We fell in love with a brick American Four Square house built by a rural Southwest Virginia town doctor in 1913. The house had been converted to three apartments in the 1940s and the most recent owner had made some progress towards removing them, but not much. The structure of the house was solid. The original oak floors and woodwork were still in place. We saw the potential and the challenge and bought the house for far under its appraised value.
That was 2003. We're still working on the house. Except for the new furnace, roof work, and fixing the chimneys, we've done all of the work ourselves while maintaining full-time jobs. This blog, which could just as well be called "Adventures in Preservation" if that hadn't been taken, is about the work we've done, the choices we've made, and whether we would do things differently in the future.
Historic preservation is inherently green building. We'll talk about why that is, why we're restoring rather than replacing our historic wooden windows, green material choices, and other ways that rehabilitating our old house is helping the environment. While we're at it, we may even comment on other preservation-related blog posts and projects in Southwest Virginia.
We invite you to learn something from our experiences and help us promote green building through historic preservation!
