SHACK-TO-CHIC MAKEOVER
Texas home renovator falls in love with new neighborhood when job is over
Ruthie Foultz loves the Quetzalcoatl sculpture a friend made for her that sits on the front lawn of her home on Roosevelt Avenue in San Antonio’s Riverside neighborhood just south of downtown. Not only does she love that the Aztec serpent is the patron of priests and the inventor of the calendar and books, but also that he helps promote her neighborhood, which she hopes more people will soon discover.
“I want them to see the Quetzalcoatl and say, ‘Hey, what’s that?’ and then loop around to have a second look,” she said. “Then, while they’re driving, they’ll see how great this area is.”
Foultz first discovered Riverside after she and her younger daughter Griffin finished playing a round of golf at the nearby Riverside Golf Course.
“So we were driving by when Griffin saw the “for sale” sign and said, ‘Mom, you could buy that house.’ ”
She bought and renovated the two-bedroom, one-bath home that she moved into in October.
This wasn’t her first extreme makeover, and she’d previously fixed up homes in Alamo Heights and Alta Vista.
“I love redoing homes, seeing something really bad turned into something great,” she said.
She purchased the 1,100square-foot house for $68,000 in the fall of 2016 and started planning the renovation. She believes the home was built around 1925 and may have been designed by Henry Charles “H.C.” Thorman, described in a
2017 Express-News story as “a real-estate mogul who might have been the most prolific residential developer of the 1920s and 1930s in San Antonio.”
“When I look at the lines of the house, it has all the markings of being a Thorman,” she said of the Craftsman-style design.
Whatever its provenance, the house was in pretty dire straits at the time. The bathroom had no sink, and the toilet wasn’t hooked up. The walls were covered with drywall so thick it extended beyond the wood frames around the windows. Even the appliances were avocado green.
“But it had good bones,” she said.
The house was level, for example, and the floors were in good shape (“that’s one of the things you look for,” Foultz said) and needed only to be sanded down and refinished. Once the drywall — and the several layers of fabric wallpaper beneath it — was removed, the original shiplap siding revealed an attractive yet rugged look.
“Ruthie fell in love with the shiplap,” said Pam Nyreen who, along with her partner Flossie Biel, run Handy Women construction company.
The house needed a new roof, a new electrical system and the plumbing connections to the kitchen appliances had to be replaced. And, while she considered adding window air conditioners, Foultz decided to install central air conditioning instead.
“For a time, I was thinking about running the house as an Airbnb, but I grew too fond of it and decided to live here myself,” said Foultz, the director of happiness for Crosley Law Firm. She said her title means she follows clients through their cases to make sure they’re happy with the attention they’re getting.
Perhaps the most problematic aspect of the house was the door in the master bedroom that led out to the windowless back porch she describes as “kind of a dungeon.” Using shiplap boards salvaged from elsewhere in the house, they closed up the door and rebuilt the porch into a light, airy sitting area overlooking the backyard.
Removing the drywall in the master bedroom revealed a hidden gem: One piece of the shiplap that makes up the ceiling has some difficult-to-decipher scribbling on it indicating the lumber yard that supplied the wood. Foultz decided to keep it.
Both the kitchen and bathroom were gutted and modernized. The bathroom received a modern glass shower (“a birthday present from my parents”) and a Mexican Talavera vessel sink. The kitchen was outfitted with a stainless-steel sink, countertop and backsplash. The wooden shelving is open and supported by metal pipes.
But Foultz’s favorite parts of the house are the backyard porch and backyard. The porch is open and airy and decorated with crossed golf clubs.
“The back porch is my place,” she said of the deck that overlooks a yard covered with pea gravel and crushed granite. It’s still unfinished, but she has plans to plant bushes to grow up and over the back and side fence to help shield her from car headlights driving on the adjacent Roosevelt Avenue.
The entire project took about nine months.
“The house needed a lot of love,” said Nyreen. “And we gave it a lot of love.”
Now, Foultz intends to spread the word about the neighborhood.
“It’s in transition, but it’s still easy and slow, and the people are nice,” she said. “It’s not competitive, like, ‘Who has the best backyard?’ ”
She said the folks at the Tee Time Sports Bar across the street let her and the workers use their restroom before the plumbing was hooked up. A neighbor down the street invited Foultz to her Christmas party. She built a Little Free Library where neighbors can borrow or drop off books for free. And she hands visitors to her home a list of local restaurants and attractions that meet with her approval.
Perhaps word is getting out. According to the San Antonio Board of Realtors, in the past six years, the median price of a home in Riverside increased from $65,500 to $94,250, an almost 50 percent increase.
And to learn more about her neighborhood — and her neighbors — she made it a point to stop driving to Alamo Heights and the surrounding areas to eat at restaurants and shop in stores she’d long patronized. Instead, she joined the “brand-spanking-new” YMCA nearby, began exploring shopping options closer to home and now patronizes the H-E-B stores on Nogalitos and South Flores.
This has, she said, helped her appreciate her neighborhood all the more.