James Wilson and his wife, Maranda, are fairly recent arrivals to College Hill. The couple moved into a home on Fountain in January of last year. Shortly after, he started a blog, collegehillhouse.blogspot.com. The blog provides a window into the world of a College Hill family (the Wilsons have one-year-old triplets) and highlights the unique challenges of owning an older home. In an e-mail interview with The Commoner last month, James discussed his blog, home, and newfound love of an old neighborhood.
When did you start the blog and why?
I started the blog in November of 2007. As for the “why,” we put a lot of work into the house last year, and we have even more work planned. Blogging is not only a great way to jot down your ideas, your plans, and your accomplishments, but also to organize all the before and after pictures. Tagging is also a great reason to blog: for example, if we want to remember what we’ve done about the steam heat in our house, we can click the “Steam Heat” label and see all the posts with that tag.
You are the father of triplets, have a fulltime job, and a number of projects around the house to complete. When do you find the time to blog?
Unfortunately, I usually don’t – at least, not as much as I’d like. The triplets are in bed by 8:00, and after we finish the laundry and preparing the bottles for the next day, we don’t have much time for working on house projects and blogging. I have been working on one blog post for two weeks now – it’s a review of a book about steam heating. It’s going to be a lengthy post, and I have time to write about half a paragraph per day at home, so it’s slow going.
What is it that you hope visitors to your blog come way with?
Well, the blog is primarily for us – so that years from now we’ll be able to sort through the projects and reminisce about what we started with. But like anyone, vanity comes into play and I do like having readers. I try to keep things very light – the material I write at my job is as dry as you can get, so when I’m working on the house blog I like to have fun and let myself be a little goofy. So I hope any visitors will just have a chuckle once in a while. Maybe, as I learn more about working on old houses, I’ll be able to share some how-to advice, but that will probably be a ways down the road.
Do you think you would be blogging about your home if you were still in the “suburbs”?
Absolutely not. Our previous house was basically in the ‘burbs, and we did a lot of work to it, but I never felt compelled to keep a record of anything. No matter what you do to a 1993 ranch house, it’s going to be a 1993 ranch house. We feel like our house in College Hill really represents us as a family – it’s very quirky, and sometimes a little frustrating, but it has lots of character.
Describe your home.
It has the kind of features that my wife and I wouldn’t trade for anything, yet these same features make our friends and family recoil in horror and ask how soon we can replace them. For example, it is heated by the original 93-year-old steam boiler and radiators. People ask us how hard it would be to put in a furnace, and they are surprised when we say we don’t know or care. It has the original windows with the old wavy glass – we’ve had many relatives refer us to companies that could tear out all those windows and put in new “good” windows, and they always have a hard time understanding that we actually love these old windows.
More generally, it’s an American Four-square that was made in 1915.
What fascinates you about your home?
I suppose I’m most fascinated by the personality that we’ve become accustomed to during the year we’ve lived here. For the most part, anyone can move into a modern home and it will be just like any other modern home. With an old house, you have to get used to the quirks. You learn where to step on the hardwood floors so that you don’t wake the babies. You learn which radiators can be turned off when the outside temperature rises above 40 degrees. Things like this might be inconveniences to some people, but to us they make our house our home.
What frustrates you about your home?
The Old House Rule of Three: you take the maximum amount of time and money that a project should take, and multiply them both by three to find out what it will really take. We’re getting used to that rule, though.
And the leaves. As I mentioned, most of our free time is in the evening around 9:00 or so, which isn’t a fun time to rake leaves. We got them pretty much cleaned up once, and two days later the wind blew the rest of the leaves from College Hill and the surrounding area into our yard.
Are you handy?
I used to think I was pretty handy. I built a bathroom in the basement of our previous house, and I completed lots of other fairly major projects. But once we moved into the College Hill house, I found out just how unhandy I can be. The Old House Rule of Three taught me that.
Would you blog about your screw-ups, or only your accomplishments? I guess the question here is: In your estimation, what makes for a good blog topic?
I’m always honest on the blog, and I sometimes try to be funny (not that I’m successful, but I try), so I would absolutely blog about a screw-up. Fortunately, I haven’t destroyed anything since I started the blog, but it’s only a matter of time…
What have you learned from the blog community about your home or your projects?
Some major things – from the blog community I learned about www.heatinghelp.com, which has been incredibly helpful as I’ve tried to learn about steam heating. But the sense of community in general is the best part. Knowing that there are many people out there going through some of the same things you’re going through, so you commiserate if not always directly help one another.
Do you find yourself checking in on your site traffic numbers?
I’m really not worried about traffic – as I mentioned, the blog is for my family first. I have checked off and on, and I am surprised by the different locations people have visited from. We’ve had visitors from Australia, England, India, Russia…of course, most are from the US. The map of visitors is interesting, in that there is a solid mass in the New England area, and it progressively thins as you head to the west coast.
You’re not the only house blogger in the blogosphere, but as far as I can tell, you are the only one in College Hill. What is the appeal to house blogging?
It’s mainly a way of keeping track of our progress, but it’s nice to have this sense of community as well. I’m also fascinated by the very idea of blogging – this is something that didn’t really exist ten years ago, and yet it is part of daily life for many people now. From little personal blogs like mine that get maybe 20 to 50 hits a day, to huge political and science blogs getting tens of thousands of hits a day, blogging seems to be part of our world now. It’s interesting to be experiencing it, even if on a small scale.
What is the appeal of College Hill?
My wife, Maranda, has wanted to live in College Hill since elementary school. I didn’t really know about College Hill until high school, but I loved it right away. When we moved back to Wichita in 2002, we wanted to move into College Hill, but it just wasn’t possible at the time. A few years later, we visited some friends who live in College Hill on Halloween, and we loved it. We’ve always been used to four or five trick-or-treaters on Halloween, and at our friends’ house we saw hundreds. The decorations were amazing, and everyone was having a great time. We realized that this wasn’t just an established neighborhood with neat old houses – it was a great place to live. We knew that someday we had to live in this neighborhood.
In late 2006 when we found out we were having triplets, we decided that we needed to find the “happily ever after house,” the one that we were willing to live in for the next few decades at least. And there was no question about where that house would have to be.
