Home Remuddling

I’m a big fan of Old House Journal magazine.  I think I have every issue ever published – I’ve been buying the magazine for years and completed my set with ebay purchases.

No matter how much I try to resist I can’t help but turn to the last page of the magazine first.  It’s OHJ’s “remuddling” feature.  Each month they pair a photo of a house, unfortunately renovated into a shadow of its former self, with a photo of  another house that looks like the sad sack house would’ve looked before remuddling.

The feature is a guilty pleasure – sure to draw gasps when you see the wrong headed choices that the house’s owners made.  Good intentions gone bad – home-renovation style.

Half Remuddled House

This is a photo of a remuddling job and an untouched original all in one.  One owner of this house – actually two attached single family homes – remodeled his half-house some decades ago, stripping away all the original ornamentation and covering the house with aluminum siding.  The other half-house retains its original trim.

It’s rare that you get to see the before and after impact of siding on a vintage house so clearly.  The city would look very different – and much better – if generations of siding salesmen hadn’t made their way through the neighborhoods.

For once, Old House Journal‘s remuddling spread this month shows a change for the better – picturing a stripped, siding clad house and its new incarnation with siding removed and trim restored.  Happily, houses can be brought back.  And the dedicated homeowner’s restoration is a gift to us all.

Categories: Everything Else
Tags: Historic Preservation

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 4th, 2009 at 1:19 am and is filed under Everything Else. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

1. pete said at December 6th, 2015 at 11:05 pm

   Vinyl and aluminum siding are terrible and should be illegal!

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