West Seattle · 2005–2009
Pigeon Point Project
I bought a 1907 Craftsman in Pigeon Point, a small neighborhood within West Seattle, in 2001. I met Trissa about a year later, and together we spent the better part of two decades taking the place apart and putting it back together. A new kitchen, radiant floors, rebuilt windows, a new fireplace, a box-beam ceiling, a media room, a wine cellar, miles of stripped paint, and one very over-engineered cat door.
That first year on my own, I mostly just talked a big game about my plans. Things got serious after Trissa and I married in 2004, and with her encouragement we really dug in. Blogging was popular then, so in 2005 we started our own and kept it up for a few years. (The 4renovators.com name came from a grander plan to host other people's house blogs. It ended up hosting exactly one.)
Eventually, after we stopped posting, I took the blog down. Twenty years later I went looking, and realized I'd misplaced or lost much of the original content. I pulled what scraps I could from the Wayback Machine, then got lucky: the original site database turned up on an old computer, and I used it, with a lot of help from some modern tools, to rebuild the whole archive and restore the photos from my own files. It became a book for Trissa, and it became this site. It's all here, start to finish. Read it straight through, or wander in wherever you like.
— Nick