Village of East Davenport home gets colorful makeover

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| Saturday, July 31, 2004 10:38 PM CDT | () comments

Alma Gaul

Motorists tooling up East 12th Street from the Village of East Davenport have no doubt noticed a startling change in a house just east of Mississippi Avenue.

What had been an easily overlooked home sided in tan aluminum is now an eye-popping cottage painted a bright creamy yellow, trimmed in white and green. The closed front porch has been re-opened with pillars, and lace curtains hang at the windows.

The curtains are literal window dressing: The inside of the home also is being renovated and is nowhere near being finished, so the curtains hide the gutted interior. The curtains also add to the home's curb appeal, along with the paint, the brass house numbers and the landscaping, which includes eight red "Knockout" rose bushes and a variegated dogwood.

These changes are examples of things homeowners can do to boost the attractiveness of their homes.

They're also the kinds of projects the Home & Garden section is looking for in a new reader-participation project. If you have made changes to the front of your home � large or small � that have boosted its curb appeal, we'd like to hear from you. The coupon at the bottom of this page explains the details.

About the 12th Street house

The renovation of the yellow house is the latest in a series undertaken by Bruce Brocka, an academic journal editor who began restoring homes about 20 years ago when he and his wife Suzanne bought their large, 1894 home on the corner of Mississippi and Summit avenues.

At the time they just wanted a nice place to live, but they became involved in rehabbing one day in 1996 when Suzanne was backing out of the driveway and a man on the front porch of the "drug house" across the street pointed a gun at their daughter.

"It was either stay here and fight � or leave," Brocka has said. "We decided to stay and fight."

Since then Brocka has purchased, restored and now rents to stable tenants about a dozen properties, and he has several more in the works. His business card reads, "Restoring East Davenport one house at a time."

Brocka bought today's house for just under $18,000 in the fall of 2003 when it went into foreclosure, and he expects to spend $20,000 to $30,000 fixing it up. He keeps his costs down by doing a lot of the work himself and by buying supplies n paint, light fixtures, paneling, you name it n on sale and stockpiling them in his own "warehouse" until he needs them.

The house dates to around the time of the Civil War (probably before the war, but historians aren't sure) when it was part of a small business district established by Ambrose Fulton, an entrepreneur whose big stone house is now the Fulton's Landing bed and breakfast inn on East River Drive.

The home was known as Fulton's Market Place and originally was a one-room cabin with a half-story on one side for sleeping, says Karen Anderson, executive director of the Scott County Historic Preservation Society and a resident-advocate of the Village of East Davenport. She's not sure whether it was a home first and then a market or vise versa.

Around 1900, additions were built on the east and west sides and on the second floor. Even so, the home remains a "baby house" of around 1,000 square feet, Brocka says.

Today the front door is tucked in on the west side, opening to a foyer with an oak staircase that was part of the 1900s addition. Through a doorway to the right is a double room that will be used as a living room-dining room combination, and then a kitchen. Upstairs there is a bath, then two bedrooms.

The house is one room wide, with all the rooms arranged in a direct line from the main entrance on the side.

Brocka plans to sand and stain the pine plank floors. "We don't do the carpet thing," he says.

Of all the renovation projects Brocka has undertaken n some considerably larger than this n this one required the most Dumpster space.

"We filled three 20-yard Dumpsters," he says. Much of the debris came from an adjacent shed that Brocka removed, but it also included items from the basement, the carpeting and the bath and kitchen fixtures.

In tackling the project, Brocka began by tearing off two layers of synthetic siding n one of aluminum and one of asphalt shingles. This revealed clapboard in "remarkably good shape" and a dab of fishscale siding in the peak of one of the side additions.

"It's a lot of fun trying to put a house back together, to make something of it," he says.

Alma Gaul may be contacted at (563) 383-2324 or at agaul@qctimes.com

BROCKA'S

HOUSE TIPS

For exterior paint, Bruce Brocka chose the Sherwin-Williams Duration brand, a latex paint with a high percentage of acrylic.

"It goes on twice as thick and is self-priming," he says. "It is wonderful stuff."

Duration costs $42 per gallon, compared to about $30 per gallon for other high-quality paints, but Brocka feels it's worth the cost because it lasts longer.

The paint is so durable that Jason Parris, of the Sherwin-Williams store in Davenport, says there are companies in the Chicago area that advertise it as "vinyl liquid siding."

If it is applied to a clean, dull and dry surface, the paint will literally last a lifetime, Parris says.

Brocka chose colors from the historic Arts and Crafts line.

He applies his paint with a brush, on a surface that has been scraped with a small,

2-inch tool with a carbide blade.

To get rid of bad smells in his properties, Brocka uses lots and lots of vinegar. "It does wonders," he says.