Our house at 3618 N. Orchard Street in Tacoma was built in 1900. For the first hundred and ten years it was addressed 5104 N. 37th St.. This was because Orchard St. did not go through when the house was built. The house was originally built for and by the people who tended the orchards that were at this location. Orchard Street was named for the Orchards that used to be here. This is the oldest house on North Orchard Street that we could find looking up tax records for every parcel on the Pierce County assessor’s web page.
A little more than a block away, we still have a 95 year old neighbor named Bob. When he was a child in the 1940s he used to play with the children who lived in this house.
In the 1950s a large addition was added onto the house. At that time the husband was a car mechanic who had a home-based business.
The addition’s floor was built with heavy duty fir 4×6 Double Tongue and Groove “car decking” with 1/2″ plywood on top of that. Your chances of finding that type of heavy-duty construction in another modern house or even a vintage house is unlikely. This type of construction method even in the 1950s was used mostly for warehouse floors for driving a forklift across, or supporting other heavy machinery.
If these walls could talk… who knows the stories that they would tell. All of the children, the teenagers, and the men and women long gone who lived here and loved here and loved this house. There is no doubt the walls of this house would have much to tell.
This is a vintage house built out of real building materials not sawdust and wood chips pressed and glued together and thrown up in a hurry. The interior in the old part of the house is lathe and plaster and upstairs it has/had fir shiplap covered with thick paper, or painted. In another hundred years it will likely still be here while newer houses may or may not survive. Over the years many people modified it to the styles that were popular at the time and added on to it. It has a big footprint that has changed since it was originally built. We have tried to bring it back to its former glory by remaking by hand much of the former woodwork inside and outside that had been torn off by people trying to make the house look more “modern”.
As an example, we replaced all of the missing exterior window cornices (crown molding) when we made new wood trim for around the outside of the windows. You mostly have to drive over to “old town” before you see windows trimmed in this way. This type of trim is no longer available from any retail outlets that we are aware. All of the windows in the addition along with most of the windows in the original part of the house now have trim like this. We duplicated original pieces by hand with a router and table saw and added it to the exterior window trim to make the addition look more like the original part of the house. The exterior sills on all of the new vinyl windows were made by hand as well to match the original window trim. House flippers do not go to this type of trouble. We do not know if people will appreciate our efforts, but we like to believe that the house does.
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