A Major Work in Progress : Renovation of Decades-Old Santa Ana Home Is a Labor of Love

Anyone who owns a home has been seized at one time or another by the urge to remodel.

For the lucky few, it passes.

For the rest, it signals the start of what more often than not becomes a time- and cash-consuming trial of personal endurance, emotional stability and the strength of those wedding vows.

And that’s in cases when the house was perfectly acceptable when the eager buyers coughed up their earnest money and signed the purchase contract on the dotted line.

Which brings us to the Biscottis, Jeff and Rolinda, a couple who show no outward signs of instability.

They had been married for four years--Jeff was 29 and Rolinda was 30--when they shocked family and friends by buying a house that they, assorted family members and a truckload of subcontractors spent three years working on before the couple could move into it.

And now, to the normal pressures that come with a major renovation, the Biscottis have added a new one: they have agreed to let The Times document their efforts during the next year in a series of articles that will give readers an inside look at a major work in progress.

The Biscotti home--formally know as the Duggan House after its builder, early Santa Ana insurance executive William Lee Duggan--is a 3,000-square-foot, two-story, wood-framed Colonial Revival built in about 1905 in a then-fashionable neighborhood on Sycamore and Pine streets, near Main and 1st streets.

In 1986, after spending years as a rooming house, the Duggan House was earmarked for the wrecker’s ball, scheduled to be torn down in the name of redevelopment to make way for a senior citizens housing complex.

The combined efforts of the Historic French Park Assn. and the city resulted in a last-minute rescue, and the house was moved in September, 1987, to a city-owned lot a dozen blocks and five slow and agonizing hours away.

Although just a typical middle-class businessman’s home in 1905, by today’s standards the Duggan House makes opulent use of stained and varnished wood, fine carpentry and handcrafted plaster. It has four bedrooms upstairs, and the downstairs features a double parlor, formal dining and living rooms and a spacious entryway graced by a curving wooden staircase.

It also had a tiny 6-by-8-foot kitchen that failed to meet even minimal building code requirements, and its only bathroom, located upstairs, was described by Rolinda as “totally non-functional.”

Still, the couple fell in love with the place when they saw it on a French Park home tour in April, 1988, and made an offer that was accepted that same month.

Three and a half years later, on Nov. 1, 1991, they moved in.

In the sometimes interminable stretch between buying and bedding down for the first time in an upstairs bedroom, the Biscotti family grew by one--daughter Victoria was born in June, 1989--and the Biscotti bank account shrank by about $80,000.

Jeff Biscotti’s carpentry skills blossomed, and Rolinda discovered the wonders wallpaper stripping can perform on the human back.

The couple opened the back of the house and added about 300 square feet to the old kitchen to create a large country kitchen, service room and bathroom. Upstairs, they gutted the old bathroom and began building a new one inside the old shell.

Along the way, they discovered that they were having fun--despite the occasional crises, the total lack of free time in which to do anything other than work on the house and the constant need to budget, budget, budget.

“People ask why we live in an old house, and why an old house in the middle of Santa Ana,” Jeff Biscotti said, surveying his Lacy Street neighborhood on a recent rainy evening.

“It’s because there is something special about older homes. And because this is a neighborhood. People know each other and are committed to preserving some of the history of the city. We have an apartment next door, and some people think that’s horrible. But the people who live there are the nicest neighbors you could ask for. And there’s a history here, and that’s something you don’t get in Irvine.”

That history came home to the Biscottis about two years ago when a neighbor introduced them to Betty Hilligass, granddaughter of William and Clara Duggan, the home’s builders and original owners.

“Betty has just been wonderful,” Rolinda said. “She’s told us stories about the place and helped us understand where things were and how it was furnished and what it looked like when it was still pretty new.”

Among the Biscottis’ prized possessions is a photograph of the house taken just a few years after it was built. It was given to them by Hilligass, who lives nearby. She also gave the couple pictures of the Duggans.

The picture of the house is especially valuable because it helps guide the Biscottis as they prepare to paint the exterior and landscape--the next big projects on their list of things to do.

So far, besides adding the kitchen, bath and service area downstairs, major projects have included installing all new wiring and plumbing and a central heating and air-conditioning system--work largely done by subcontractors--and furnishing the kitchen with custom-made cabinets.

In addition, Jeff has removed every one of the more than two dozen large double-hung wooden windows and sent them home with his 76-year-old father, Angelo, who patiently stripped and sanded each frame down to smooth bare wood. Several termite-eaten window frames had to be rebuilt, but the end result is working windows that slide smoothly up and down, providing the cross-ventilation they were designed to produce.

Jeff’s father also has stripped all of the original moldings in the house, and his father and brothers-in-law helped in framing the kitchen addition.

Jeff also closed up a door that had pierced the exterior wall of one of the two parlors, replacing it with a window built to match the others in the room.

