Bucklin House Through The Years
September 5th, 2008 @ 1:30 am by Cliffe | Sorted Photo Exposure
Now I know that I posted about a turn-of-the-century Central District house earlier this week. But when it rains… Vintage Seattle reader Bryan kindly sent in some photos of his handsome 1906 Victorian in the Central District’s Garfield Neighborhood. Also check out The Bookwalter House from last week. Take it away, Bryan:
I have been meaning to send you some pictures of our 1906 Victorian home in the Garfield neighborhood of the Central District ever since you put the call out several weeks ago. I have dug up a couple of versions of the 1937 records photo, as well as a 1961 shot from the SDOT website. You can see some pretty significant facade changes between 1937 and 1961 — it always amazes me that people thought that faux brick/stone asphalt siding was preferable to the original finish details. But I guess the benefit was that it appears to have preserved the original clapboard and shake siding underneath all those years.
The owner before us bought the house in 2002 from an estate and proceeded to do much of the renovation over ~2.5 years as a “flip” project. He stripped off the 1960’s facade and restored many of the original details, as well as completely re-doing the interior. [...] We have proceeded to repaint the house in more interesting colors both outside and inside and do some re-landscaping since then as can be seen in the 2007 pictures.
We hope to someday restore the curved Victorian bracket details in the four roof gables. The front one was completely missing, the back one was missing a piece, and the two dormer ones were dangerously holding on when we bought the house, so we had them all taken down for now until we can get them re-done.
You can also see in both the vintage as well as the modern pictures that our two 1906 neighbor houses are still around as well. The house to the right is a near identical mirror twin of ours, but interestingly we have found out that originally the foundation was intended for a different house that never got built and instead became a near copy of our house.
Bryan Bucklin
Via E-Mail
9/4/08
The owner before us bought the house in 2002 from an estate and proceeded to do much of the renovation over ~2.5 years as a “flip” project. He stripped off the 1960’s facade and restored many of the original details, as well as completely re-doing the interior. [...] We have proceeded to repaint the house in more interesting colors both outside and inside and do some re-landscaping since then as can be seen in the 2007 pictures.
We hope to someday restore the curved Victorian bracket details in the four roof gables. The front one was completely missing, the back one was missing a piece, and the two dormer ones were dangerously holding on when we bought the house, so we had them all taken down for now until we can get them re-done.
You can also see in both the vintage as well as the modern pictures that our two 1906 neighbor houses are still around as well. The house to the right is a near identical mirror twin of ours, but interestingly we have found out that originally the foundation was intended for a different house that never got built and instead became a near copy of our house.
Bryan Bucklin
Via E-Mail
9/4/08
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| Bucklin House. 1937 tax photo. |
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| Bucklin House. 1961 photo. |
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| Bucklin House. As seen in 2008. |
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| Bucklin House. As seen in 2008. |
September 5th, 2008 @ 5:27 am
The reference to the SDOT photo — does this mean I could see my house, during the time I lived in it, in this photo archive? Please tell me more!!
September 5th, 2008 @ 8:02 am
Hi Martha:
SDOT has to have been doing work on the road by your house for it likely to be found in their archive. I somewhat stumbled upon that photo over a year ago while looking in their archive on the Seattle City government web site. If I recall you can search by your street name and/or area of the city to get the photos they have of your area, but then you just have to look through the pictures to see if you recognize something.
Happy Hunting,
- Bryan
September 5th, 2008 @ 9:18 am
Martha, King County began a WPA program in the 1930s of taking a photo of every single house in the county, usually from the year that they were completed. Any houses built before the program started, they just snapped a photo as it stood at that time. Sometimes more than one photo exists, too, in a later decade.
You can request the photo(s) of your house that are on file with the King County Tax Assessor’s department: assessor.infoATmetrokc.gov. It’s been awhile since I requested my house’s photo–I got a photo from the year it was built, a photo taken in 1989 when major renovations were done, and the house’s original blueprint! Great fun.
September 6th, 2008 @ 6:14 am
Thanks so much for the info! I made some headway already with the archive. Seattle is such a cool place! I wanna come back!
September 7th, 2008 @ 1:07 pm
Martha, (and anyone else interested),
Shannon’s right about the 1937 photos - if your house, or any house you are interested in, existed in 1937, then the WPA took a photo of it, and there’s a copy of it in the archived King County Tax Assessor’s files at the Puget Sound Regional Archives.
The King County Assessor’s office is the place to start, as you will need the tax parcel number of the property - the photos are not indexed by address, but parcel number. You may have it on your tax bill, or if you are researching a childhood or ancestral home, you may need to get it from the KC Assessor. Tax parcel numbers can be obtained by calling the King County Assessor’s office at 206-296-7300, or through the online iMap parcel viewer located at the KC Assessor’s web page - http://www.kingcounty.gov/assessor, follow the links.
But once you have the parcel number in hand, cut out the middleman and call the Washington State - Puget Sound Regional Archives at 425-564-3950.
The Puget Sound Regional Archives have the old King County Tax Assessor’s records, as well as old SDOT and WSDOT records, and the entirety of the 1937 WPA photos, as well as many other small government photo collections.
If there’s more than one photo of your house from any of the photo collections, the Puget Sound archives will have them. My 1922 Greenlake cottage had two, and my sister’s 1924 Bryant Spanish revival had three(!).
My house had been “remuddled” in the 50’s and 60’s, and there were features and details that I was at a complete loss as to try to understand why they were what they were, what they had been, and how to restore them. I had a wierd front porch, a long, extremely skinny dining room, and stairs to an originally finished upstairs that were steeper and narrower than a ship’s ladder.
The 1937 photo, a 1952 photo, and the original floor plan, all from the Puget Sound Archives brought everything into clear focus. The cottage had originally been a tiny Colonial Revival with a columned front porch, the house originally had no dining room, but a built-in Craftsman dining nook, and the stairs had been (badly) moved to allow for the addition of a bathroom upstairs, and interior stairs to the basement.
The photos also make great housewarming and wedding gifts if the couple is moving to a new house together (especially for the older couple who really already has everything). You can order copies of the photos in several different sizes (I like the 5 x 7 or 8 x 10), and have them matted and framed alike with a small number denoting the year of the photo on the mat (you can find lots of options in the scrapbooking section of paper and craft stores) - simple black or wood frames work nicely.
September 9th, 2008 @ 11:07 am
I love the oval windows!
September 12th, 2008 @ 3:14 pm
Thanks didi, but try figuring out a way to put curtains on them!
We love the look of the oval windows, but they do result in a slight issue for covering them since they are in the bedrooms, so we just gave up. There are two matching ones on the backside of the house as well.