Seattle Sun Newspaper - Vol. 7, Issue 10, October 2003

Copyright 2003 Seattle Sun. Please feel free to use the article below in your research. Be sure to cite the Seattle Sun as your source.

Wallingford Home Tour

spotlights renovation successes

By JAMES BUSH

Finding your dream home is that much easier when the home finds you, says Kathy O'Driscoll.

"Do you know how you walk around the neighborhood and there's a house you say, 'If that were ever on the market... ,' " she says. "Well, that's what happened. This was that house for us."

The three-story, turreted 1907 Wallingford Victorian that O'Driscoll and husband, Javorko Dzamonja, are renovating will be the featured attraction on the fourth annual Wallingford Home Tour, held Saturday, Oct. 4 from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. This year's tour, organized around the theme "Restoration, Transformation," will feature homes that have been remodeled and modernized, but have retained their original Wallingford flavor.

Tour proceeds will go towards the operating costs of the office, which serves as home base for neighborhood groups.

On a recent Sunday morning, O'Driscoll and Dzamonja gave the Seattle Sun a private tour of their future home (although the renovation work is almost complete, they may not be ready to move in until after the tour).

The elegant green marble and granite tile work on the front steps and porch gives a hint as to what awaits inside. Dzamonja, a contractor, and O'Driscoll had already purchased at auction much of the tile they used in various places around the home. She jokes that she now has "the most beautiful tile job you'll ever see in a laundry room."

The big addition to the home is an elevator serving the basement and first two floors. Victorians are "very vertical" homes and she and her husband plan to live in this one the rest of their lives, notes O'Driscoll.

As with all renovations of older homes, there was some unanticipated work. Dzamonja hadn't intended to rebuild the large deck located off the dining room, but later discovered enough structural damage underneath to warrant replacement. Likewise, he ended up re-siding the home after a little comparison shopping revealed that he could get new siding at a great price.

On the first floor, Dzamonja and O'Driscoll expanded the kitchen by building a small addition, changed the location of the front/side door (the house has two main entrances), widened the entryway between the kitchen and dining room, and removed the built-in shelving in the library. O'Driscoll says the huge dining room was "probably the biggest selling feature for me" as far as buying the home. "You can have as many people for Thanksgiving dinner as you want," she says.

On the second floor, the former master bedroom (created by an earlier homeowner, who removed a wall between two bedrooms) has been redivided into a bedroom and a "yoga room" with a large closet separating the two. The bathroom and changing room that completed the master suite has been modified into two bathrooms, one for the master bedroom and the other for the guest room (which features the original bathroom's clawfoot tub).

The third floor is the site of O'Driscoll's office (in the top room of the three-story turret), which offers a sweeping view of Capitol Hill, Lake Union, and downtown. It's also the future domain of 7-year-old Luke (whose room is painted "Thomas the Tank Engine blue") and 9-year-old Yelena. "We're trying to pay respect to the Victorian aspects of it, but keep it a little simpler," says O'Driscoll, who prefers cherry flooring and eschews traditional Victorian wallpaper in favor of painted walls.

While O'Driscoll gets a big dining room and a sky-high office, Dzamonja has staked out a basement recreation room (where he has built a bar) and a sizable workshop in the immense garage, which (based on mismatched rooflines) appears to have been created by joining two smaller garages. "You just don't find a house in the city with this kind of garage," he says.

The outside of the house now includes a few more Victorian details as, despite the dramatic three-story turret, even historic photos of the home showed it to be surprisingly unadorned. The simple interior door moldings were also replaced with a more ornate Victorian-style fixtures.

The architect for the renovation is Richard Fisher, a Wallingford resident who lives just a few blocks away.

While O'Driscoll was sold on painting the exterior yellow, she was undecided on the shade. "We were debating between yellows, so we went up to Capitol Hill and walked around," she says. There, she and Dzamonja spotted two yellow homes, one painted in a brighter shade than the other. This convinced them that, as far as yellow paint is concerned, brighter is better.

After the house was painted, their neighbors affirmed their decision, she says. "Three people in three days came by and asked for a paint sample."