'A house that deserved to be loved'

Kari and Jack Waldhaus are using this historic Baker City home as a summer place now that they've moved to Hawaii. After this photo was taken, the couple painted the home a pale yellow.

By ADRIENNE GOODRICH
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For the Jack and Kari Waldhaus, Hawaii is home, and Baker City is for summer vacations.

Well, “vacation” in their case means slaving away at carpentry.

The Waldhauses own the Victorian house at 2515 Court Ave.

Last year, when Jack got a job in Hawaii, the couple moved from Baker City to Honoka’a. Once Jack had his week of vacation stored up they came back, but not to relax.

Instead of sunning on a beach for their vacation, they spent it restoring the outside of the house — just in time for a new coat of paint.

The house, with a total of 4,500 square feet, is one of the older homes in Baker City. While the exact date of the building is unknown, it has to be older than 1890, since it shows up on a map dated that year.

The style of the house, Victorian Italianate, came to the U.S. from England in the 1850s  and remained popular until the 1870s. This style copied Italian Renaissance homes. The house on Court has many of the Italianate fixtures, with its flat roof and bay windows with inset wooden panels.

(There are several other homes in Baker City with this style, including the former home of philanthropist Leo Adler, now a museum, on Main Street.)

Victorian homes were often sold in kits, the pre-cut boards coming in boxcars along with the plans, or the blueprints could be purchased by themselves.

The Waldhauses’ house could have been sold in a kit, since the Oregon Railway and Navigation Company line arrived in Baker City in August of 1884; however, whether the house was actually built this way or not is unknown.

On the 1890 map the house and land it sat on were called the “Kimmison Edition.” This may mean that it was built by Mary A. Kimmison, who sold it in February of 1912. Kimmison died in 1919.

Victorian houses were commonly built in towns, including Baker City, where gold mining was a major industry. These large, elaborate homes were a way for their owners to flaunt their wealth.

The house on Court was no different.

The house itself is two stories, with an attic and a basement. A stone foundation rises for several feet before the wooden siding starts. Long and high, the house doesn’t reveal its real size to a casual watcher from the sidewalk.

The house contains three fireplaces, all of which start in the basement instead of on the ground floor. The basement probably contained the original kitchen, an arrangement that would keep the house cooler in the summer. The section that includes the current kitchen probably was added later when the idea of summer kitchens — separate kitchens for the hot months that were open to the air — migrated from the Deep South.

Later, an owner installed a giant coal-fired boiler in the basement to heat the home.

“It looked like something out of a Frankenstein movie,” said Les Tipton, who grew up in the home.

The house has a rocky history.

Between 1912 and 1945 the title was transferred about 18 times. At one time the County Sheriff held the title, which probably means the home was foreclosed on.

Originally the house was in a relatively open area, with cultivated fields nearby. Today the neighborhood, just south of the Central Building that’s part of the Baker Middle School complex, has a full contingent of homes.

A map from August of 1903 shows the cultivated land gone and more houses encroaching on the area. This would have been during the city’s second mining boom, one driven by the opening of hard-rock mines. The first boom was centered around placer mining.

The house was definitely built to impress.

Kari and Jack’s favorite features are the 48 stained-glass windows, the solid marble fireplace with inlaid gold, and the front staircase — there are two staircases, the rear one probably for the use of servants.

The windows make Kari feel like she is in a church.

“When the sun comes up in the east in the morning they sparkle,” she said.

The fireplace, Kari jokes, could be worth more than the house itself.

“I joke that we’ll sell the house and sell this separately and probably make more money on it,” she said.

But Kari’s favorite part is that front staircase.

“I call it my, ‘I don’t give a damn’ staircase,” she said, describing the women she imagines flouncing down the risers with their parasols and flowing skirts.

Much of the house’s history is rather murky.

Kari was given a picture showing ladies in an old-fashioned car that is decorated, perhaps for a parade, and waiting in front of the house. She guesses the picture was taken in the 1920s.

