In this installment of our 2016 Renovation Diary, our homeowners focus on curb appeal After years of shuttling between New York City and Los Angeles, Mark Goff and Phillip Engel wanted to change their location and their lives. They landed in the tiny town of Healdsburg, California (approximately 1.5 hours from San Francisco in Sonoma County Wine Country, population 11,254). The home they found there?an extreme fixer?was certainly transformative.
The work they did on the 1870 Victorian turned the business analyst (Engel) and graphic designer (Goff) into seasoned renovation experts and tested their patience and skill. This week, in our second annual Renovation Diary, the pair describes the joy and the frustration of bringing the decrepit home back to life, a process Goff fully details in his blog, 227NorthStreet.
This house has always been white, and many people in town referred to it as the "White House." It?s never been landmarked, but some research Mark did makes us think it would be eligible.
While we were trying to decide just what color to paint it, we put up some small test swatches on the front of the house. This generated a lot of opinion, and we even had people knock on the door to tell us which color they favored. One woman told us, "Paint it any color you like?as long as it?s white." For a while, when people in town asked us what color we were going to paint it, Phillip would jokingly say "fuschia!" But he realized that it was...