Earl and Gilda Garcia spent the past year breathing life back into a historic Florida bungalow.
Tough work, considering what can happen to a house in a century.
"We had a lot of big stuff to do," said Gilda Garcia of work on the house, one of 12 featured on this Sunday's Old Seminole Heights home tour.
"People warned us, but we had no idea."
Love is blind, especially when it comes to real estate. Even tired and bedraggled, the 1913 Arts and Crafts style "airplane" bungalow exuded enough curb appeal to make Gilda Garcia screech to a stop and call a real estate agent.
And at $170,000, who could resist? The 2,500-square-foot home featured a built-in eating booth in the kitchen, ceiling-high leaded glass cabinets and a big, airy front porch with an original swing.
Plus the location was sweet: a neighborhood teeming with families and preservation buffs, just minutes from downtown Tampa.
"That was an added incentive; it just cinched it for us," said Earl Garcia, head football coach at Hillsborough High School.
On most days, he walks to work.
Gilda Garcia drives, all of four minutes to DeSoto Elementary School, where she's the principal.
With the help of carpenters Doug Wood and Donnie Jacobs, as well as a cadre of local crafts people, the couple were able to return the once-elegant old house to its original luster. That meant scraping through decades of funky paint, replacing old knob and tube electrical wiring, rerouting air conditioner ducts, unclogging plaster from the chimney, refurbishing or replacing hardwood floors, even ripping out a bathroom "with a sledgehammer."
The Garcias estimated that by doing a lot of the unskilled, backbreaking work themselves, they could restore the house for $50,000. In reality, it cost them $100,000. And they still did a lot of the work on their own.
Clearly, the couple said, their decision to buy the house and restore it paid off. Their home was selected for the sixth annual Old Seminole Heights home tour, an event so popular that it earned mention in the spring issue of American Bungalow magazine.
Organizers expect 1,500 visitors to traipse through the historic neighborhood, founded in 1911 by businessman T. Roy Young, whose Seminole Development Co. filled the lots with homes inspired by the popular California bungalow.
Two of the neighborhood's historic districts are listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and a third received local landmark designation.
Today, the neighborhood stands as a living pop-up book of architectural styles, including Mediterranean and Colonial revivals, American foursquare and frame vernacular. The Garcias' "airplane" bungalow, with its wide eaves and low-pitched roof, features a single, window-wrapped, second-story room that serves as Earl Garcia's study.
The home's interior provides the perfect backdrop for the Garcias' collection of Ernest Hemingway-related souvenirs, including black-and-white photos of the writer in Key West. They even selected their furniture from the Hemingway line produced by a major furniture company.
More old photos, including an early picture of Gilda Garcia's grandmother snapped at a dance recital in Cuba, line the hallway like a receiving line at a wedding.
For years, the Garcias lived in another historic home in Seminole Heights in a neighborhood called Evelyn City. They owned a 1930s house, one that looked very much like a New England saltbox, Earl Garcia said. It had been thoroughly restored by the previous owner.
"This was always Gilda's dream," he explains, "to restore an old house."
She got her chance.
Now, Gilda Garcia devotes precious weekend days to liberating woodwork from clingy coats of pastel paint. She also happens to be a very good cook, the kind people talk about. So much so that her after-game supper parties, which sometimes kick off at 11 p.m., are revered for their bountiful spreads of black beans and yellow rice, picadillo, boliche, yuca and Cuban-style roast pork.
Lately, she has been spending more time at Home Depot and wading through architectural salvage yards than in the kitchen and entertaining guests.
But it's been an interesting journey, she said.
"Someone gave me the ultimate compliment the other day. They said, "Your house is so warm and inviting,' " she recalls. "And that's what I want. For people to feel comfortable here."
If you go
WHAT: Sixth Annual Old Seminole Heights home tour
WHEN: 11:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Sunday
TICKETS: $7 per person. Includes a self-guided tour booklet. Buy tickets and start the tour at the Seminole Heights Garden Center, 5800 Central Ave. (between Hillsborough and Sligh avenues). Transportation by the HARTline Trolley.
