They moved into their new home on Carroll Avenue during the blazing summer of 1980, Sharon Mielke recalls. During that record-breaking heat wave, the Mielkes had no air conditioning except for one window unit in the baby’s room.
A week after they moved in, the house next door was gutted by fire, and the windows on one side of the Mielkes’ house shattered when firefighters hosed it down to keep it from burning. (The house next door would stand two more years as a burnt-out shell.) A gorgeous old magnolia next to the house withered and died from the drought and searing heat.
“It was a mess,” Sharon says, “but we survived that summer.”
Getting settled in a new home always has its challenges. But for people like the Mielkes who undertake an old-house renovation, it can seem almost impossible.
The Mielkes’ first house, on Swiss, was “definitely a restoration opportunity. “It was a nightmare!” remembers Sharon. She explains that the old man who had lived there apparently had a phobia about people breaking in — admittedly, the neighborhood was rather rough at that time — and he had wired and booby-trapped the whole place with electronic devices. Fortunately, the gun that supposedly was wired to go off in the back yard in case of trespassers had been disconnected before they moved in, but they had to disassemble entire panels of switches.
Outside, the paint had been worn almost completely off (“At least it saved us a lot of scraping!”), and, inside, filthy wallpaper hung in strips from the shiplap. The Mielke family purchased that house in 1975, shortly after they came to Dallas, and by 1980 still had not completed much needed work. So why didn’t they continue living there and renovating it? Sharon explains that they simply found another house they loved — and took pity on. They’d driven by it for years and, “it was such a sad old house, all abandoned and neglected. When we found out in 1979 that a bank had put it on the market, we just thought it was too good a deal to pass up.”
They’d already bought a couple of other houses by that time, and initially were thinking more about resale or renting it out than actually living there themselves. But they did decide to live in it, in part because “the house on Swiss would be easier to rent than this one would be!”
To create a functional kitchen, they took out the back stairs that filled much of the space, installed cabinets, and put in a door between the kitchen and the dining room. An original glass-fronted case in the butler’s pantry was copied so that two now flank the passageway, and shelving was created to house collections of blue and white china and spatterware. A substantial kitchen fireplace, added by previous owners, provides warmth and texture, and a unique iron fire screen by period designer and artisan Davis Griffith Cox adds architectural interest to a room composed primarily of solid shapes.
When they moved in, the house had been re-sheetrocked and resembled a blank canvas. Most of the beautiful oak was painted with many coats of white–a challenge to strip, because the moldings are rounded rather than flat. A heat gun wouldn’t touch that old paint, so it was sanded off. The Mielkes lived in just a couple of rooms while they were working.
This turn-of-the-century house — it hasn’t been dated to an exact year because of a fire at the city records building in the late 1890s — is an eclectic mix of styles, but a Craftsman sensibility prevails, particularly in the front living area, with its beamed ceiling, and in the strong vertical lines of the staircase. It is thought to have been built by one of the city leaders and appears to have been moved to its present site; it sits on a plot of ground that’s unusually tiny for a house of its size. (The Mielkes have purchased the lots on either side.)
When they moved in, there were room numbers over the doors. The house began its life as a family home and became a boarding house, most likely during the Texas Bicentennial celebration of 1936. The area now used as the dining room was also the room where boarders took their meals. A couple of people who once boarded there have been by to see the place and tell the Mielkes old stories. The third floor was originally a ballroom.
“The steps going up to it are so steep, I don’t know how anyone in a formal dress could get up there!” says Sharon. As for the period decoration, this house was done in authentic turn-of-the-century style with help from Cox. “Black Thorn,” a William Morris wallpaper and fabric, determined the green, pink and terra cotta color scheme downstairs. The library is papered with it, and portieres and curtain facings are made of it. Sharon also papered the library ceiling.
“It went up, it fell down, it went up, it fell down,” she recalls laughing.
The green parlor features a built-in Renaissance Revival bookcase that blends seamlessly with the original woodwork. Cox created a beautiful paint effect for the wall behind it. He has a way with color; he selected the wonderful palette of rich-yet-muted colors on the three-story shingle exterior. (To achieve that earthy period look, Cox recommends the “Williamsburg” collection from Martin Senour paints.) Coincidentally, the color chosen for the cabinetry in the butler’s pantry turned out to be the exact original shade.
The Mielkes had never done any restoration before moving to Dallas, but Sharon grew up in an old house. They love the period ambiance of older homes and enjoy living within an easy drive of work and cultural events. And Sharon reports that once they got started, all that sanding, painting, wallpapering and drapery-making was actually fun. Of course, she did have a full-time job and three kids in grade school, so her schedule was “pretty full.”
And, she laughs, “I certainly could’ve lived without that summer!”
