Homeandgarden: The Road From Ruin

The Road From Ruin

The secret behind this little B&B is that not too long ago it was a dilapidated 1912 eyesore targeted for destruction. All it needed was a load of money and a lot of backbreaking work to bring it back to splendor.

By JUDY STARK

ST. PETERSBURG -- This used to be the worst house on the block. Shabby, tumbledown, with a thick stack of code-enforcement violations, it was the neighborhood nuisance. The people next door circulated a petition to have the place torn down.

Look at it now. Restored and refreshed, it's the neighborhood showplace, a luxurious bed-and-breakfast inn newly renamed the Dickens House.

The house was built in 1912 (the same year the Titanic sank) as a single-family home and later was a boarding house and gift shop, then a crammed apartment. Its transformation -- indeed, resurrection -- mirrors the city's changing fortunes.

"There was a lot more structural work than I ever imagined, but the design bones were excellent and the location was excellent," said the owner, Edmund Caldwell, who bought the house, at 335 Eighth Ave. NE, at a foreclosure sale in 1995 for $40,000.

He admits he had never set foot inside the house before he bought it, "but the time was right for downtown. The pieces of the puzzle were falling into place."

His original intention was to use the first floor as a studio and office and to live upstairs, "puttering and fixing up for the rest of my life" in the house's 3,860 square feet. He is a mural artist who does client-commissioned, site-specific works. "But about a year and a half ago I started entertaining the idea" of turning the place into a bed-and-breakfast inn.

"I was aging" -- Caldwell recently turned 55 -- "and I thought of it as a source of infill income, something I could continue to do and still do my artwork."

So a remodeling job that had been a "slow-budget job," as income and energy allowed, suddenly shifted into high gear. For the last six months as many as 15 people have worked on the jobsite: electricians, plumbers, carpenters, drywall hangers, tilesetters. It took five months simply to strip the woodwork. Caldwell estimates he has invested about $250,000 in the house.

The Arts & Crafts-style house is named after its first owners, Henry and Sadie Speer Dickens, who arrived in St. Petersburg in 1900 to take their place among the city's social and business elite. Henry Dickens was first the freight agent for the Atlantic Coast Line railroad and later was an insurance agent and real-estate developer.

The five rooms and suites bear names that evoke local history: the Dickens Room; the Perry Snell Room, named for the developer; the Cottage Suite, with a wicker seaside look; the Orange Blossom Room, named for the railroad; and the Cracker Suite, which acknowledges Sadie Speer Dickens' pioneering cracker family with its twig furniture and cattle-ranch decor.

The house's history reflects the city's. It was a boarding house, and in the 1940s and '50s an apartment (Mabel's Gift Shop occupied the front porch) at a time when genteel retirees came seeking modest lodgings and downtown was a busy place. When St. Petersburg's fortunes dwindled in the 1960s, so did the house. Divided into eight apartments, it was rented to increasingly lower-income tenants and in recent years became not only an eyesore but a safety hazard.

The city's code enforcement citations -- 50 pages long for just the two years from 1993 to 1995 -- reported rat and termite infestations, missing smoke detectors, rotting floors and soffits, unsafe electrical connections and leaking sewer pipes.

"But I thought the house was worth saving," Caldwell said. "I'm tired of this town destroying its architecture. These houses can be saved. That may not seem economically feasible, but in the long run, it is. You can't reproduce these houses, including the quirks and the oddities that give a house its unique charm: the odd steps, the sloping ceiling you bump your head on."

He ran into plenty of quirks and oddities as he worked on the house over the last 4 1/2 years. "There were the rat skeletons as we pulled down the ceilings," he remembered.

In a 1953 renovation, a wall was installed between the dining room and the living room. Later, when heating ducts were installed from underneath, every 2x4 was cut off, "so the only thing holding up the second floor was the plasterboard." The porch soffit was rotted and had to be replaced by a steel beam. Caldwell once fell through the rotted floor on the third floor, plunging into the second-floor ceiling, while carrying a toilet. Another time his foot went through the rotted floorboards on the fire escape. There was no interior staircase; the only way to reach the second floor was via outside steps.

