Doors in The Mission

Our current door

Other doors in the neighborhood

Here's the door we've finally chosen.

Of course, it's not a stock door. Even if it was, I'm sure that they wouldn't have it in the obscure size that our current front door opening has become. We've ordered it from this custom door place in Bernal Heights. It's the kind of place that has Pau kind of hours where the main guy that you have to talk to in order to order a door is only there during certain hours, but when you show up during those hours, he is never ever there. After four tries, J managed to connect with him and order the door. Three weeks was what he promised, so that probably means...6? We shall see!

Trap Doors & The Gimp

This house makes no sense. That's why it took so long to figure out what to do with it. It almost seems that every subsequent person who owned this place was more crazy than the last.

#1 Trap door in the main entry hall
I suppose this was originally added to access the garage, but the ceiling was so low over the stairs that you would have to sit on the stairs and scooch down each step in order to get to the garage. Not even my 4'11" grandma could get down those stairs without hitting her cute little head.

#2 Trap door in the very back of the house to access the studio apartment
Like the other trap door, these stairs also have no real ceiling to speak of and are even steeper. The story that the neighbors tell us is that the old woman who lived here before us had a daughter that was a little odd. And the daughter lived in the studio downstairs and could enter the house from the back. The only thing is that the daughter must have only been 3' tall in order to do that comfortably.

#3 Little windows from the back of the studio that look into the main house.
What this means is that if you are scantily clad or not clad at all up say feeding the dog in the morning, the person living downstairs could see you from their kitchen. Creepalicious. This picture shows the view as if you were at the back of the house looking towards the front into the kitchen. We've taken out the window now and covered it with insulation. That's the gray area just under the stairs.

#4 No windows in the master bedroom
Not one (unless you count the little one in the closet looking into the back of the house).

#5 Sliding glass doors in the master bedroom looking to the back area of the house
yup

#6 4 different styles of roof

#7 The entire studio has no windows except for one at the front that is about 1.5'x1.5'.
If you don't count the windows looking into the main house above. And the weird thing is that they build closets and whatnot down there to block the tiny amount of natural light that does come thru. The whole thing is very David Lynchy with this 60's era yellow sunflower wallpaper in the eating area. The trouble with a lot of Victorians is that the houses are usually pushed up against each other on the sides making natural light a bit of an issue, but what they did downstairs is a little crazy. The gnarly carpets that we ripped out down there were all stained from dog pee and God knows what else. I bet you wish I had a photo of that.

All in all, this house is wackadoodle and seems to be channeling the Winchester Mystery House.

The Diarrhea House

This is our little Victorian. She was built in the 1890's and seems to have survived all of those nasty quakes just fine. When we bought her, it was this yucky brown color. It actually looks nicer in this picture than it did in real life. I thought it resembled diarrhea. My grandmother called it "Ol' two eyes" when I sent her a picture of it. This was likely due to the awful aluminum windows that someone put in in the 60's. To the left of those stairs is a little studio apartment.

We bought the house with the intention of fixing it and flipping it within 2 years. That obviously didn't happen. My best friend in this venture is my little green lantern. I'll tell you more about him tomorrow.