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Perhaps you’ve noticed the gradual transformation of the little house at the corner of Main Street and Myra.
It’s a charming 1916 home that’s gone through many phases along the 103 years of its existence. At one time, Musso Shoe Repair was located on the same lot; the concrete slab is still there.
Paul “RP” Fitch is the present owner and restorer of the property.
“I was not in the market for a house,” Fitch declared. “At all! I was living in Jeanerette. I lived in New Orleans for 10 years and I came back here to take care of my mother.”
Though he wasn’t looking for a house, he saw a newspaper ad for this one. “It said, house for sale, $35,000, Main Street,” he recalled. “So just purely out of curiosity I drove by and saw it, and I thought, ‘That’s a cute little house.’”
Fitch peeked through the windows and saw that some work had been started by a real estate company out of Morgan City.
“They were going to turn it into a rental house, and had done some of the gutting,” he said. “I just called, because I wanted to see it. When they showed it to me, I thought I’d just offer them $28,000, see what they’d say. They said $30,000, and I said $29,000 and they accepted.”
Over the next two years Fitch got about the job of restoring and repairing the wiring, the roof, sheet rock, plumbing and the double-hung windows with a top-section that opens on its own.
“Then my mother started being unwell,” he noted. “So I stayed in Jeanerette taking care of her for 10 years, I just had this for an extra house. I would have parties here, and when we had overflow guests it was a guest house
“When Katrina struck, my mother had an elderly first cousin in New Orleans, she was 93 years old, and she had two daughters who were in their 70s. They called me and said, ‘We have three hours to get out of the city and we don’t know what to do, can we come to Jeanerette?’ I said, better than that, I have an extra house in Franklin, you can stay there.”
The Arts and Crafts style home, also known as a Craftsman bungalow, was unfurnished. “So I called my sister and said we have three hours to furnish a house!” he said.
The relatives lived there for six weeks, and then he continued restoring it, and moved in 10 years after purchase when his mother had moved to a nursing home.
“But the drawback was, I bought this house because I was working in Franklin,” he noted. “I was two minutes away from my job. Well, in the meantime, the governor closed every other state office and consolidated, and moved us to New Iberia. So now I’m 25 miles away from my job.”
It’s after that trek home that he sits down with the Banner-Tribune, and adds that he moved there in 2011 and it has been his home since.
There’s plenty work left to do, Fitch says, including painting and flooring. “Had I been smart I should have done everything before I moved in,” he said. “Actually living in it is a hindrance to getting things done. I painted the living room and dining room myself, and that was an ordeal! The living room took over a week because I work, and the dining room got done in one day because I had the lady from Country Roads coming.”
The magazine featured Fitch and the home in its Oct. 23 edition.
“I got started at 8 o’clock in the morning, took everything off the walls, washed the walls, spackled all the nail holes, trimmed, put one coat up, went and had lunch, put a second coat up, put all the pictures and furniture back, and at 11 o’clock I was done. I was beyond done!”
Fitch said a long-ago neighbor to the house was Georgia Chapman Zylicz, and she and her husband owned the Commercial Hotel (on Main Street at Jackson). “She had numerous children and her husband and her sons were in the house-building business,” he said. “One son got married and they built this house for the son and his new wife. They had a daughter that was born in this house. But they moved to Texas after maybe a year.”
As it happens, that daughter got in touch with Fitch through current neighbor Mariana Titus, and he invited her to visit. “I asked her if she wanted to spend the night in the room where she was born,” he said. “So she did. She was just over the moon about that, she and her daughter came. She was 90 years old and had never set foot in this house.”
There was a succession of owners that followed that family, perhaps five or six different owners over the years, “Until the Musso family bought it. Mr. Frank Musso was raised here. The shoe shop was right on the slab on the side of the house.”
Musso left an indelible mark, so to speak, in his childhood bedroom: "Apparently he took a diamond ring and scratched ‘FNM’ (Frank Nicholas Musso) on the window. And then when I was working in the kitchen…and I saw some writing in pencil on the ceiling. Apparently Frank and Guy (Musso, Frank’s son) had put ceiling tile up themselves, because there’s a little hand-written message that said, ‘Last piece of **** tile!’ Apparently they had had enough.”
Fitch noted that, since the first owners were also the builders, “they were building this house for one of their own, so it’s rock solid. A good design for as tiny as it is, good materials. And these are solid walls, it’s not finish grade, it’s rough, but it’s solid walls behind the sheet rock so it makes it easy to hang big things.”
Fitch said Country Roads likely heard about him through one of two friends, though he doesn’t know which. Louisiana Homes and Gardens had a prior article as well.
The 1,085 square-foot house makes a circular path through its rooms: There is a hall at the front door that opens into the living room on the right and a bedroom on the left, which then leads to a second bedroom, and through a door into the kitchen, to the dining room, and right back to the living room.
“I just love the feel of the ambiance, the esoteric of it, the design,” he said. “It’s not generic, it’s not cookie-cutter like these draftsman houses that you get now. The ceilings are high. As tiny as this little house is there’s lots of interesting little details in it, like a bay window in the living room, wainscoting in the dining room…this house is barely over a thousand square feet and I have an entry hall, it was everything that a young couple needed. I really could use more space, but it’s easy to maintain and it’s just me…I have guests a few times a year, entertain now and then.
He concluded, “I’m going to appreciate the size, or lack thereof, when I’m older. I won’t have this big house to keep up, so it works.”