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Ron Tanner & Jill Eicher's 1897 Baltimore row house featured in the Jan./Feb. 2008 issue of This Old House magazine
I assumed that they were sending a guy to scout the house and determine if we were worthy of a feature. In anticipation of such a visit, we’d been working on the house for months. Our list of projects included stripping and re-finishing the woodwork in the master bedroom—including eight pairs of 3-paneled shutters; reassembling and retiling the master bathroom after having torn it up to get at a ruptured cast iron waste pipe (the only piece we hadn’t replaced several years earlier); finishing planting in our back yard; stripping and repainting our three-story porch; and making-over the front yard. We hadn’t touched the front yard since we’d taken on the house. Three weeks: could we get it all done in time? Racing to deadlines seemed the story of our rehab life—whether getting the house up to code for the bank (a deadline we missed by 6 months) or getting the house ready for my family’s first Christmas visit (a disaster!). Always I think we can do more than is reasonable or realistic. Jill just rolls her eyes when I get like this. We finished the master bedroom five days before the TOH visit. The backyard was planted; the porch was painted only on the first level and I still had paint to scrape from 12 of the 48 windows I’d spent days reglazing; the bathroom I’d given up on, leaving half a partition wall untiled; and, oh, yeah, the front yard. I hadn’t touched that yet.
Jill and I decided to take out the grass in the front yard, plant roses, then put up a waist-high Victorian iron fence. This entailed 1) tearing out the 100-year-old ivy and a few scraggly bushes, 2) uprooting the 80-year-old original shin-high fence (which was anchored and fastened in ways designed to withstand a tsunami), 3) hauling out about half a ton of dirt, and then 4) concrete post-holing the fence sections, which were a lot harder to manage than I anticipated (like everything I do). Then there was amending the soil and planting. Which, again, took much more time than I had to spare. I installed the last fence section the night before the much-anticipated visit. If you look closely at the TOH photo of the front of our house, you’ll see two rose bushes still in their containers. That week Jill and I got so little sleep we might as well have been drunk when the crew showed up. The night before, in fact, I didn’t get to bed at all. It would have helped had the magazine told us in advance what they were going to photograph. Knowing that, I wouldn’t have been scraping paint from the porch windows at six that morning. As it turned out, this was not a scouting shoot, this was a done deal—the editors had decided to run us as a feature and so they had figured out in advance exactly what they wanted to photograph. They didn’t want our backyard or our porch, even though they had expressed a lot of interest in these months earlier. And they had no time to entertain any new ideas, like snapping a photo of the 1886 penny we’d found when we cleaned out one of our sinks. The crew consisted of Timothy Bell, the photographer, his apprentice, and a stylist. They spent nearly 10 hours at the house. They had received a detailed list not only of the shots but also of the composition for each—color palate, angles, etc. You may be aware that at-home photos in magazines never represent how the home-owners live. Open up any house-pretty magazine and look at those Artic-empty countertops and those museum-tidy book cases. Such photos are idealizations of the home. So it was this time: they took up rugs, moved furniture, and evacuated all unnecessaries. Even in our newly planted front yard, they added a couple more plants for color because editorial wanted red on the stoop. The stylist was a straw-thin, effusive woman who seemed capable of motivating a busload of anemics to march a mile. She brought a van-load of new slip covers, pillows, and bedspreads to meet the editorial mandate. Coverings had to be lighter, we learned. And the brightening did make the photos pop. Obviously they have a method. The stylist and the photographer spent about an hour designing each shot. The photographer had strobes placed in three different locations for each picture. It looked very complicated. Jill and I tried to stay out of the way as we cleaned up one step ahead of them. After we took up the rugs, we had to wipe down and polish the floors. The recently refinished shutters in the master bedroom still weren’t installed. I ended up shoving them into their recesses and hoping they’d stay put. Because we’d spent every minute of the previous week trying to finish painting the porch, prepping the back yard, completing the master bedroom (interminable!), and the front yard, we’d had no time to do the basics for the visitors—like sweeping. But we were so weary, we hardly cared. My mother would have been appalled. The visitors didn’t seem to mind the mess as long as we let them do as they pleased. They were very deferential, asking politely, Can we move this, can we re-arrange that, do you mind? We shrugged: go for it. They told us that some homeowners get real edgy about strangers poking through their houses and moving their stuff around. Which is kind of odd, considering that the homeowners invite the magazine to visit. It’s not as though the photographer and stylist show up unannounced at your front door and say, “We’d like to tear up your house today!” One rule TOH house observes: they are not allowed to bring any furniture or gewgaws into your home to make it look better, only some covers and pillows and maybe some white candles. The white candles seemed a bit much but it’s a signature of sorts. If I had to characterize the TOH aesthetic it’d be Pottery Barn meets Natural Old House. And it does show off the architecture. The idea is to keep the distractions to a minimum. An oriental rug, for instance, calls a lot of attention to itself. A shiny wood floor, by contrast, nicely complements its surroundings. If you look at the photo of Jill and me in the library, that’s not where the couch and the chair usually are—and that’s not our slip cover or throw pillows on the couch. But both the couch and the chair belong in that room. So, yes, you see our house but not fully the arrangement of our stuff. Also: our junk’s missing, as are the dogs and cats and the dust mounds the size of softballs. I’d planned on taking pictures of the crew taking pictures, a kind of meta-analysis of the experience. As it turned out, I was lucky to still be standing. Well, actually, I wasn’t by the time they left. I was napping upstairs. It got boring waiting around shot after shot. Really boring. It’s not like we could chat with them—they were working hard. And it’s not like we could do anything else. We tried to be good hosts. But my long week caught up with me and I couldn’t hold out. When I awoke, the crew was just pulling away. Jill came upstairs and said, “We’re in the magazine!” “Great,” I said, turning over and grabbing for another pillow: “Wake me when it comes out, will you?” 
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