good work and we're happy to be a part of it. Our items went straight to the sales floor at Habitat ReStore where anyone can shop for architectural artifacts.  The proceeds help with local housing needs. And we've moved our own Ozarks Bungalow restore project several steps forward. 

Yours in recycling,
Kelly

#668 Halloween Bungalow

To put us in the spirit of the season and to let the neighborhood know we're here, we decide to decorate more for Halloween than we ever have before.

We replaced 3 white light bulbs with orange bulbs on our front porch.  Whew!

But then we see this cool bungalow on the The Craftsman Bungalow web page and we start to think we should go bigger. 

Yours in preparing for the season,
Mary

#667 Our Gypsum Lath Surprise

Our Ozarks bungalow was built in 1914, the heyday of finishing interior walls with lath (thin wooden strips nailed to the framing) covered with several coats of smoothed wet plaster. The wet plaster oozed between the lath to form 'keys' which hardened as they dried, locking the plaster to the wall. You can imagine this was not something 1914 homeowners took on as a weekend do-it-yourself project.  It took a lot of time and skilled labor to install lath and plaster.  Here's a behind-the-scenes peek at one of our lath and plaster walls where you can see the vertical wall studs, horizontal lath, and oozing plaster keys frozen in time since 1914. 

So I was both surprised and puzzled when I opened up one of our interior walls and found no lath, no plaster, no oozing, no keys, but instead this:

What's up here?  From the back, this wall looks to be covered with modern drywall, clearly not from 1914.  But it's odd that each drywall strip is only 16" wide. My first thought was the wall had been remodeled and I had found where a drywall crew used up their scrap.  But upon closer inspection, I saw the drywall strips have two factory-finished edges.  So they were not field-cut scraps.  They were created as 16"-wide strips at the drywall factory.  Hmmm.

Take a close look at the photo for more clues.  The wall shows ghosts of a previous lath-and-plaster wall.  See the gray horizontal lines on the framing boards spaced at the same width as lath?  That's where the wet plaster originally oozed between the now-missing lath. The vertical studs show a pattern of two nail holes where each lath was attached.  So at one time, this wall too was covered in authentic 1914 lath and oozing plaster.  But then what happened?  Why remove the lath and plaster?  Once removed, why would a builder use 16"-wide drywall strips rather than full 4'-wide sheets to rebuild the wall?  Hmmm.

About the time we were sleuthing our walls, I was pleasure reading Norm Abram's book Norm Abram's New House and came across a paragraph Norm wrote just for me:

By the time my father built his house, the system had evolved into fastening panels of rock lath (a rigid gypsum core with a paper covering) that were sixteen by forty-eight by three-eighths of an inch thick to the studs and then applying about three-eighths of an inch of plaster: a base coat of brown plaster and then a finish coat of white plaster or plaster tinted to the desired color of the room.

Of course I fact-checked Norm with a specimen sliced from our own wall.  In the photo below, there's our 3/8" thick gypsum lath at the top layered with multiple coats of seamless plaster to form nearly an inch-thick wall surface just as Norm described.

Combining this revelation with other more visible clues, we've concluded our house underwent an extensive remodeling in the 1950's when builders were in an extended period of transition converting over from the old-school labor-intensive lath-and-plaster approach to the speedy modern drywall. As part of that 1950's remodeling, most of our original 1914 lath and plaster was ripped out and replaced with then-popular hybrid gypsum lath. 

Surprise. Ours is a 1914 Ozarks bungalow with mid-century gypsum lath walls.

Yours in wall sleuthing,
Kelly