It’s been a fascinating journey so far to understand the story of the von Homeyer house at NE 24^th and Mason. The original construction drawings and early photos, the story of the brothers who lived in the house all their lives, and now interesting insights about the front porch, which was enclosed more than 65 years ago.

Maybe you’ve seen the before and after photos that can’t help but make you contemplate earlier days (click in for a a closer look):

Check out the original front porch from the 1920s photo on the left, and as it appears today. Current homeowner Michael Schmitt says he hopes to set the original porch free as he adapts the house for its next century.

As it turns out, the porch was covered over in January and February 1959. We know this according to a request we filed for historic building permits from the Bureau of Development Services, which is something every history-inclined homeowner can do as a way of knowing why things are the way they are today.

To be sure, a good percentage of minor work done on our old houses may have been done without permit, leaving no paper trail. But in this case, adding new exterior walls is documented both with a building permit (issued downtown by the Bureau of Buildings), and an inspection card (filled out in the field by the building inspector). Have a look:

This $350 construction job was done in January 1959 by Harold Burbach using sheeting, siding and aluminum slider windows (but without cutting any new openings on the existing exterior walls or altering the French doors). Evidently the inspector attempted to mark the job as completed during visits in August 1959 and then January 1961, but received no response.

The newly enclosed space created an alcove off the piano teaching studio used by Frances von Homeyer and her many students, perhaps a place to store sheet music, of which Frances had a lot. We’re working on understanding the wide impact Frances’s music and teaching had here in the neighborhood and across Portland, which appears to be significant.

Our request to the Bureau of Development Services for historic building permits and documents also yielded the original 1925 permit and an inspection card that records a straightforward construction process. Both confirm the house was built by Kilgreen and Company for $3,780, that it was built for Hans von Homeyer (who was then living across the river in Vancouver…Frances is not mentioned), and that by Christmas 1925 construction was entering the final stages.

You can request your building permit and inspection cards online (the helpful folks at Resource Records will send you PDFs of any documents in the file for your house) which costs $15. Just a heads up: in our experience about 10-15 percent of houses don’t have any historic permitting documents, or very few…record keeping was not great before the 1920s.

If you do make the request online, you’ll need to provide the county property number for your house, which you can find under the “Assessor Detail” on portlandmaps.com when you look up your address (it starts with an R). If you do go to portlandmaps (which is an amazing data-rich resource), be sure to check out the link to “historic plumbing permits” for your address. These can be just as enlightening as building permits about original owner, builder and pre-address change address, with bonus details about cesspools, vent stacks and all manner of early 1900s plumbing techniques.

There are other resources to learn more about your house and its former occupants. Here’s the list we suggest. This kind of detective work is fun and can lead to all kinds of insights. At our house, it allowed me to find the little boy who grew up here, which led to his photos from 1917 and insights that directly shaped how we rebuilt our front porch, which was the very first post that got AH started way back in 2007.

The next stories from the von Homeyer house will be people stories: Frances and the piano, the amazing photo archive, and interesting images from the early 1900s in Portland and Vancouver. Thanks again to Michael and Jaylen Schmitt who have invited us along on this journey.