You know the story about the simple home remodel that turned into a nightmare? That's pretty much what happened at 922 Canyon Road, but there are so many interesting points to this project that it's more revelation than bad dream.

The owners, who have lived in the historic property for 20 years, started out by planning a simple kitchen update. But once the contractor began looking beneath the wall plaster, the scale of the project ballooned. Crews worked on the renovation for a year. An on-site archaeological dig turned up 600-year-old potsherds, but no human bones. Today, the house has a new roof, major upgrades to the building's structural support, a dozen new, hand-carved corbels and canales — and the owners are preparing to move home.

The first important point is that this is an old house. The owner (who asked not to be identified) said he and his wife have been told that it's the oldest continuously inhabited house in North America.

That is virtually impossible to prove or disprove, but it is known that one of the former owners of this parcel of land was Jean L'Archeveque. He is believed to have been involved in the murder of the French explorer LaSalle in Texas in 1687, before fleeing to Mexico and joining Don Diego de Vargas' army for the reconquest of New Mexico five years later.

No one is certain how old the bones of this structure are, but there was a house here when Gerald Cassidy and Ina Sizer Cassidy first visited the site. They bought it in 1915 and expanded it during their residence in the early 20th century.

Kevin Skelly, the Santa Fe contractor on the current renovation job, said it would have been nice if someone had done restoration work 50 years ago.

When he first came to the job in June 2010, it was going to be a basic replace-the-appliances package. Then it was going to be modernizing the kitchen. But the condition of the walls could not remain hidden under the gaze of an experienced builder.

"We would peel off interior plaster in different spots and find decomposing adobe," Skelly said during an early-May walk-through. "I think the whole place was held together by the stucco and plaster."

He showed one spot that had four different live loads and no good support. His team rectified the problem by installing new steel posts.

Water was a culprit. If previous builders had employed a drainage strategy, it was now invisible. Rains caused flooding in certain places.

Where was the water supposed to go?

"Good question," Skelly said. "We were digging along here (outside the house's west wall) and we found this."

He pointed to a brick-walled cistern that had been dug into the ground near the corner of the house, almost at Canyon Road. It's at least 6 feet in diameter by 10 feet deep.

"We're thinking it was either for sewage or water," Skelly said, "but we're going to convert it to a holding cistern for irrigation."

His crew had laid a length of slotted PVC pipe in a trench around the outside of the house's west wall for drainage. And MiraDri, a sheet material with integral tubes, was put right against the house; after re-stuccoing, the material will drain any water that makes its way into the wall structure.

Inside, the crew worked on walls and rebuilt fireplaces. The worst fireplace, in the living room, was built on vigas in the dirt, and the vigas had long since burned out completely.

The house has 29 windows of eight types, according to the May 2010 report "Recommendations for Treatment of the Historic Windows, Doors and Exposed Woodwork" by Alan "Mac" Watson, of Watson Conserves LLC.

The report notes that every one of those windows requires some maintenance and/or repair. Watson, a historic-preservation watchdog as well as an expert in traditional Santa Fe construction, advised that any required repairs must be made with solid pine patches.

In May, Grey Howell, who has collaborated with Watson on similar projects for years, was on-site working on window restorations and replacing corbels. He had built and hand-carved five corbels to replace existing, rotted ones.

Seven new canales also are being replaced. Skelly said his master carpenter, José Alvarez, built those, using wood reclaimed from the old roof.

Skelly's Internet blog (at kmskelly.com) has a section about the "Bridge to Nowhere." The 60-foot sky bridge from the house to the parking lot was constructed in order to remove "massive amounts of debris" and avoid creating a traffic problem with a Dumpster or large truck on Canyon Road.

The oldest part of the house is believed to be the former stable, which today is the office and laundry room. The portal on its east side is dominated by a huge beam bearing the carved date 1725.

How it came to be there is told in The Missions of New Mexico Since 1776, published in 1980 by University of New Mexico Press. Author John L. Kessell describes the Cassidys poking around in the rubble of the old mission church at Nambé, looking for stuff to adorn their new house on Canyon Road.

Their haul included the giant choir-loft beam, which also is inscribed with the name Don Juan Domingo de Bustamante, who built the church; several other carved beams and corbels; and an 18th-century altar screen painted by Bernardo Miera y Pacheco.

That 1725 beam has a big crack and was sagging when Skelly came to the project.

"It has been there for 90 years, and we thought it was important to do something so it will last another 90 years," he said.

