The Porchfest home profile project was produced by University of Georgia students in Lori Johnston’s journalism seminar on home and garden writing and Katie Marages’ vernacular architecture course. The students interviewed homeowners, researched the residences and neighborhoods, and captured photo and video of the homes. The residences featured will host bands during Historic Athens Porchfest on Oct. 20.

Historic Athens Porchfest is right around the corner, and one of the porches in the Buena Vista Heights neighborhood is prime for entertaining. Ed and Kristen Morales’ home boasts an L-shaped porch, with a pergola and garden greeting guests.

This porch will feature The Young Frankensteins during the Oct. 20 event, which celebrates the past and the new with performances in historic neighborhoods.

Historical Remnants

The home, built between 1910 and 1918, features original pine hardwood floors in all but two of the rooms. The rooms are on the left side of the home once entering. You can see the difference between the older, darker pine and the new lighter wood.

Kristen explained why there’s some paint left on the original floors.

“The way people would do old floors is they would have a carpet in the middle,” Kristen said. “For some reason they didn’t like the wood floors, so they would just paint around. So there was actually a nice square of paint when we were refinishing the floor.”

The home also has its original plaster walls.

“I have a love-hate relationship with the plaster walls,” Kristen said, because of their cottage cheese texture.

Ed said he always found this part of the house interesting: The original wooden bevel siding of the exterior of the house can now be seen as an interior wall. This wall connects the old frame of the house to the newer structure.

New Additions

The Morales family has made several renovations,  including making a nook in the wall for their children. They also ended up “busting up into the attic, which was this humongous space. And so we got two bedrooms out of that,” Kristen said.

They also redid a bathroom upstairs and the primary bedroom bathroom. All of their renovations, however, have only been on the previous additions to the home.

“Old houses were made to be repaired, and new houses are made to be replaced,” Kristen said.

The additions to the home’s structure include a sunroom, kitchen and upstairs. The original frame of the home has high ceilings. However, when the previous owners added the upstairs they lowered the master bedroom ceiling.

Noteworthy Occupants

This 20th century residence has been the home of a multitude of people over the years. The house was built sometime between 1910 and 1918 because it’s on a 1918 map but not a 1910 map, Kristen said.

Many previous occupants’ stories are now lost to time, however Kristen has uncovered some interesting stories and names. Some of the musically inclined previous tenants and owners include:

• Jefferson Holt, former manager for R.E.M.
• Catfish Jenkins, which was a popular band from Athens in the ’90s
• Dottie Alexander, former member of the band, of Montreal, which practiced next door

The home also housed many people at one time in the past because it was split into multiple apartments. Some of the apartments were specific rooms while one of them was the basement.

“I ended up going through city directories and finding references to apartment A, apartment B, and I went back through to the 1940s,” Kristen said.

This will be the third year that the Morales family will host The Young Frankensteins.

“People come out and they sit out on the hill across the street, and it makes like a little amphitheater; we’ll get like 100 people out here,” Kristen said.

Miller Rich is a journalism major at the University of Georgia. This story was written in a journalism seminar course on home and garden writing.