Previous Quilt Design

The new/old house remodel is not the first time I have incorporated quilt designs in a house remodel. Nearly thirty years ago, I remodeled our house in Salt Lake City incorporating a quilt design in the kitchen island. This house was built in 1904 and was designed and engineered by its owner who was a mining engineer.

The house had been a private residence until 1954 and then gone through multiple changes, not all positive. It was a private nursing home for a long time until the safety laws regarding private nursing were changed for the better. By the time my husband and I purchased the house, it had been abandoned for three years with the sort of depredation that happens when that occurs. So there wasn't a kitchen at all--no cabinetry, no appliances. The original kitchen space had been a bathroom when it was a nursing home so there were holes in the floor for the toilet discharge and vents in the ceiling as required even back then.

I  designed my own kitchen based on the placement of the kitchen and the doors and windows. I don't have any architectural training but I know how a kitchen should flow. I did use a licensed contractor to get our remodel done and we followed all codes.

Anyway I put an island in the space that incorporated the stove top--a Creda--and had it topped with tile with a dogtooth border. We did cover up the holes in the floor with slate flooring but kept the remnants of the original fir floor. I had never had a fir floor before but found out quickly how soft fir is. You could drop a nickel on the floor and end up with a profile of Thomas Jefferson. This was not a huge problem until our house was discovered by a TV show that was filmed in Utah.

Trust me, when the location scouts say they want to use your house, you should think twice. The money is very good but the damage left behind may not be what you want to deal with. Everything always got fixed, but sometimes the damage was enough to make you weep.

As a side note, we sold that house when I knew the market was going south in 2006. The poor house did not fare as well as we did. Two moronic investors purchased it thinking they could get money from the government for "saving" an historic property for commercial purposes. I told them there was no way they could use the space for a bed and breakfast but they didn't listen and ended up fighting off foreclosure by leasing it to a meth dealer who used the basement as a meth lab. The police raided the house and ultimately the place had to go through the whole meth mitigation process.

If that isn't bad enough, the people who bought it out of that debacle (oddly enough at more than $1M) started a remodel, ended up getting divorced because the husband ran off with the architect and left the wife and kids in the house. She stayed in the house but as part of the remodel she put in a jetted tub that required cutting through some of the original floor and original joists. One day she took a bath in the tub, stepped out with one foot, and ended up crashing into the first floor.

So be careful what you wish for. Sometimes the dream house isn't.