Jolted To Perfection by John Luke Most people who live outside the Pacific Northwest (heck, probably most people who live in the Pacific Northwest) aren’t likely to recall the morning of February 28, 2001 without a bit of a reminder: Nisqually earthquake, 10:54 a.m., 6.8 magnitude.       “The most powerful earthquake in more than half a century jolted the Pacific Northwest yesterday, rocking homes and office buildings, buckling roads like rubber and serving as a jarring reminder of the region’s vulnerability to nature,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer reporter Robert L. Jamieson Jr. wrote in his page 1 story the next day.       “The 6.8-magnitude temblor originated 30 miles below the earth near Olympia and was so strong that it cracked the thick Capitol dome. Lawmakers said the limestone dome rippled like origami.”       Cheryl and Jeff Petra (pronounced ‘PEEtrah’) weren’t at home that morning. Both educators, they were at their respective schools in Olympia, where their immediate concerns were for the welfare of their frightened pupils. (“I thought it was the end of the world,” one second-grader told a reporter.) Only much later that day, when they returned to their wood-framed house within eyesight of the Capitol near Capitol Way, did they discover that their two-story house, which they had come to think of as “chunky,” “massive” and “sturdy” during the seven years they had lived there, was not quite so invincible after all.       “The most obvious damage, and the most serious, was that the front porch had moved away from the house,” Cheryl says. “That was especially troublesome because the porch supports the main bedroom. Over the next few months, we kept finding more damage. By summer, we had discovered that every room except the kitchen had been damaged.” The couple hired a contractor in June to help them plan repairs, and by September work had begun on a porch replacement the contractor had designed. But they had approved the design tentatively and uneasily, not so much because they doubted the quality of the work that was to be done but because they had a nagging feeling that the design of the porch just wasn’t right, somehow. It didn’t seem to “fit” the house the way the original porch had. Unknown Unknowns Cheryl and Jeff knew a lot about children and education when they bought the house back in the early 1990s, but they were unschooled in architectural design. They had never heard the word “Craftsman” applied to a house. Nevertheless, they shared a taste for architectural simplicity and honesty that was not easily satisfied, because they looked at and walked through more than 200 houses before they decided to buy their sturdy wood-sided house with its high ceilings and big wooden windows that brought light and generous views of the outdoors into the natural- wood-finished interior. Those qualities reminded Cheryl of growing up back home, on the prairie of northeastern Montana, and for that reason alone it felt right.        “We didn’t know what to call the house when we bought it,” she says, “and we still didn’t know anything about Craftsman style when the earthquake hit, but we felt we needed another opinion before we committed to the porch replacement.” By then it was late September, and when an announcement for the Historic Seattle Bungalow Fair caught the couple’s attention, they decided to take a look, drawn by the prospect of talking with designers and builders who apparently knew a lot about houses that, like theirs, were built in the early 1900s.       “One of the first things that caught my eye when we walked into the exhibit hall was a photograph on the cover of a magazine that showed a simple wooden table and chairs under a window in the breakfast nook of a kitchen. On the table and in the shelves surrounding it were brightly colored dishes. A note inside said the dishes were Bauer pottery and the table and chairs were made by Gustav Stickley in 1904, and that the house was described in an article in that issue called “Southwest Bungalow, High on a Hill.”       “I read the article while I was standing there. The photographs showed a house filled with beautiful old furniture, some cabinets with leaded glass doors that looked a lot like those in our house, and even an old saddle sitting on a rack in a corner. The article said the owner had worked with an interior designer named Karen Hovde, and listed her toll-free number but gave no hint of where she was located. I had barely closed the magazine, paid for it and begun to move on around the exhibit area when there she was in her booth- “Karen Hovde, Interior Vision in the Craftsman Style.”       The magazine Cheryl had picked up was Issue No. 29 of American Bungalow, and the cover article, on the late Dennis Fosdick’s defiantly eclectic Spanish Revival home in Glendale, Calif., was the first of several American Bungalow articles in which Hovde’s work has appeared over the past seven years. For Cheryl and Jeff, it opened the door to a new way of living in and with their home and its furnishings, which Hovde helped them to first recognize, then gratefully embrace. Learning to See ”The porch was just wrong for the house, but that was only the beginning,” recalls Hovde, who became the Petras’ guide and counselor in what turned out to be a complete renovation of the house. “All the interior walls and ceilings were cracked. The contractor said all they needed was patching, when what they really needed was complete reinforcing and resurfacing. And when I saw all the wonderful floors and woodwork inside the house, darkened and in places alligatored with age but otherwise unspoiled, I saw the potential to give it new life.”       First, though, Hovde had to introduce the Petras to the broad principles and fine points of a historical period and a residential style that they were innately drawn to but little understood.       Put off by dark wood surfaces? Wait until you see how they interact with natural light when the stains and finishes are renewed, and how natural they feel when the right kinds and levels of historic artificial lighting are brought back in.       Don’t particularly like heavy square posts? Look how right they feel when interior and exterior posts form a rhythm and balance that unify the house’s lines and spaces, indoors and out. Step by step, Hovde opened Cheryl’s and Jeff’s eyes-not so much to what to call the elements of their home as to understand why they had come to feel so homelike. ”It’s a feeling of being connected,” Jeff says. “Every day when I walk through the door, I simply enjoy how it feels-how the colors and textures all come together, of how something beautiful has been resurrected and restored, and how bonded we feel with the pace in which we live.”       For Cheryl, one of the most gratifying facets of this awakening has been the realization that her beloved grandmother’s house on the prairie was of a similar vintage.       “To have discovered this additional and unexpected link with my own family means a great deal to me,” she says. “For me, a sense of home and a sense of family-of having connections over time-are strongly associated, so much so that I had to respectfully reject Karen’s suggestion that I not keep my grandmother’s drop-leaf “wedding table” in our dining room because it doesn’t quite fit the Craftsman feel that she’s helped us create. That table symbolizes ‘living over time’ for me in the most tangible way possible. It isn’t going anywhere.” Although they don’t represent family in the same way, Cheryl insisted that the pair of rocking chairs in the living room also remain, even though they, too, deviate from a strict Arts and Crafts aesthetic.       “I toted those chairs back from Nicaragua after spending a month there visiting our Sister School in Santo Tomas. Karen would love for us to relocate them. But for me, they have sentimental value and strong connections to some of my work with children. So there they are, and there they’ll stay. I once told Karen that if she could make a saddle work as well as it did in the house I saw in the magazine, she can live with my rocking chairs.” The Gift Outright As it did the lives of so many others, the Nisqually earthquake of February 28, 2001, disrupted the lives of the Petras for nearly three years. But the event that jolted and cracked their house also jolted them into making an unexpected and transforming opportunity out of necessity. ”The earthquake was a gift,” Cheryl says. “It gave us our house.”