Our Pretty Painted Lady

I had a special request to show some pictures of our 1886/1887 Victorian. I know there are some pictures on this blog somewhere, but I took some new ones.

Front view; technically it's a 3 story house, but the top floor is used as attic space and is unfinished (but very spacious!). Because the ceilings are 10 1/2 feet and it sits on a raised limestone foundation (and also a small knoll) when I stand at my upstairs windows and look outside, I am well above all the neighboring houses and can see quite a distance.

We had the porch supports fixed underneath (and put on new skirting) the first summer we lived here. The porch has many of it's original parts (the floor, the bead board ceiling, the posts, the soffits and the roof ) but the lower railings, steps and the decorative brackets were added/replaced by previous owners. We would like to replace the railings with something more decorative--turned spindles come to mind---and replace the scrolled brackets with fan spandrels, but we have been reluctant to change them yet. We have been holding out hope we might locate a picture of our house from sometime when it was built or a few years after so that we can see what the original details looked like. No such luck yet. The folks at the Historical Society have told us that finding a photo of the house from back then is considered " the Holy Grail" of historic home owners.

You may notice a startling lack of trees in our yard. We have only one tree; a very young maple in the back yard. There was a very large maple tree about where I am standing now, and many more trees, but all of them were cut down by the previous owners, because they didn't want to rake leaves. We were astonished when we first came to look at the house because the photograph they had online for the listing by the realtor was an older picture, when there were trees all around the house. We drove up and for a second I didn't recognize the place, because I was looking for house with a yard full of trees!

My bedroom window. Do you see the bird's nest on the bracket? It was built last year and they have come back to use it again this year, so I hear a lot of twittering outside my window. They are hard to see, but I love the big ball finial on the corner piece and also the cut-out flower on the bracket. I have often wondered if this is what the brackets on the front porch looked like.

There is also a small porch on the back of the house, with two doors. This door opens into the kitchen. The other door opens into the living room. We had to have quite a bit of the floor, supports and steps re-built for this porch also because it was sagging badly and the previous owner did a really shoddy quick and dirty repair that was awful.  We chose a five color scheme for the house when we had it re-painted in summer of 2007. The paint is all Sherwin Williams, from their Historic Homes collection. The dull purple is called Renwick Heather, the blue is called Downing Slate, the grayish color is called  Downing Stone. The darker purple color on the trim is called Expressive Plum and the white is Ice Cube.

Thanks for stopping by!