Mesta Park SPARKLES
Six vintage homes will open for 40th annual holiday home tour
The proof is in the pictures, popping up one after the other as Reagan and Keri Bradford swiped through an album on her iPad.
“See that?” Keri Bradford pointed to what she said is the back of the house, though it appeared to be a mass of vegetation. She was pointing to a tree off to one side. “See the vines and the tree? They had grown through the windows. It was inside the house, like ‘Jumanji.’ ”
The home at 805 NW 19, minus the vines, will be among six homes on the 40th annual Mesta Park Holiday Home Tour next weekend.
Tours will be from 4 to 8 p.m. Dec. 2 and from 1 to 5 p.m. Dec. 3.
Advance tickets are $12 and are available online and at select locations. Go to mesta park.org and click “events.” Tickets also will be available on tour days at each of the tour homes for $15 for adults and $7 for children.
In the book “Jumanji” and the movie, a hit during the 1995 Christmas season, the vines were carnivorous. Luckily for the Bradfords, the vines at their house didn’t put up as much resistance.
Photo after photo reveals how contractors cleaned up the exterior, gutted the interior, stripped the walls and floors, and pulled out wiring, rebuilding and merging what was a pair of duplexes into one single home. The work took 15 months in all.
“That’s how open this house was,” Reagan Bradford said, bringing up another picture showing the floor stripped of its floorboards, exposing the beams beneath.
“We put in new beams because the foundation was in such horrific shape. We basically built a new house,” he said.
A friend living next door clued the Bradfords in on the old duplex in 2015. They lived just a few blocks away in the second house they had gutted and renovated, and had done one previously in Linwood Place.
“We had two kids, instead of just the one when we did the first house,” Reagan Bradford said. “So we were looking for more space, and we just loved the projects. It’s kind of one of my and Keri’s favorite thing to do together.”
The owner didn’t live there and just used the place for storage. But he was unpredictable, their friend warned, simply showing up from time to time without warning.
“I’m just going to call you,” Reagan Bradford recalled his friend telling him, “and you’re just going to have to come over here.”
The call came on Christmas Eve 2015 as the family was getting ready for a church service. He dropped everything and rushed over to the property catch the owner.
“I talked to him for about 10 minutes, walked around and we had a deal,” Reagan Bradford said. The big issue proved to be all the stuff the man had stored in the old duplex, but Bradford agreed to give him 60 days to get what he could out. “I told him after that, I’d take care of the rest. That was like a big relief to him.”
A house fire in 2008 pushed the Bradfords into the renovation world. They found out afterward the wiring in their house was bad.
“We said we want to live in an old house, but we’ve got to know what’s in the walls,” Reagan Bradford said. “And the only way to know that is to do it ourselves. So that’s when we started looking for a house that we could redo. But I’m the worst handyman that ever lived.”
“And I can barely change a light bulb,” Keri Bradford added.
“But we’ve come to enjoy the process,” Reagan Bradford went on. “It’s important to be savvy about who you hire and to stay on the job site and monitoring it. That’s really all it is.”
Their daughters, Hattie Mae, 8, and Frances, 5, also enjoy the process.
“We’re still every night looking on our iPad at design things and they’re like, ‘Ooh, can we have that for our next bedroom?’ ” Keri Bradford said with a laugh. “They’re already moving on to the next one.”