This house was built circa 1920 in Historic Oakwood. When the house was purchased it had 1148sf of heated space, 3 bedrooms (one really couldn’t be considered a bedroom since it had a door that led directly into the master bedroom), and 2 baths (one of which was the master but it was so tiny you couldn’t open the shower door but half way before it banged into the toilet). We loved it! Niah and I quickly started working on our five year plan to remodel/add on. In essence, the project required the removal the ofentire roof and the back third of the house which was a late 1950s poorly constructed renovation of a back porch. In our reserach of the history of the house, we found that each house on our street are mirror images of each other – twins. You can really see this on the front elevations of the houses and the Sanborn maps.
306s sister house is 308 Pell St and it is rumored that a large tree fell on the roof of 306 in the 50s from possibly Hurricane Andrew. The roof we think looked more like 308 and less like the hip roof that was currently on the house. A clue that the 306 roof was the visible height of the chimney. It was around 6 feet taller than the roof line and you could see the ghost line of the original roof about 3 fee down from the top. This is now exposed in our upstairs den. This research was what convinced the RHDC and COA to allow us to do the second story addition. The back of the house (kitchen, second bathroom, and bedroom) and the second floor are new (stairs up are in the kitchen, master suite, laundry room, office, and upstairs den). The housenow looks more like we think it may have looked when it was originally built and much closer to its twin. It also allowed us to almost double the square footage. The original portion of the house, was left alone – new paint and new finishes in the hall bathroom but other than that it is what it was when we bought the house. The new portion of the house is more modern, but also classic enough to stand the test of time.
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