My friend Meredith invited me to visit her new house a few weeks ago. A rambling ranch home on the east side, it was perfectly preserved in 1969, the year it was built. Meredith and her husband Ted bought it from a pair of sisters who had kept the house in pristine condition, right down to the fake crystal chandelier in the dining room.


There are parts of the house that seem oh-so-dated, like the funky floral wallpaper over the master vanity (it is also lining the drawers of the vanity like custom contact paper) or the faux marbelized countertop in the guest bath. The kitsch-addict in me wanted Meredith to go with the flow and keep enough of the gaudy to date the house and give it some of that Gong Show flavor.
In general, the home is a beautiful specimen of thoughtful design and architecture. Formal living and dining areas open off of the entry foyer. The kitchen features a priceless pass-thru (that I would personally decorate with modernist etched glass but David thinks should be left open). The exposed beams in the den meet with wood paneling that needs a new stain but is a wonderful complement to the stone fireplace. The lot is enormous with a covered patio and landscaped backyard as well as a private side yard with storage and a climbing tree.
During the grand tour, we started opening the drawers in the master bedroom vanity, and lo and behold we found the original house plans.

I do mean original: rolled up and somewhat yellowed, the graphite and pen had smeared in a couple of places. The plans appeared to indicate that the home was a blueprint for others in the neighborhood, possibly a model home.

Meredith was under a major time crunch, caught between two living spaces, and struggling with needing to make some very speedy decisions. I put in my two cents, but after she showed me her collection of paint chips and her magazine cut-outs, I was sure that she didn’t need any input from me. I can’t wait to see how it looks with her personal touch!
If you live in Austin and you are in the midst of a MCM home redo, ranch or otherwise, please drop me a line. I know not everyone has time to blog the process, but I love seeing before/after shots and I am happy to post pics here. Plus, it gives me a good excuse to get out of the House of Sick for a few hours

We had to cancel our vacation to New Orleans for Mardi Gras. One sick kid would have been enough, but we had three. So what do you do to make the weekend special? You get a dang dog, that’s what you do.
We started out at our local animal shelter. They seemed to only have Labradors, which Christiane vetoed, and Pit Bulls, which I vetoed. Saturday came and went. No dog. We got a little cranky.
On Sunday we went to the Town Lake animal shelter. We spent 2 hours filling out forms, waiting, being interviewed, and eventually playing with the only acceptable dog they had. She was sweet, and we said we would take her. We got back in line. Twenty minutes later they tell us, “Sorry but that dog is taken and we already have a backup. Buh-bye.” We got really cranky.
So we started hitting the pet stores. Petsmart and Petco host Paw Match dog rescues on Sundays and we went to 4 of them. Rows and rows of Labradors and Pit Bulls. Eventually we found ourselves at a Petsmart in Round Rock. And there she was.
I asked if I could visit with the white one. They got me a leash. She was so sleepy she could barely stand. The rescue person said she had been playing with kids all day. Good answer.
We paid the fee, stocked up at Petsmart (they don’t call them smart for nothin’), named her, and took her home.
She is the best dog ever.

Updated to add: Her name is Trixie

Thank you house bloggers for all the buzz and links to Crestview Doors. Many people are posting photos of their doors. It’s really cool to see the regional differences in these doors.
Meanwhile Back at the Ranch has a “Madison”. I highly recommend this placement of a devil tiki mask when installing a “Madison”.
Ranch Redo has sent an amazing amount of traffic to the web site. Thanks for the leads!
The Reluctant Remodeler has a very cool version of the “Grover”. It has smaller windows, flush trim, 5 v-grooves, and check out the cool extended door knob.
Wedgewood Ranch has been jonesing for a “Woodrow”. In fact, he posted a photo of the Jones’s “Woodrow”.
I also found a catalog that has the “Grover” in it. Aladdin called it the “No. 17“. I can’t remember how I got there. But it was one of you guys.

I let the cat out of the bag in a comment on Ranch Redo on Monday. I’m starting a new company to sell a very narrowly defined, but otherwise completely unavailable style of front door.
The Company is called Crestview Doors.

I named the company after the neighborhood where I live. This is where I have noticed and slowly become obsessed with these doors. Each design is named after the street where I saw it. In some cases, such as the “Grover” the design is so common, I just named it after the longest street.
One by one I’ve seen these doors disappearing off of our little mid-century fifties ranch houses. The new doors never look right to my eye. The stained glass is too ornate. The Craftsman doors too are old fashioned. The metal and fiberglass doors just look fake. And what is up with the half-wagon-wheel door?
When it was time for us to ditch our old warped door, I thought we would just replace it with one off the shelf matching the old doors in the neighborhood. As it turns out, you can’t buy them anywhere.
We had one custom made for our house, and I got to thinking… I bet I could sell these online.

