I have always dremed of restoring a historic victorian home! This beautiful home was a blast to fix!
Our Second home was bought in January 2017. It’s a large two-story Victorian home. This beautiful home was rented out by a bunch of people in five different appartments. The house had been neglected for years, so much of it needed desperate TLC. The house had many historic victorian features that needed restoration including, all original trim work, a grand staircase, and a pocket door.
We were given this old photo by one of the previous owners. A shop was built in front of the house by the owners; at one point, it was a hat shop, and at another time, it was a grocery store.
From beautiful family home- to meth house
The previous tenants had smoked meth in the house. We had to hire a professional cleaner to decontaminate the home. As soon as we got the all-clear from the health department to enter the house, we could begin the historic restoration of the Victorian beauty.
The previous owners had done some DIY work on the home, such as some custom “energy efficient” windows AKA: plywood and double pained plexiglass. There was a lot of other “DIY” work done by the previous owners, and it needed to go ASAP.
restoring the historic victorian Grand Entry Way
We wanted to make the entrance grand. We added the wainscoting to add even more architecture to the house. The white wainscoting allowed me to choose a bold green color for the walls, keeping true to the bold victorian design without being too overpowering. I added framed historic photos of the Victorian home in the hallway to give the space a vintage feeling and pay homage to its beautiful originality before its restoration.
beauty is in the detail
I bought victorian chandeliers and added ceiling medallions to further enhance the victorian design of the home. Victorian design, ueses tons of detail, and on top of that, lots of bright, vivid colors. I commented to G that if this was my home, I would take the time to hand-paint the ceiling medallions; G replied, let’s do it!! It will look so cool! It turned out to be a fun little side project, and they looked amazing!
Living ROom
The design from the entryway continued in the living room to add flow. I borrowed some furniture from an antique shop to try and stage the house a bit.
I needed to develop a way to make the “energy-efficient” windows look better, but there was such a long list of things to be fixed, and we could not afford to buy new windows. For a quick, cheap fix, my mom and I made some Roman curtains to cover the wood in the window. They ended up looking pretty nice!
Pocket doors
The house came with these awesome pocket doors! They are so beautiful and a neat feature of the historic Victorian house, however restoration but such a pain to restore. The previous owner had drywalled over the door on one side. The doors did not work. We had to restore some of the hardware, which is not easy to find when the house is 100 years old! Also, it is a pain to fix something that’s inside a wall! We added some custom wood bookshelves to the room as well!
Dinning Room
This dining room was at one point a kitchen, then it was made into a bedroom. We decided to use it as a formal dining room. We decided to expose the brick on the chimney to add some old charm to the room.
Kitchen
The kitchen was my favorite part of the house! It is so big and grand. One cool feature is the double cabinet doors leading to a backroom used as a laundry room and food storage. The design seemed a little tricky at first, but once we figured it out, it was amazing! We were able to use a granite piece that we had bought used a while back for the island!
Bathroom
when restoring a historic victorian home, the bathrooms usally will need a total overhall
The bathrooms were so nasty… Just think of what happens when the water is off, and people are still living there. Not a pretty sight or smell… So grateful that I was not the one to clean those out! We tried to keep a victorian style while adding some modern details. They turned out nice and clean.
Bedrooms
The bedrooms were so bright, big and open. We had to add closest to each room and add some walls here and there.
Water damage 😫
The biggest project we did on the house was the roof. The roof is at such a steep angle, which makes it extremly dificult to walk on and repair. After tearing it out to start a new roof, rain clouds started rolling in. We threw on some tarps and prayed they would stay. The wind started blowing, and it moved the tarps. We ended up with some pretty bad water damage. Oh yeah, and did I mention that we just installed brand new light-colored carpet? Lucky the carpet was easy to clean.
The water damage on the ceiling was not easy to fix. We put many layers of Kiltz stain blocker paint. It kept bleeding through. After the tenth layer, we finally were able to cover it up! The water even went through the second story to the first! Some water got onto the new engineered hardwood floors! We had to rip them out from the beginning and put new pieces where the others had been damaged! The water damage didn’t really cost us too much money in materials, but it took a lot of time to fix it! Such a headache!
The green monster
Neglegted does not even begin to explan the extirior of the historic victorian Home. So much of the exterior needed restoration!
This house reminded me of a haunted house! The exterior needed some help for sure. I had such a hard time choosing the colors for this house; we wanted it to be bold and unique- I wanted it to be a colorful Victorian home. I choose a green color for the main body, with a creamy accent. Oh my! I turned out SOOO bad!
We decided that we HAD to fix it. It was too ugly. We wanted to save some money, so we tried just switching the cream to the main color and the green as the accent. Thankfully it worked! It looked so much better, and we saved some money on paint. We learned our lesson the hard way, always buy a color sample first! The new roof looks great too! The house also came with a shop in front. We would have loved to do more with the shop, but unfortunately, we couldn’t do anything with it. We had hopes of the buyers doing something fun with it.
Charmaing, Grand, and unique: It was well worth restoring this historic victorian home!
The restoration of this historic victorian home was one of my faviorites! There were some definite hiccups with the house, but the cool details that went into it made it so fun! We had so many people ask us why we didn’t keep the home for ourselves because it turned out so beautiful! Our plan was to sell it from the being, plus I am pretty sure it was haunted ;)! We were able to sell it quickly. Everything went smooth! We learned some things from our first house that we were able to avoid in this closing of the home!