Porchfest in Cobbham

Neighbors can’t seem to walk past 824 Hill St. without saying hello. In the half hour Gaby Covington and Paul Quick sat on their porch on a recent Wednesday morning, four people stopped at the sidewalk to chat.

“There’s a way of life with the sidewalks,” Covington said. “We talk to all our neighbors. We know all our neighbors.”

The sidewalks will welcome more than neighbors on Oct. 18, when The Minor 4th plays the porch at 3 p.m. as part of Historic Athens Porchfest. It’s a natural stage, since the couple spends most of their time out there. 

“We live on the porch,” Covington said. “As much as we can, we stay on the porch.”

It wasn’t always so inviting. When Covington bought the fixer-upper in 2017, the front yard was overgrown, the picket fence was broken and the porch was rotting. The whole place was painted a dark color.

“It looked like the Addams family house,” she said. “Nobody would come up at Halloween ’cause they were terrified.”

Inside, the house had been chopped into apartments and rented for cheap. 

“It was a flophouse,” Covington said. “There were holes in the walls, holes in the floors.”

When she moved in, exactly one room was clean, so she started there and worked outward, room by room.

Underneath the damage was a handsome house. Athens-Clarke County tax records list it as built in 1920, though Covington said some people think it’s older. 

Covington calls it her Victorian farmhouse. It was built in folk Victorian style, the plainer, working-family cousin of the frilly Queen Annes and Italianates nearby. Its floor plan is a classic Georgia cottage: four rooms, each 15 feet square, opening off a wide center hall. The ceilings climb 11 feet, which keeps the rooms airy even on a muggy afternoon. 

Behind a closed-in wall, Covington found the home’s original openings, a reminder of how generous the first layout was. Two doors down stands a near twin, identical from the street, but, Covington said, completely different inside.

By the 1960s, she said, much of the Cobbham neighborhood was rooming houses and rentals. Strangers still stop by to tell her they once lived in her house, back when you could rent a bed on the floor of the upstairs hallway. There’s a rumor the place was one of Athens’ rock ‘n’ roll houses. 

Renters stripped most of the original details, and when Covington bought it in 2017, only the front door and one mantel remained. A panel of its stained glass was already broken, and she’s still hunting for someone who can fix it.

The neighborhood’s turnaround started in the ’80s, when neighbors began buying houses, fixing them up and selling them to people who would stay.

We would not have the Athens that we have without these incredible people,” Covington said.

Their influence lingers in the rules. Changes to original materials need approval, and the historic commission keeps a record of what each house was built with. Hers, it said, originally had an asphalt roof, so asphalt it stays. 

Covington carries on that work one project at a time. A mantel the couple found at an antique shop in Nashville now sits in the study, and it looks like it has always been there. Two other fireplaces are still waiting to be stripped of coats and coats of paint. 

The kitchen, her favorite room, centers on an island a friend built from reclaimed antique wood.

The work isn’t finished, and Covington doesn’t expect it to be. 

“Everybody in this neighborhood will tell you you never finish,” she said. “If you waited until your house had all the projects done for you to invite anybody over you never would.”

What keeps the house feeling full is the neighborhood. Covington started a mahjong group that has grown to about 25 members, and it has done something even years of waving from the porch hadn’t. 

“It takes a long time to break into a neighborhood, and to really get to know people,” she said. “The mah jong really helped us to know neighbors that normally we just speak to, but now we feel like they’re friends.”

Quick has his own way of explaining why it matters. When he moved to Athens in 1994, he lived off Jefferson Road and ran through Cobbham, wondering what it would be like to live here.

“It’s a dream that, I mean, that I get to sit here, and be on this porch,” he said.