This building was built as three apartments and was later changed into six. It deteriorted badly and was attracting nasty  people as renters.   It origianlly had porches with roofs but was changed into just decks.

An investor bought it and changed it into four very nice condo units attracting excellent owners.    Each unit has three levels.  He put the porches back but used interior balusters and newels for the exterior porches.  Within years they rotted off. I was a friend of two of the condo owners so I agreed to help as their condo owners assocition had a very limited budget for repairs.  I found a very approprote treated spindle at Menards at an incredibly low price of about $3 each.  They needed a lot.

The condo owners got togeher and while watching sports in the garage primed and painted all of the spindles themselves to save money. This common goal also built their friendships.   I made the newels, finials and rails for them and lent them an air nailer, drills  and chop box  to install them.

 

I  spnet a half day with them instructing them on the installation.  None of them had any construction experience but did a great job of installing the spindles rails and balusters.  They found it to be very satisfyng and saved a tremedous amount of money. It felt good for me to help them and to get an asset to our neighborhood.

 

 

 

When the current owners bought their house it had wide exposure aluminum siding  and the porch balustrade was missing.

The owners have spent years getting the original details replaced.

I made a mockup for a proposed porch balustrade.  I used two sizes of spindles to give them a choice.

I did not make or install their balustrade but my mockup was used as a pattern.  The owners painstakingly painted the spindes themsleves.

 

 

 

Notice the tiny round parade porch with a balustrade on the right of the photograph below.  Sometime after this photograph was taken, that balustrade was taken off.

 

 

 

I made a blaustrade for it using the same design as on the porch.  The rails were made by cutting small sections of a round rail then putting the three layers together by staggering the joints (bricking) for strength. This is the top rail. When it was finally put together it was symmetircal, not as shown in the picture.

This is the bottom rail made in two layers, glued and screwed together.  All the wood used was treated.

 

 

This is the finished rail:

 

This is the new balustrade on this little and very interesting parade porch. To access it you would have to go thru a window.  Only one person could stand out there.  I think it is for looks only, not to be used.  Some people call this a Juliet porch as it looks like what Juliet would stand on to call Romeo.

When the aluminum siding was put on the building they took off the keystones to make the surface flat.  I made new keystones for above the attic windows.

The gable ornaments were missing. Chuck Keysor ( [email protected])  made the individal squares on a CNC router from pvc material.

They rented a lift to install  it.  The only projects left onthe extrior restoration are two smaller gable appliques.

Our Back Porch

This is our back porch when we bought the house in 1986.  Probably in the 20’s they enclosed the porch and stuccoed the building.  They moved the wall with the window on the left out five feet to enlarge the kitchen for one of five apartments.  The wall on the  right of the door enclosed the porch and hid a back staircase to the second floor apartments.

This picture shows the beginnings of taking the porch apart.  The window was kept and put in the new wall five feet in.  The room on the porch roof was a sleeping porch.  Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote an article  for a  magazine saying that sleeping in an enclosed room with stale air caused Tuberculosis so everyone across the nation built sleeping porches with lots of windows to get fresh air for sleeping.  They even added a radiator to this one. It had to come off with the door into the house being put back into a window.  I was very proud of myself for making an entire double hung window to replace the one that was taken out.

We found marks on the house showing the exact profile of the crowns on the posts.  They were duplicated exactly.  The posts had been installed first with the clapboards coped up to them so we knew the exact width of the post.

We did not have any evidence for the design of the balustrade so after months of searching my wife picked one for an old pattern book. The balusters were very time consuming to make but well worth it.  It is important a balustrade not interrupt the window so it was crucial to have one that is 24 inches high which is often found on Italianate houses in our neighborhood. Italianate houses always have porches that art tall and slender with a low or no balustrade.

Code officials do not like low rails.

