Photographs by Christine Madrid French, 2024.
1488 Calistoga Ave. Early History of the Cottage
The house at 1488 Calistoga Avenue is one of three nearly identical houses built at the same time by contractor Charles W. Wilkins for George Horton in 1886. With a crew of six carpenters the swift building of the 24’ x 54’ cottages, consisting of five large rooms (two bedrooms, parlor, dining room and kitchen), as well as a bathroom, pantry and closets was expected to take only three months.
Read the history of the Calistoga Avenue Triplets! Download the PDF “Early History of the Cottage: 1488 Calistoga Avenue, Napa, Built in 1886,” by Karen Wesson, 2021.
1488 Calistoga Ave. Railing & Front Window Trim Restoration
The house at 1488 Calistoga Avenue is one of three nearly identical houses built at the same time by the same contractor for George Horton in 1886. At some point the details on the front railings and on the front lower window were removed at 1488 Calistoga Avenue. The other two houses still had these details which were used as a reference.
Download the PDF “1488 Calistoga Ave. Railing & Front Window Trim Restoration Report,” by Karen Wesson, 2024 or read below.
Photographs and text by Karen Wesson.
THE RAILING
To restore the railing, one of the existing vertical balusters was removed to use as a guide in milling the horizontal pieces from 2×4 redwood lumber to duplicate the dimensions and the spacing of the distinctive groves. To install the new horizontal pieces, measurements were taken from the railing at the neighbor’s house to calculate the location of the alternating high and low horizontal pieces.
THE WINDOW TRIM
Measurements of the trim, the angles, and round pieces were carefully taken from the neighbor’s house. The trim piece was not a stock item and had to be created by cutting down a stock item and then gluing it to a separate piece of redwood which had been milled with one side cut at an angle to duplicate as close as possible the neighbor’s original trim piece. The round pieces were purchased from eBay.
