Italianate Cottage: A New Old House In Charlmette, Louisiana

I lived in Chalmette, Louisiana which is just south or down river from the city of New Orleans. We lost our house in Hurricane Katrina, water over the roof for three weeks, which gave us the chance of a life time to build our own New Old House. We always wanted an old house, and being from this part of Louisiana we are surrounded by old Plantation homes, and being just a few minute drive from New Orleans we see all the great old homes almost everyday. Due to family obligations we were never able to find the time or money to buy an old house and renovate it, or move from the area we lived in. Just a few miles from where we lived we had always seen this house that looked very old but knew it had been built in the last ten years because the subdivision was only built about ten years ago. We really liked this house and always said if we ever get the chance we were going to build a house just like it.

I work just north of New Orleans and was able to get into the area we lived in during the Hurricane. One look at the place and I knew it was all over with. The area we lived in was not far from a large oil refinery which had several large oil storage tanks at their plant. One of these tanks floated off it's foundation and spilled over one million barrels of oil into about two thousand houses next to the plant. One of those houses was ours. Life does have a silver lining sometimes, so thanks to flood insurance and some savings we began our journey into building our New Old House.

Once all the flood water went down, that took almost a month, we salvaged what we could from our house and started looking for land. Now the state of Louisiana may look like a big place but most of it is covered with water or swamp and finding good land is not that easy, but after a long search we did find a nice little place to build a house. Next was getting blue prints and a house design, which brings me back to the New Old House we kept seeing not far from where we use to live. Several trips to that house and a lot of pictures later we had a basic design. We also met the owner of the house who told us how he came to build his New Old House which was to copy it from a real old house on St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans. St. Charles Avenue is also called the garden district and almost every house on it is on the National Historical Registry. These are some of the most famous houses in the country and all of them are privately owned. A trip to the original house on St. Charles to get ideas and we found out that the house is owned by a man that worked at the same company as my wife before the storm. We were able to get an invitation into the house for a quit look and some history of the house which was built in 1870 in the Italianate Cottage style.

Well a little internet searching on Italianate Cottage and several trips to the book store and we had all the information we needed. Now to get blue prints and some more internet searching and we found a company in Jackson Mississippi that does historical reproduction house plans. A lot of emails and one trip to Mississippi later and we had our blue prints. Work started in October 2006 and should be completed in April or May of 2007. Have had all the normal problems of building a new house, rain that will not stop, lack of contractors and labor, material shortages just to name a few but things are moving along. Our design is keeping with the look of an old house but the materials and science of the house are all new. One thing different is the use of an un-vented and conditioned crawl space, and spray foam insulation. Most new houses in the south are built on what is call slab on grade. They pour a concert slab directly on the dirt ground with some plumping run in the slab and then frame the wood structure directly on top of the concert slab. We wanted the look of the old raised houses but did not want the mold and mildew problems they cause. We also wanted some FLOOD protection, so the house is five feet off the ground on top of a crawl space, but the crawl space has no vents in it. We do have ducts from the HVAC units run into the crawl space so that it will be the same temperature as the house, and this also keeps the crawl space de-humidified and mold free. It also cuts down on the size of the A/C units we had to install saving us some big bucks. The spray foam is much more expensive then regular fiberglass or rock wool but it cuts down your heat and cooling cost in half. It gets really hot here in the summer time so the spray foam is a good thing.

Well, just wanted to tell you how we are doing our New Old House. Should be finished with the electrical this week, and then we need to get inspections done so we can spray the foam and install the sheet rock.