The house may have had the first indoor plumbing in Baker City. Tipton said he heard from a previous owner that it had the first indoor toilet in Baker City. However, the townspeople thought it was so unsanitary that they made the owners take it out.

The house was used as an apartment building for a while. It was called the Colonial Apartments when Tipton lived there from 1949 to 1966.

“The house has had some rough years and has survived fairly well, and for some reason I still feel closely connected to it,” he said.

At that time the home was owned by Margaret Taylor, a nurse at the local hospital, he said. She lived in a double-room apartment on the ground floor and Tipton’s family rented the rest of the rooms on that floor. The upstairs was devoted to three apartments, each with a kitchen.

“It was a great place to grow up in because of its size which gave us plenty of room to play,” he said.

Taylor was single with no children, and soon became part of the Tipton family, reading to the children, feeding them and playing with them.

“She was like a grandmother to us,” Tipton said. 

Unfortunately, around 1958 a salesman convinced Taylor to put asphalt siding on the house. In order for this to be done the original decorative trim and brackets were torn off. This left the house looking much less Victorian as it was stripped off many of the decorative features. This was in about 1958.

When Taylor died, the home’s new owners forced the Tiptons to leave.

After that came a dismal period in the house’s history. The walls were stripped down to the studs, the yard was full of pieces of wood. It looked like a lost cause.

“The house was ready for demolition,” Kari said.

“I though it was going to burn down for a while,” Tipton said.

But the Huck family, who sold the home to the Waldhauses, reversed its downward slide and restored the interior.

“They put a lot of time and energy into it,” Kari said. “If we had seen it before they worked on it I don’t think we would have bought it.”

Not only did this make the house livable again, but it resulted in the “caboose room” in the basement.

Jerry Huck enjoyed trains so much that he took apart a caboose and rebuilt it in the basement.

The Hucks also updated the home’s plumbing and electric wiring, Kari said.

Because the Hucks restored the inside there weren’t many artifacts left for the Waldhauses to find. They did, however, discover the “widow’s walk” hidden behind the water heater.

A widow’s walk is a railed rooftop platform — in this case a short decorative metal fence designed to top the porch roof. They were a decorative feature typical of Italianate architecture.

The name comes from the idea that the wives of mariners would stand on the platform looking out to sea waiting for their husbands to return — many of whom never did.

While the Hucks took on the massive job of restoring the inside of the house, they never made it to the outside.

This job remained when Jack and Kari bought the home in 2006. And it was still left to do at the start of this summer.

“We haven’t been able to put too much time into it,” Kari said. “The more important thing was the outside because the inside was livable.”

And the outside was a big job. The house was a patchwork of different woods in different states of decay. There were holes where squirrels were living in the attic, peeling paint and bad roofing.

In fact, she even compared how the house looked to the Addams Family home in the popular TV series.

“Before we started working on the outside you would have expected Lurch to come to the door,” she said, laughing.

However, what impressed the couple most about coming to work on the house was the community support they experienced.

Kari describes the house as a “community project.”

Even though the neighbors haven’t been pulling nails or picking up paintbrushes, Jack and Kari feel their efforts are appreciated.

“They are so thrilled that this house is being worked on,” Kari said.

When the Waldhauses arrived to start their work, neighbors pitched in to make sure they had the utensils and furnishings they needed to live in the empty house.

Earlier this summer the neighbors threw a block party to celebrate that the house was being restored. 

Even the paint colors for the house — such as the pale yellow — were chosen by a committee of neighbors, Kari said. This was because the neighbors are the ones who have to look at the house every day.

“The people here are just absolutely wonderful,” Kari said. “I think we’ll always have a part of us in Baker City.”

The Waldhauses don’t have specific plans for the house.

The couple had wanted to sell it when they first moved to Hawaii, but they couldn’t stand the thought of just giving the house away.

“People aren’t buying these old Victorians anymore,” Kari said.

So they have decided not to list their house for sale. However, if the right buyer came along they possibly could be convinced to sell.

If not they’ll just keep the house as a summer home.

“We thought this was a house that deserved to be loved,” she said.