Skelly and crew brought in a micro-lam, a very strong beam made by gluing together multiple layers of plywood. "It's 30 feet long, 6 1/2 by 18, and you couldn't get a crane in here, so we had to hand-carry it in. It's 920 pounds. It took nine guys."

The micro-lam was installed above the old beam, then the old beam was anchored to it with long bolts.

Many other decorative wood details in the house were done by the Cassidys themselves. Even the metal railings on either side of the few steps from Canyon Road to the front door bear subtle decorative details. Each railing has thin rope-carved lines on either edge, with little bullet-carved devices along the main surface.

One reason for the deteriorated adobes in the house was that water had penetrated and sat in the walls for long periods. Water also found its way in between the layers of the roof, which had a Frankenstein aspect to it.

Art Lopez of Lopez Roofing called it "the worst roof I have ever seen in the 40 years I have been in the business."

It was roof upon roof, in some places four to five roofs, Skelly said. In the mishmash was tar and gravel, perhaps 14 inches of pumice, and about six inches of dirt.

"One can only imagine the massive amount of weight gently suspended on the rotten rafters and decking above the home's inhabitants for all of those years," Skelly wrote in his blog.

That new roof will be a weight off the owners' minds when they move back in July 8.

Contact Paul Weideman at 986-3043 or pweideman@sfnewmexican.com.

Gerald Cassidy: An artist and a writer

Gerald Cassidy was born in Kentucky in 1879. He studied at the Institute of Mechanical Arts (later known as Cincinnati Art Institute). He became a noted lithographer in New York City before a bout with tuberculosis brought him to Albuquerque.

After recovering, Cassidy moved from Albuquerque to Denver to work as a commercial artist, and there he met and married author Ina Sizer.

They became seasonal residents of Santa Fe in 1912, first occupying a house in the 800 block of Galisteo Street. Three years later, they bought the old house at 922 Canyon Road.

Their house was among the first built in what would become the town's arts district. Cassidy became a founding member of the Santa Fe artists' colony, and his wife was the head of the Federal Writers Project in New Mexico.

In a 1913 letter to anthropologist and Museum of New Mexico founder Edgar Lee Hewett, linguist and ethnographer John P. Harrington wrote, "Mr. Cassidy never drinks, chews, or smokes; is a free thinker; and of a very poetic temperament."

Cassidy gained his reputation with paintings of the peoples and locales of the American Southwest. "His first work using Indian and Western subjects was heavily art deco, and a deco edge would remain in his work even as it developed into a more solidly realist style," according to a biography at geraldcassidy.com.

Cassidy painted two majestic murals that initially hung in the lobby of the El Oñate Theater on the Plaza and now grace the lobby of the downtown post office. He donated his circa 1911 painting Cui Bono?, depicting an Indian man at Taos Pueblo, to the Museum of Fine Arts (now the New Mexico Museum of Art) before it opened in 1917, and the painting has been on almost-continuous display ever since.

For La Fonda, Cassidy painted 10 dramatic canvases depicting Native American people, Spanish dancers and Kit Carson, as well as a map of New Mexico and Arizona.

A 1931 letter from Cassidy told of life during the Great Depression: "I have been obliged to borrow additional funds on my house to meet living expenses and buy paint materials, and since the first of the year Mrs. Cassidy has taken paying guests into the house in order to pay our grocery bills."

Cassidy died in 1934, the victim of turpentine fumes and carbon monoxide from a newfangled heater.

Looking for bones

Because only a small amount of dirt was going to be encountered in the remodel of the historic Gerald Cassidy house, an archaeological survey was not required. But the contractor and the home's owners wanted to do one anyway.

"I think we basically had to do that in case bones were found that might have been Native American," said the owner, who asked not to be identified. "We wanted to be totally and completely above board."

The location of archaeologist Ron Winter's activity was at the southwest corner of the Cassidy compound. The objective was to get the floor levels consistent in that area.

Winters went down to about 3 feet below grade, carefully removing earth and sifting it for artifacts.

"We found some Native ceramics, and I have a lot of faunal bone, but we found no human remains," he said.

The earliest pottery sherds discovered at the site are the Santa Fe black-on-white type, dating to about A.D. 1400.

During the interview, Winters began taking small plastic bags out of boxes and opening them. The contents included potsherds; lots of animal bones, some of them with sawn edges; pieces of bottle glass the archaeologist said probably date to the 1800s; a small key; a nail; a pair of tiny jars with heavy steel screw-lids he guessed may have held cold cream once upon a time; and a lead toy soldier.