Lots of people buy houses that need paint, some TLC and maybe a new bathroom or kitchen.

And then there are those who seek out Renovation projects with a capital R, who can look at a heap of a house and think, “home.”

“I call it a divine madness to want to do these projects,” said architect Darryl Ohlenbusch, an instructor at the University of Texas at San Antonio and San Antonio College, who has fixed up a number of old homes and commercial buildings.

Recently Ohlenbusch purchased a building without seeing the interior, then got inside for the first time and realized that the roof was largely missing and you could see blue sky from the first of two stories.

“I always assume the worst,” he said. “But this one was worse than I expected.”

But once such a project is complete and a home has been restored to better-than-original condition, the owners are left with a unique property built with the kind of quality materials, wood and detail work that would be impossible to afford today in new construction.

“I don't know anyone who will say they love, love, love the process,” said Julie Hooper of King William Realty, who recently completed a three-year redo of a caliche-block home. “But it is gratifying.”

Seeing the inside

After months of trying, Danny Johnson drove by the Tobin Hill house one day just as the owner was leaving. He was able to flag him down and make an offer.

The man didn't want to sell, but eventually changed his mind and let them see the interior.

“Right when we came in, it was just this feeling of, ‘Wow,'” Melissa said. The whole house was painted a peach color, the kitchen was gutted and had holes in the floor and there was no working bathroom. It had sat empty for 15 to 20 years. “It was just really ugly.”

They loved it.

In addition to the peach paint, the house had coffered ceilings, dental molding, wood floors, built-in cabinetry, a pressed tin roof made to look like slate and details such as a fireplace with a hunting scene. Original windows – with the wavy glass – were intact in a storage shed.

The Johnsons bought the house and started a long renovation process, tackling the interior of the house first.

And although they have a business fixing up and selling homes, they don't normally do historic projects. It was a learning curve for both of them.

“Finding people who can do this work is really difficult,” Melissa said. “You need craftsmen.”

Meanwhile, the outside of the house continued to look more like a haunted house than a home.

On a cab ride from downtown one evening, Melissa had to convince the driver to drop her off there. “I live here,” she insisted. He was worried about leaving her.

‘Brave or stupid'

Hooper describes herself and others willing to tackle big renovation projects as either “brave or stupid.”

“I think it helps if you're a visual person, or if you have someone you trust who is very visual. Otherwise you're not going through the front door,” she said.

It helps to be choosy, too.

“I'm extremely picky,” Hooper said. “I don't necessarily want to pay for what another person has done. I have very clear and specific ideas. I'd rather buy a great big mess.”

Edward Alanis of the Phyllis Browning Co. said that buyers of un-renovated historic homes share a few things in common.

“Most of the time, if they're willing to look for a major renovation, they look for what everyone calls good bones,” he said. “They're looking for architectural features not found in new properties. They're looking for a functioning floor plan. And something that hasn't been messed up by a bad remodel, where someone enclosed a porch and then added on three bedrooms.”

Such properties are getting harder to find.

“Ten to 12 years ago you would hear people say, ‘We've got a listing in Monte Vista and it's a virgin house.' Now those are almost impossible to find. Everything has turned over so many times.”

Discoveries

The Johnson's neo-classical house had been declared a historic landmark by the city in 1998.

But they knew little else about it, and started searching for information.

The Loves were the first family who lived in the house, so historic documents refer to it as the Love House. The Johnsons fondly called it the Love Shack.

Then on a home tour in Monte Vista, they went into an Atlee B. Ayres-designed house and realized they were at home.

“I said, you know, ‘This house is a lot like our house,'” Melissa said. “It was a lot larger than ours, but it was the same.”

The Monte Vista home was built a year later – 1911 – but had the same basic floor plan, dining room cabinetry and a familiar x-pattern repeated throughout the wood detail work.

Ayres, one of San Antonio's most important architects of the early 20th century, also designed the Tower Life Building, the home that became the McNay Art Museum and the Municipal Auditorium.

The Johnsons started doing more research, and a UTSA architecture professor pointed them to the University of Texas at Austin, where Ayres papers are archived and slowly being put online.

After months of searching, Melissa found original construction documents for their home with Atlee B. Ayres' name and signature.

Discovering that they had purchased an Ayres-designed home came as a huge surprise and bonus. But it wasn't the reason they tackled the renovation.

“It was a three-year labor of love,” Melissa said. The couple were married at the home and reveled in having the renovation complete before bringing their one-year-old daughter home from the hospital. From the third-floor balcony they can see downtown and watch fireworks around the city.

The work

It's hard to predict how much work and money it will take to revive historic homes, especially those that have been untouched for decades.

“There's a certain unknown quantity,” Ohlenbusch said. “It's hard to quantify how much it will cost to do a project. You have to get in, take it apart and find out what's going on with the building. That sounds like evading something, but it's the nature of preservation work.”

Ohlenbusch likes to do some of the demolition work himself to see how a house was put together. “I don't want to find out a crew took down a wall that could have been saved or removed something that could have been an important archaeological clue,” he said.

For a house that is 80 to 100 years old, Ohlenbusch says people should expect to replace all of the systems, including the wiring, plumbing and heating and air conditioning (if it exists) and repair the foundation. Stripping a building back to its studs is often necessary because rodents and animals have been living in the walls.

“A lot of what we do is rebuild better than it was built to begin with,” he said.

And sometimes, after the process is over, owners later have to say goodbye to a building that they've put years into renovating.

For the Johnsons, who have four children, the large Ayres house isn't quite large enough for the family anymore. Despite its size – 3,100 square feet including attic space that easily could be converted into more living space – the home has three bedrooms.

The Johnsons can't figure out how to add more bedrooms without ruining the flow of the home's floor plan. So they're reluctantly putting it up for sale. “We don't want to leave, but we feel like we need to,” Melissa said.

The next house that they have their eye on is also a fixer upper, too, although not it's not this kind of fixer upper.

“It's what we do,” Melissa said. “We enjoy it. Our parents think we're crazy.”

This is how the home looked before its restoration.