Returning home — Avenues residents lovingly restore 1912 house to its original luster

David Richardson and his wife, Amy Wadsworth, and their 8-year-old, John, live in an old home with a new kitchen. Earlier in their married life, when they had a houseful of children, Richardson and Wadsworth were thankful that someone had added on to the 1912 home, building bedrooms under the attic dormers.

But now the older kids are grown and gone. For the most part, the family only uses the 1,500 square feet of the main floor. They live almost entirely in the original home; a living room, dining room, kitchen, two bedrooms and one bath — with a claw-foot tub.

Richardson wonders why any family of three would ever need more space than this. He and his kin couldn't be more comfortable in their Craftsman-style bungalow. An architect, construction company owner and preservation specialist, Richardson has done much of the restoration himself.

This weekend a thousand visitors will walk through the Richardsons' home as part of the Utah Heritage Foundation's 37th annual Historic Homes Tour. The tour promises a stroll through 100 years of Avenues history, featuring homes in a variety of styles by some of Utah's most prominent architects. The oldest home on the nine-home tour is a 1865 Gothic cottage. The newest is a 1948 Modern.

Wadsworth bought their home in 1985, while Richardson was on a business trip. At $110,000 it was in their price range, he recalls.

About a week before it went on the market, probably at the advice of the Realtor, he imagines, the previous owners put several coats of white enamel paint on the coffered ceilings. "They even painted the oak floors," he says.

One of Richardson's first tasks as a homeowner was to strip the wood on the living room ceilings. As he worked on the wood, paint thinner splashed on the gray fireplace and he discovered beautiful green tile underneath that paint.

The doors and windows are original to the house, Richardson is pleased to report. He thinks one of the worst things remodelers can do is to remove the original windows.

When they purchased the house, however, the front door was missing its central glass pane. Some time ago the window had apparently been broken and replaced with plywood. Richardson commissioned Beehive Glass to construct a new, beveled pane.

The home is part of the Cobble Knoll development, planned and executed by Frank Whitney. Richardson explains that running water didn't come to the Avenues until 1907 or 1908, so their house had to have been among the first to be built with plumbing included.

Since they moved in 16 years ago, they've redone the bathroom twice and the kitchen once. They took the kitchen down to the bare studs, uncovering a window in the process. They also opened up an interior wall, making what had been a linen closet in the hall into a glass-fronted pass-through cupboard. As a result, their new kitchen is much lighter than the original one would have been.

As part of the remodel, Richardson had kitchen moldings milled to match the wood in the dining room. The new tile floor in the kitchen, by American Olean, is almost an exact match of the original tile floor in the bathroom. That tile was uncovered under several layers of tile and linoleum.

There is more to be done on this house, Richardson notes. The entryway ceiling still needs to be stripped, for one thing.

But Richardson believes his next project will be to remove the stair railing and balustrade. He wants to replace them with something more appropriate, something in the Craftsman style. The stairs were added at the point in history when the bedrooms were added to the attic. Before that, attic access was through a fold-down stairway above the kitchen.