In the long passage from the first tests for termites and tensile strength in the underpinnings of the house at 47 Jefferson Avenue to the day of the hallelujah arrival of Mark Peterson and Laura Hamm Peterson a resolve settled in Art McMurdie that this would be his last salvage job in Takoma Park. But, oh, what a job he did.
The house had stood in a state of near abandonment for several years, lived in for the final stage only by an old lady and her cats. Built in 1923, it had taken on the look of Dorothea Lange’s Appalachia. Neighbors who brought packages of food to the woman could with any step crack another hole in the porch floor.
To Art, it qualified as a wreck and not a fixer-upper, a distinction with a difference. “A fixer-upper is for someone handy with tools. I was always looking for a house that should be demolished,” he said on a recent morning, relaxed in an easy chair in his own well-kept home on Cleveland Avenue. “You could say I’m a demolition man, just a different kind.”
Mark and Laura, who ultimately bought the Jefferson Avenue wreck that Art did not demolish but rather resurrected, think of him as something of a fantast. “He sees the hidden beauty of a place where other people just want to tear it down,” said Laura, during a tour of the house that now looks like a model in a catalog.
Art ventured into the restoration business twenty years ago with little architectural knowledge except what he had absorbed as a photographer for clients in the building trades. “In the back of my mind I’d always wanted to go off on my own and do this,” he said.
A shabby house next door on Cleveland Avenue presented the opportunity, and Art made a winning bid. For blueprints he teamed with a friend, architect Paul Treseder. A year later Art sold his enhanced version. Not yet savvy about the pricing of aesthetics he accepted a loss, but a pattern was set.
There were other dwellings to return to glory, and he and Paul took advantage, with better financial results. Along the way they won a few renovator awards and praise from traditionalists at Historic Takoma. The turreted Victorian in North Takoma that they finished for political commentator Clarence Page and his professor-wife Lisa brought more acclaim.
By comparison the house on Jefferson Avenue, a small framed two-story extended on stilts over a hillside, had neither size nor pomp, but it had the requisite falling-down features. As it continued to deteriorate Art would get reports from a woman who lives on Jefferson and who swims with him in the mornings at the Montgomery College pool.
In 2004, with the death of the lone occupant, the house finally went on the market, but Art did not secure the deed for another two years. An interim owner attempted to level it and replace it with two modernist specials, eventually to give up when he couldn’t buy extra footage to widen the lot. He left behind a structure more sadly weathered than ever.
“It really did look bad, and after all this time I was anxious to get started,” Art recalled. Things proceeded slowly, though. Once his crew had carted off concrete rubble used to gain purchase for a dumpster and had removed the exterior walls down to the studs, there, in the thick dust, he had confront the painstaking chore of deciding what could be saved.
Downstairs the joists showed signs of termites but no real damage. He let them be, shored up in places with steel. But so much else was beyond repair. At moments Art wondered if he should have erred on the side of a bulldozer.
To make matters worse, the jacked-up, decade-long selling rush of local housing was starting to lose steam. He told himself to hurry even as he kept to his populist-artist’s pace.
At Vanderbilt University, meanwhile, Mark and Laura were new graduates with masters in theological studies and were contemplating what to do next. They had met on their first day at divinity school and fallen in love and had begun to imagine buying a typical dream house that Mark would later describe to Takoma Park real estate agent David Maplesden as one with “a full basement, two-car garage, and built after 1980” – in other words, nothing like the house on Jefferson.
Art’s remake was finally taking shape. The wood flooring, stained by cat pee and showing the rust marks of tacks from a linoleum overlay, had become the piece de resistance. Art had discovered an omen-like trove in the attic, a hundred perfectly preserved 16-foot yellow pine boards that he mixed and matched with the old flooring. For the match in the downstairs living room, though, he needed maple tongue-and-groove. “I priced out the maple, and it cost 50 cents a foot more than oak, which didn’t seem too bad.” He ordered the boards.
By early spring of last year Art was completing the final touches. He listed the house at an upper-end price. For several months it attracted only window shoppers. Twice he lowered the price. At the same time Mark and Laura had gotten married and were looking to put down roots here, she as pastor of a Silver Spring church, he as a leadership development consultant for federal agencies. David had shown them several available houses, but each had disappointed them.
“There’s a place I haven’t shown you,” he said at one point. “It’s not in your price range, but it has real kitsch.” Thus on a summer Sunday the young couple made a trip to Jefferson, a sloping, tucked-away street up a woodsy hill from Sligo Creek, and beheld Art’s noveau replica of the 1923 original – the exquisite jigsaw of floor boards, a skylight in the master bedroom, an old-fashioned laundry chute, bannistered stairs, a wrap-around porch begging for wicker chairs, all of it quaintly styled.
“I said to Laura, ‘Oh, my God, this is the one,’” Mark recalled. “We loved it.”
During the next month the couple submitted three separate offers to Art, trying to strike a deal. On the third try they succeeded. “We just kept at it. I think we annoyed him into selling it to us.”
Art realized a modest profit, though what had kept him going these last years was not the money but a chance to feel buoyant and unbridled in his work. “This was a good one to retire on,” he said on an autumn day, eyeing the house. Mark and Laura had settled in, but he had stopped by to make a minor adjustment.
In December, having turned 65, he began his retirement by training for an odyssey by bike across the country. In the last week of February, after taking a plane west, he left San Diego and headed for St. Augustine.
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