AROUND TOWN - JUNE 18, 2003

Renovation the key in Eastside’s first home tour
By ALYSSA BROWN

Most home tours feature fancy and often palatial residences, but the first Eastside Home Tour on Sunday is an exception.

“The homes selected are not the grandest or the biggest,” Joan Nelson, coordinator of the Allen Neighborhood Center, said. “We chose those that would reflect the diversity of housing stock.”

A variety of architectural styles, including a few four-square homes and bungalows, as well as a colonial-style home and a farmhouse, are featured on the tour on eight recently renovated homes, built between 1897 and 1922.

The tour is the culmination of months of work on the part of the homeowners and the Allen Neighborhood Center. The center presented a series of four workshops in the months prior to the home tour. With titles like, “What Do You Have? What Do You Want?,” “Maximizing Your Home’s Usable Space,” “21st Century Additions in a 20th Century House,” and “Embarking on Your Home Improvement Project,” each of the three-hour sessions guided more than 80 homeowners through the process of planning and executing changes to their homes.

Nelson said the Allen Neighborhood Center designed the workshops to teach people how to “create the home that you want in the home you have.” The program also included free sessions on applying for building and safety permits and home improvement loans. Plans are already in the works to create a similar series of lectures for 2004. Although the overall format will be similar, the new sessions will be tailored to address concerns that arose this year. According to Nelson, “There were a lot of themes that emerged, such as porches and wet basements.”

Nelson said the eight homes will, in some cases, show interesting measures to maximize usable space. Other houses feature substantial additions.” Ultimately, Nelson hopes these creative renovations will inspire others to look at their homes in a new light. She said people will see “what has been done and what they can also do.”

Visitors will see just what happens during construction at one house on the route. Nelson said, “You walk in there, and there are no walls.” The entire renovation process there has been filmed, and visitors will be invited back to see the finished project in six months.

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