This morning over 2500 of my neighbors showed up to protest the bloated Walmart that Lincoln Properties wants to jam in place of the rotting corpse of Northcross Mall (eew!). We made a ring not just around the mall, but around the whole block. By my estimation (using Google maps) the line was about 6000 feet long.
I really didn’t think there would be enough people, but when we were about a block away, we started to see people in red walking and biking towards Northcross. There was an unusual Saturday morning traffic jam on Burnet. When we parked, I saw people walking along the sidewalk next to the mall. I thought, “Ok, not enough people to circle the building, but if we all walk and hold lengths of ribbon, we’ll get the effect.” Then I realized those people were just walking to the line that ringed the whole block. The portion of the line that we walked to was about 5 people deep. Suddenly it was clear, there were more than enough people to ring the block along the street.
An organizer asked us to stretch towards Northcross Drive. We moved a ways down, then the word spread, we did it. The line stretched all the way around.

A counter came by, I was #564. The boys were climbing a dumpster. They didn’t get numbers.
The protest was supposed to last 10 minutes, but everyone was having such a great time, we stayed about 30 minutes before the line started to break up. Most everyone wore red, but it was cold and the effect was muted by the coats.

Luckily, a lot of people have red coats. And the sun came out just in time for the rest of us to take our coats off.


Spirits were very high. I think it’s important that we had such a good time. This community came together, maybe in the biggest way ever. Excuse me if I get a little waxy here, but it was more than a protest, it was a ceremony. Like a wedding, where people are present to say this is a good thing and we are all here to prove it and hold it.
And that is a difficult thing to work against. There have got to be a few people over at Lincoln Properties wondering if they have the stomach to fight so many nice people. We’re going to be here long after Walmart is gone, and we throw better parties.

Chickenpox is here. We are going through it with typical Erwin House efficiency. 7 year old got it about 3 weeks ago and now 7 month old and 4 year old are synchronized. Both produced spots this afternoon. We know the drill and it should be over (forever) in about 7 days.
Hu-boy. Family vacation in 8 days. Hope we can go because we are going to need it.

This is what the neighborhood is asking for instead of a monster Walmart. It is mixed use retail/office/residential. It’s nice. We would go there. Roll your mouse over to see the current mall.

Trammell Crow is building a similar development (Crestview Station) on the other side of our neighborhood. Nobody is protesting that. (Well, probably somebody, but you know what I mean.) Us Erwins are looking forward to it.

Walmart hasn’t been as forthcoming with their designs. This is a poster that they sent to a few neighborhood meetings. (The poster showed, Walmart did not.)

Architecturally, there is something about this that reminds me of a house flip. Sure it’s a dilapidated empty property right now, and sure it will have a new coat of paint and more square footage, but in the end the seams show and the overall design is disjointed and illogical. In a few years, when the paint starts to peel, it will look worse than before, and the neighbors will pay for somebody else’s short term profit with the value of their own property.

If you are one of our local Austin, Texas readers, please mark this Saturday, February 10th, at 9:30 on your calendar. We will be at Northcross Mall with several thousand neighbors showing support for our neighborhood and protesting the super-mega-ultra-giga-Walmart that Lincoln Properties is trying to stick there. We will wear red and join hands circling Northcross Mall at 10:00 for 10 minutes.
Again
What: Arms Around Northcross
Where: Northcross Mall, corner of Anderson and Burnet
When: Saturday Feb 10 at 9:30 am
How: Wear red, make circle, hold hands.
Here’s the flyer.(pdf)

Walmart is trying to build in our neighborhood. Not one of those cute little Walmarts you see on the highway — this would be the biggest Walmart in Texas. Two stories, 225,000 square feet (1000 times larger than Erwin House). They want to keep it open 24 hours. The ass end of a 3-story parking garage would face the street. Not a highway, a street. Semis hauling cheap sweatshop merchandise would drive past houses and churches, and wait at a light between our grocery store and our Junior High.
Walmart has been true to its icky reputation in dealing with the neighborhood. I won’t detail every underhanded thing they’ve pulled, but this one is particularly disgusting. A valiant group (RG4N.org) representing residents passed out surveys to what must have been about 10,000 homes during the worst ice storm in years. At the same time Walmart tried to skew the results by running a push-poll. A push-poll is a fake poll where you try to change someone’s opinion. (Here at the Erwin House we call that “lying” and it is punishable with timeout and no hot chocolate.) In this push-poll, Walmart called our neighbors over and over until they answered. Then asked them if they like the big cuddly-wuddly Walmart. If they say no, they get lectured on why Walmart gets to build anyway just because they say so how ’bout that?
Somebody taped the call.
Count me as never, never shopping at Walmart again.

Having to call AAA to tow the minivan out of our backyard was the last straw. So we ordered up a driveway. You know what it’s like when you go to the grocery store hungry and you buy, like, a lot of food? Well, we’re getting a lot of driveway. And a new sidewalk to boot.
The driveway starts out two cars wide, swoops around at one car wide, and winds up by the side door at about three cars wide. The curves are fantastic (although the graphic designer in me would like to find bezier handles on the forms and smooth out a few kinks) and ideas about landscaping are all falling into place.
The sidewalk that used to drain water to our front steps now slopes to the street and is perfectly lined up with front door. (The old one was perfectly lined up with the old front door.)
I’m so excited I’m looking up dimensions for four-square and hopscotch.