While the main festival takes place on Saturday and Sunday, there are activities on Friday as well. The Tour of Homes starts on Friday afternoon and runs through the weekend. This year I did a volunteer shift for one of the homes and checked people’s tickets. It was so much fun. I met a lot of people (the tour was really busy  on Friday), and I got to see familiar faces from the neighborhood. You buy your ticket ahead of time, and then each house is a self-guided tour. Can you imagine being a home-owner and having hundreds of people traipsing through your house over three days? No, thank you. There were no photos allowed in the house where I volunteered which is the owner’s prerogative, but here’s the facade.

One of the houses was very interesting due to the fact that it was in the middle of a renovation. And the owners were living through it all with their infant son and very large dog. They thought they were just going to scrape and repaint the walls, but they uncovered structural damage and failing plaster in the process. I’m guessing this is what it was like for neighborhood “pioneers” in the 1970s who were buying decrepit old houses and fixing them up while living in them.

Another interesting house was built by neighborhood friends in 2002. The husband is an architect and a big fan of Frank Lloyd Wright. You can see Wright’s influence in the design. It’s funny, Chad and I had been there for dinner and Chad had attended many festival committee planning meetings in the house, but we had never gotten a full tour.

The other event on Friday evening is the Butterfly Ball. The event is an annual fundraiser for neighborhood theater groups. We did go this year but we’ve gone previously, and it’s a fun evening with dinner, a band, and dancing. I took some photos while the catering crew and music stage guys were setting up earlier in the afternoon. As you can see in the photos, this year’s theme was Alice in Wonderland.