What a fascinating house, hope you keep posting as the restoration goes on!

Great pictures and awesome house !

Thanks, I am not in tune with a lot going on around here or much of local history, stumbled across it when I was looking for the house my great grandfather lived in when he died. It is in a decayed neighborhood, and I suspect they are having trouble getting funds, I googled a bit wanting to know more about it a couple years ago, saved a couple photos I found which I can't post because they aren't mine.

The link will show what it looked like before they began restoration. Pretty bad. I fear the progress will be slow, I just hope they don't give up.

Here is a link that might be useful: Octagon House before restoration began

So you took the picture from the street, and the gal thought that was bad, huh? Then she should put a fence up all around her property!
Lovely octagon home, just lovely.
JoanMN

I didn't know this was her property, knew it was near there but could have cared less until I saw what I saw, but she is a very controversial person here locally, ran for mayor, calls talk radio all the time. It is being developed into luxury condominiums so I doubt she will want to fence it off and hide all that expensive ornamentation. There's a lot more there in front, but I'll let it go, don't want to make the thread too long to load with more photos.

I like the octagon house better :-).

As always Aliska your stories draw me in and your pictures keep me reading. What a beautiful old home, I bet it saw its share of stories over the years too. If I were young and rich I would love to be able to restore one of those old homes.

The new stuff, well, it is new stuff, doesn't do a thing for me personally. I rather like the old stuff myself. Although upon looking at it again, I could probably swim in that pond. LOL

Thanks

Valerie

I love that old house. I hope the restoration will continue. It needs to be kept.

Heh, I'll bet some kids out some night will take a dip in that pond.

I will try to find out more about that house. Somewhere I read it was once a part of the underground railroad.

The view from there is not nice like it would have been when it was built, overlooking a relatively new commercial area and the river. Now it is ugly, the neighborhood is too bad for a bed and breakfast or restaurant.

I don't think it is in danger of destruction, but you know where the money goes now, economic development a la first photo. I'll see if I can find out more about it. There are still some nice folks living in those bad neighborhoods, and it would sure make a nice home, if only to keep it occupied to ward off vandals and to preserve it from decaying again.

Maybe we should have an old house thread. I go poking around looking for lovely old homes to photograph. Found one the other day that looks like it belongs in New Orleans, am waiting for the right lighting conditions to go photograph it and a couple more garden stops to photograph amongst my own gardening activities.

As to my stories, I should put up a blog, I suppose, but who would read it?

Thanks for all the nice comments. If there's any real news about the house, I will post an update. There are quite a few dotted around the country. There was a website devoted to octagon houses, don't know if it is still up; so many have been destroyed already, we had one other one, never saw it.

A few local blighted areas are being settled by ordinary folks who are fixing up the properties. Some of the nicest gardens are there. Maybe there is light at the end of the tunnel. It is terribly difficult to restore even the newer older homes, so much work and hard to maintain architectural integrity. I'm fighting that with my 75-year-old craftsman bungalow. Can't find the right parts (locksets, etc.), molding and doors to repair things right. There are restoration hardware businesses for restoring those old Victorian homes which is a good thing, but the components are expensive. People with that kind of money want new homes. I like the older ones. Most of the new ones don't have much character.

I read Martha Stewart's home in CT is for sale. That must be one gorgeous place.

Love your photos. Don't we all wish they would restore these old treasures instead of tearing them down to make room for another brick condo.

Here is the one I made a spoofy thing out of, can't find the photo I worked from, probably on old hd, this is the one they tore down, I do have a 4X6 print of the original. Maybe to some it is ugly, but I saw some potential in it with those bay windows facing south, no getting inside that one, but I was curious about the interior layout and floor plan of the apartments.

Now I'll post two more smaller photos and try to wind this one down because I've yakked enough. This was about one block from the octagon house on the same side of the street, right across from when my gr grandfather lived in 1903.

{{!gwi}}

Now this next one I toyed with the idea of buying, they were asking $90,000 back in the middle 80's, but knew it would be too much for me to get the right workers to maintain, poor people live there now. It was built at the turn of the century for doctors' offices.

Inside it was amazing. Four bedrooms upstairs, built-in corner cupboards in dr, spacious kitchens, little fireplaces with unusual tile (no renters allowed to use fireplaces around here because you can't insure the properties if you don't block them off), transom windows over interior doors, attics, those are some of the details I remember, little extras that cost so much to have custom done now. Maybe it looks too gothic spooky, but I think condos like this well landscaped would be a lot nicer than some of the stuff they are putting up now. Real plaster walls, of course, that if the holes aren't too big, are very easy to patch, so is drywall if you know how to cut it, mud and sand it right, I guess.

Oddly, I was w/granddaughter looking for an apartment and met the current owner. He owns both properties. She is renting a newer brick duplex just behind this old building, doesn't like the trashy look from the back, don't blame her. They still haven't fixed up this place on the exterior like it could be. Why should they for low-income renters? They were renting for about $425 but are now up to about $800, government subsidizes poor people for some I think.

{{!gwi}}

Lovely pictures and stories!
Konrad

Thanks, Konrad. I talk too much or too little, no middle ground for me.

That's my great grandfather who came from Manchester, England in the 1850's when he was a child w/his family, the one who died across the street in 1903. He is the man on the left in the oval inset.

His first wife next to him died in 1890 of heart trouble at 42, he remarried a woman with 3 children and moved to a house across the street, no numbers so can't find which one it is/was, the one little girl died of typhus about 5 years after her mother at age 15, the other married but never had children of her own. The little blond boy was my grandfather who died in 1929, before I was born.

I used old family photos to make that collage, think it is kind of sloppy work now, but I worked hard extracting all those people from both sides of my family.

I was trying to do some neat things with my new Photoshop CS2 the last few days, it is a bugger, can't do anything I want with it other than process photos, the most user unfriendly program imaginable, not intuitive at all, help files useless. If I hadn't seen such neat things done with it, I wouldn't bother with it.

Great I love old houses, and the ghost photos. I want to learn to do that. I still can't so I am going to take a photoshop class. I have to pay 25 for that one from Ritz, but most of them are free. But, I am going to get my money's worth, I am going to ask how to make a ghost. I still can't superimpose imagines yet, I know this has to do with layers, but I can make new layers, but I can't get the ghost to be on the layer. LOL.

Once you have two layers stacked, just look for the opacity slider on the TOP layer (have the layers pallet open in the work space) and turn it down to your taste, then layers>flatten, all there is to that. Use normal blending mode to start.

Good luck in the course, it is probably worth the money. I wish our local community college had one, but even then, they can only give you an overview. To do the more complicated stuff, you need a good book and tutorials on the web. In the end, you have to do a lot of figuring out for yourself with the knowledge you have built.

That one I think I did in Paint Shop Pro, but the technique is exactly the same.

Try it. I'm kind of stuck at this point, need to press on ahead. Think I'll read the book that came with CS2 LOL. I hate reading books now, but not always so. Your mind can only digest so much at a time.

That is not the best collage I ever did, picture quality is bad because I used a scan. Now I would use a digital photo for starters but still have to scan the old photos, but they're smaller so the deteriorated quality doesn't show so much. It was fun at the time, and a lot of work.

I can still perform most tasks a lot better in PSP, but am forcing myself to transition to PS because it is better in the long run, counterintuitive though it is.