constant narrator

Bug, Samantha, Edward and I went on a little field trip today to Gonzales, Texas, home of Discovery’s architectural salvage. It was a scouting mission for me to see if they had some of the things I will need for my apartment build-out of the house.

[Back story: Although the 4 people reading this already know, my 2 months of house dating have ended and I am through all of the hoops with a finalized loan on a house in the Cherrywood neighborhood. I close on Thursday. My brain is exploding.]

It was a pretty drive with all the pastures green and the blue bonnets showing off with the Indian Paintbrush. Some of the ditches were rioting with it. There were big, gorgeous thunderstorms off in the distance on all sides, and we eventually drove into one that had this blossoming sort of thunder. We waited out the downpour a bit when we pulled into Gonzales, then hopped into Discovery’s.

Wow, they have everything. It was almost as good as the mammoth architectural place in Chicago, which is really saying something since Chicago generally has much more interesting and old buildings that are torn down and scavenged. They had some gorgeous doors and lots of crazy doorknobs and some mint condition clawfoot tubs that made me drool. The real deals seem to be in the wood floors they reclaim or mill themselves. I approached the front desk and ended up talking to the owner for 45 minutes (boring my compatriots into retreating to the van).

Funny thing about Brad Kittel, owner of Discovery’s (with his wife Suzanne)… I was describing the house I’m buying and out of the blue he said its street name. Now, the street is one block long and out of the way. I looked at him sideways and he told me he had rehabbed most of the houses on that street and knew every one. Seems he rehabbed half of my new zipcode, back when it was one giant crack den.

How very strange.

At any rate, I found plenty of goodies to come back for and he was very forthcoming with his knowledge about how to lay things on top of slab foundations, obscure eco-heating inventions and many other topics. I shall return, and they shall claim some of my money for their own.