The Regeneration Generation

The Wegners: “Anything can be fixed. . .”



Unloose a civil engineer on the worst house in the East Dallas Historic District and you come up with Terry and Linda Wegner’s house at 5650 Swiss.

The place was really a hole: an ancient white two-story with little, if any, architectural appeal. The rear of the house sagged, the stairs were enclosed, the plaster was cracked on most walls.

But only two-and-a-half years after the couple paid $21,500 for the house, it’s a showplace. It took a lot of nights and weekends – and $25,000 – to get it there.

Terry Wegner was perhaps better equipped for this sort of thing than your average young homeowner. He’s a former builder for Trammell Crow, and now runs his own construction company. To him the old structure was just another professional problem.

“With my training and background, I know at least one thing,” he says. “Anything can be fixed. All you need are the right tools – and money.”

Terry installed central air and heat, built a majestic wrap-around porch, opened up the staircase, and had the walls sheetrocked.

Linda mixed whites and bold colors, wallpapers and paints, throw rugs and wall-to-walls. The result is a home which expresses the couple’s personalities, while retaining its historic charm.

This is the third house the couple has redone in five years. But, for the first time, they are acting settled. Terry serves on the board of the Historic Preservation League, and Linda is president of the pre-school PTA at Lipscomb Elementary.

They have a few years before they face the school problem, but they are ready for it. “Some people over here say they’re going to give the schools a trial period, but we’re going to do more than that,” Terry says. “We want to be active and help make them good schools. We think it would be good for our child.”

The Slocums: “This isn’t a big city over here.”



Candy and Pete Slocum, parents of four, bought 6306 Tremont and then discovered the English brick house wasn’t in the Lakewood Elementary School district.

It was a frightening bit of information.

“But we had already closed,” says Candy. “There was nothing else to do.”

Lipscomb Elementary, a few blocks away, is 55 per cent white and about 40 per cent Mexican-American. At that time, it did not enjoy the reputation of a Lakewood Elementary.

“But I did a lot of checking,” she says. “I knocked on doors, really imposed on the neighborhood, and I found out the people were really fond of the school. I never heard anything negative about Lipscomb from the people in it.”

So their son got into the first grade and they got into the house. 6306 is in the last block before Tremont ends at Lakewood Country Club’s golf course. The Slocums had been looking for three bedrooms at a reasonable price, but they also wanted the “charm and structural quality” they couldn’t find in newer homes. They found them in a 50-year-old home for $23,000, and began two years of weekends and nights peeling and painting encrusted woodwork.

“There were days when we all felt like quitting, but fortunately, we never all felt that way at the same time,” Candy says.

The Slocums are avid hunters so the main project was to give the front rooms the look of a lodge. They did it with panelling, and with realistic sty-rofoam beams hung from the ceiling. In the rest of the house every surface has been changed, uncovered or recovered and sometimes both, except in the dining area where a green carpet hides more stubborn linoleum and the leaded glass cabinets still have peeling white paint.

“This isn’t a big city here; it’s our own little community,” she says. “I left Amarillo in 1964 and it’s taken me this long to find what I’ve been looking for in a neighborhood.”

TheWardlaws:“We just had to have it.”



Ken Wardlaw drove up Swiss Avenue from downtown one day two years ago and was not at all impressed. Then he crossed Fitzhugh and fell in love.

“I almost had a wreck,” he says. “I saw those mansions and the parkway, and my heart started thumping like I had just run a foot race.”

Wardlaw, 31, an insurance broker and dabbler in real estate, was an apartment dweller at the time. He and his wife embarked on a feverish search for the Perfect House. A few weeks later a realtor asked them to look at a 51-year-old French country-style at 6209 La Vista.

“We walked in and saw those massive double mirrors in the living room. We walked on through the dining room and out the back and I grabbed Ann by the arm and said ’I’ve got to have it. This is it.’ We were both just trembling.”

For the Wardlaws, the house became everything. The neighbors, the schools, the future market value of the old house were only tangential concerns.

“I just told them ’I’ll pay whatever the owner wants, just don’t let anybody else buy it out from under us,’ ” he says. The couple finally paid $48,000 for the house and have sunk several thousand more into improvements.

There were serious deficiencies in the old place: its entire insides were painted a dirty rose; heavy curtains covered the walls; every glass pane in the four double French doors leading to the porches was painted inside and out; plaster cracks marred the walls. As for the carpet, well it just had to come up.

But they loved the place. It was structurally sound, had a slate roof, beige tile fireplace and virtually irreplaceable concrete work around the front porch and entrance.

The Wardlaws work on their house on weekends and in the evenings, cleaning, varnishing floors, patching plaster and painting. The living-room is now off-white, trimmed in chocolate, and the rooms are filling up with antiques. As fast as the Wardlaws are collecting, the upstairs will soon be full too.

And the couple’s commitment to the house has done nothing but grow. Not long ago a fellow stopped to ask if the house was for sale; Wardlaw told him, “Sure. I’d walk out of it for $175,000.” That’s as good as a Not For Sale sign.

The Suttons: “It was the most depressing thing you’ve ever seen.”

The 74-year-old two-story, four-bedroom frame on Junius had been condemned by the city and marked for demolition when Jim Sutton found it.

The house had been divided into apartments, and was being used as a warehouse. “It was the most depressing thing you have ever seen in all your life,” says Jim’s wife, Trudy.

But the Suttons were undaunted. They bought the house for $12,000, and arranged a home improvement loan from Lakewood Bank & Trust. Since then, they have rebuilt the porch, painted the exterior, sheet-rocked the interior, added central heat and air, re-directed the staircase, added antique doors, and ripped out and built at least a dozen walls.

Cost: $20,000. And they aren’t finished yet. The couple is now ready to decorate. Jim is stripping the woodwork around eight windows in the breakfast-garden room. Next, they will work square foot by square foot of woodwork from the beamed ceiling in the dining room to the fireplace in the bedroom.

The Suttons expect to sink $40,000 in all into the old house. Jim feels it will then be worth perhaps $90,000 to $100,000.

“The average person can’t afford a $90,000 to $100,000 home, but here you can have one for $35,000,” he says. “When you look at it that way, you can get real hyper about it.”