Only two of the windows are original; all the rest are new, built in the appropriate period style. Five layers of rolled roofing were removed, replaced with architectural dimensional shingles. The house has new plumbing, wiring, air-conditioning and heating systems, fire sprinklers, a sophisticated phone system, whirlpool tubs in four of the five rooms, and soundproofing.

"I lived at Home Depot and here" during those construction years, Caldwell said. "If it didn't happen at Home Depot, I didn't know it." It is a pleasure, he reports, to have those years behind him and to have a real life again that does not involve constant drywall and dust. Now, "I've gone from shoveling out the house and loading dumpsters to ironing linens."

The house is furnished with pieces that reflect Caldwell's other great love: scavenging. Every item has a story. The heart-pine staircase came from the old Chicago Hotel on the city's south side, built in 1905. "I went to a yard sale and ended up buying a staircase -- for $200." (It cost him another $2,000 to have it installed.)

All the wall tile in the five new bathrooms came from a Tampa tile manufacturer's bankruptcy sale for $350. He bought 10 bolts of fabric for $150 total, including pale turquoise taffeta for draperies in the Dickens Room and red moire silk to upholster a big ottoman in the living room. The ottoman was a castoff children's table from the Sunday school at First Presbyterian Church just down the street. Caldwell cut down the legs and had it upholstered.

He bought the six-burner turquoise Garland commercial stove for $200 through a classified ad from the St. Petersburg Rod and Gun Club. (It sat in the living room for two years while he worked on the house.) The rod and gun club yielded another set of treasures: dozens of stuffed fish and mounted heads of wild animals, including western antler racks, a ram's head, and a deer. He paid $50 for the lot, kept a few and sold the others for $1,200.

The copper range hood was $500, again through a classified. He found a $400 Oreck vacuum cleaner abandoned in the alley behind his house; all it needed to make it workable was to remove a clog.

A twig chair in the Cracker suite was another alley find. So was what he first thought was a 1940s reproduction of a French regency armchair. But its doweled construction, the hand-carved wood covered with gesso, red oxide paint, and golf leaf, and the straw padding, hand-bound in a unique French technique, convinced him it was the real thing, over 100 years old.

The black porcelain doorknob in the bathroom was the design inspiration for the third-floor Cracker Suite. To match it, Caldwell chose black-and-brown carpeting. His contractor, Adrian Huber, contributed a salvaged 1930s Kohler pedestal sink with the original black porcelain faucet and handles. Caldwell wanted shiny black woodwork to match the porcelain doorknob, so he spent $3,000 on knot-free sugar pine. He sanded, primed, sanded again, painted it with two coats of latex and decided he didn't like it. So he sanded it off and painted it with high-gloss black oil-based paint. He came back the next day to find the surface covered with tiny burrs: dust! So he sanded again, vacuumed the room three times, then closed the windows, shut off the air conditioning for 24 hours, spritzed the floor with water to keep the dust down, and painted three coats of black enamel with the windows closed.

The final results were "wonderful," he says now. "It was a lot of work, and it costs more, but it's very important to me, and guests are just enamored of it."

The reaction to the house from visitors is "heartwarming but humbling," Caldwell said. He had 1,100 people through the house when the North Shore Neighborhood Association held its Candlelight Tour of Homes in December, "and people on the tour hugged me and said, "Thanks for saving the house.' "

The effort of the last couple of years "is like a blur," Caldwell said. "It's like childbirth: If we remembered the pain, we'd never do it again. I have a great sense of accomplishment, that I could show myself and others my capabilities in a multifaceted way. I have a feeling of gratitude for what it turned out to be."

Recent guests from Utah called their real estate agent before they checked out of the Dickens House, instructing the agent to start looking for an old house in a historic neighborhood in Salt Lake City that they could renovate as a home.

"You change people's lives," Caldwell said, "when you show people what can be done and when you let the house tell you what it can be."