 We were lucky to find a paragraph in the BOCA code the city was using at the time which stated that if the item is not life threatening, the code can be sensitively enforced for historic homes.  We brought that to the attention of the code official and were allowed a 24 inch rail on our front and back porches.  The same paragraph can be found in the new International Residential Building code.  Recently it was written as a formal city policy that 24 inch rails can be use citywide.  Contact me if you want a copy. A 30 inch rail is now very commonly built in Elgin.

Store bought lattice looks terrible.  My wife designed the one above making the holes diamond shaped instead of large squares like that from a big box store. It adds a lot of class to the lattice.  I routed the inside edge of the panel and applied a half round home made molding to the perimeter giving it a real classy look.

Here is the finished porch

Here are pictures showing the progression of the porch restoration:

 

The David C. Cook mansion at 105 N. Gifford  was built in 1885 for David C. Cook, the son of a Methodist minister and prominent Elgin publisher. It cost $10,000 to build.   The wonderful porch as seen in the old picture below is one that we hope to have a chance to get to rebuild.

In the 50’s it had extensive additions to make rooms for a retirement center. Below is a picture from 2008.

Several years ago it was foreclosed upon and has been vacant ever since.  The Gifford Park Association is currently working with the bank in hopes of getting the additions off and rehabbing the building.  Hopefully I will get a chance to participate in rebuilding the porches from the picture.

As an interesting side note, here is a picture of David C. Cooks other house in Piru, CA.  It is currently used as a wedding venue.  Click here for more info and pictures.  It burned to the ground and was rebuilt using the original plans.  If they can do that, Elgin can certainly restore his first home.

David C. Cook’s story is quite fascinating.  His mail order sewing machine accesories business was destroyed in the Chicago fire of 1871. Undaunted, Cook started over in the business of helping the victims of the fire. He opened a mission on North Avenue in one of the city’s most dangerous neighborhoods.  There, he saw the need for Sunday School lesson books written at a level at which these underprivileged students could read.  Cook took on the task of writing and printing “Our Sunday School Quarterly” himself.  His new wife, Marguerite, helped in the venture also, and they began “Our Sunday School Gem” a 16 page magazine, definetely the most popular Sunday School paper of the day.

The business began in the Lakeview neighborhood in Chicago, but when it outgrew that spot, they moved operations to an old wollenmill in Elgin.  Incorporated as the David C. Cook Publishing company, the firm’s publicatins soon had a circulation of 5 million copies per month, and even the Elgin Post Office had to move to bigger quarters, to accomadate the overwhelming increase in mail handling.

Thanks goes out to the Gifford Park Associaton for the above account found in their Housewalk booklet from when the home was featured on the  Historic Elgin House Tour.

If you would like to see interior pictures of the house before details were removed click here.

In the 50’s the home shown below was moved across the street to make room for parking and an addition onto Elgin High School.

There is an old picture of the house that was found at the Historical Society Museum.  It shows that  the tiny parade porch above the main porch  had a curved balustrade on it.

I replicated the little balustrade using the same design as the porch only shorter.

The old picture also shows that there was a huge keystone above the attic window. I made one to replace it. Ten years after I made it, it finally got installed in 2020.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The porch was missing some of its long brackets so I made some to match.

 

 

The side second-floor window had its fanlight window removed.

 

 

 

 

I made one to replace it as shown at right.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A huge thanks goes out to John Anderson and Paul Cayez for rehabbing this great house.  For many years it was a problem property with several rental units.  It is now a single-family home with great owners.

The current owner recently made repairs to the porch.

The front porch piers were rotten.  I made all new ones to replace the old. The picture below shows a rotten one.

Here are the new ones I made from treated lumber so they will last forever.

Many of the gooseneck sections of the rail were rotted so I made new ones as shown below:

They are made of cypress which has great rot resistance plus they are coated with a preservative.

Many of the column bases were rotten so I made new ones.

I believe they were originally made on a shaper with a custom knife.  That would be expensive today if only a few are needed.  I turn them on the lathe.

This home was designed by famous Elgin architect W. W. Abell.  Here are other homes he designed.