To match the 87-year-old clear redwood siding of the original house when finishing the kitchen addition, Jeff called several area lumberyards without finding anyone who could help, then stumbled on Reel Lumber in Anaheim. The company made a cutting head to mill tapered siding to match the original and produced 1,000 linear feet of it for $2,900.

A lot of the Biscottis’ time these days is spent finishing up the downstairs portion of the house--the public rooms used for entertaining and family affairs.

Rolinda stripped acres of old wallpaper from the hand-troweled plaster walls, uncovering a deeply textured surface with an unusual greenish cast that a plasterer assured the Biscottis was a normal color for a final plaster coat at the turn of the century.

To smooth out the texture and prepare the walls for new paper, Jeff troweled on a thin coat of drywall mud and then sanded it smooth when it dried--a days-long effort that coated every surface in the house with a fine powdering of white plaster dust.

The Biscottis have not had to do much major patching because the walls and ceilings miraculously survived the house moving--and the years as a boardinghouse--with few cracks and holes.

The couple did hire a plasterer, however, to go over the parlor and dining and living room ceilings with a new smooth top coat to cover the cracks that did exist.

Jeff is in the process of papering the dining room and said he’ll be moving into the parlors next.

Still to be done downstairs: refinishing the oak floors; rebuilding the fireplace--which collapsed when the house was moved; putting up the newly stripped floor, door, window and picture-rail moldings, and refinishing other woodwork, including the clear fir staircase.

Upstairs, the house has been barely touched, and it is there that the visitor gets a real taste of what the Biscottis are determined to tackle.

The little jobs include building a new bathroom, refinishing the floors, patching and painting or papering the plaster walls and ceilings in the four bedrooms, and repairing and refinishing the woodwork--including the original oversized, four-panel fir doors.

The big job will be to re-level and ensure the structural integrity of the octagonal master bedroom turret. The turret looks fine from outside, but inside the floor is pitched at a disconcerting angle down toward the front yard.

The Biscottis are also planning to paint and re-roof the house and landscape the front yard and install a driveway this spring.

“There is something incredibly special about working with an old house like this,” Jeff Biscotti said.

“The craftsmanship, the special touches you find--like the 8-foot, 4-inch doors that you can’t replace unless you have them custom-made--just the fact that we basically were starting from scratch, which is something most home buyers don’t get into. It makes the project ours.”

Buying the house was an adventure in itself. Because of the joint city-historic association funding of the move from Sycamore Street, the Biscottis weren’t simply dealing with a previous owner, they were tackling a bureaucracy.

“We saw the house on a home tour,” Rolinda said, “and we knew it was what we wanted. We both grew up in little tract boxes in Buena Park, and we had decided that we wanted something different. This was it.”

Instead of making a purchase offer, however, the Biscottis had to write up a proposal detailing why they wanted the house, what they planned to do with it, what it would cost and how it would be funded.

Although dozens of people had inquired about the house, the Biscottis’ was the only proposal submitted. It was reviewed and approved by officers of the Historic French Park Assn.

“Our goal was to bring the house up to minimum habitability, to move in and continue restoring it, and to get in in shape to get a bank loan,” Jeff said.

That last item was the most important for the Biscottis. Because the house had been moved onto the site, it had no electrical or plumbing connections. Without those and without bringing the basic structure up to current building code standards by enlarging the kitchen and installing a working bathroom, no bank would be willing to make a loan on the property.

One reason it took so long for the Biscottis to move in is that when Rolinda discovered she was pregnant shortly after buying the house, the couple decided to have the entire home stripped of its several coats of old paint--the first layer of which was potentially hazardous lead-based paint.

The $3,700 stripping job, under a crew headed by Rolinda’s father, Robert Parker (working as an unpaid volunteer), took a long time because of the special precautions used to keep the lead dust from flying around the neighborhood or polluting the soil around the house.

“And, of course, once we stripped it,” Jeff said, “we discovered that the bank was reluctant to make a loan without homeowner insurance, and the insurance companies were reluctant to write a policy on an unpainted wooden house, so that slowed things down.”

In fact, Biscotti said last week that he expected to receive final loan approval “any day now,”--almost four years after the couple actually took possession of the home.

When that loan is funded, the Biscottis will add in the profit from the sale of their old home--a 1954 tract home in Santa Ana near South Coast Plaza. The combined funds will be used to pay the city $75,000 for the lot and $50,000 to repay a low-interest refurbishing loan they obtained in 1988.

An additional $50,000 will go to the Historic French Park Assn. to repay the costs of moving the house and building the new foundation. And $50,000 more will be used to repay the second mortgage the Biscottis took out on their old home when the money from the city loan ran out early last year.

Beyond the financing part of the proposal, however, the Biscottis impressed the selection panel with their obvious appreciation for the architectural character of the house and their desire to preserve it and to stay in Santa Ana.

Their commitment shows not only in the work they are doing, but in their willingness to share their experiences with the community. So far, the house has been included in two home tours in the French Park neighborhood.

“And now we’re really pushing hard to get the downstairs done,” said Rolinda. “We’re on the tour again next February.”