Where has the time gone??

 Hi friends!!

I was shocked to see how long it has been since I blogged. Life has been sooo crazy!! A few updates:

This has been one of my most challenging years. As many of you know, in the past year I have lost my niece, Sam, my uncle Jay, my sister, Heidi, my nephew Nick and Pete's mom. Losing that many family members in a short span really makes you reevaluate your life, your goals, and your perspective on things. 

I also had back to back hand surgeries this summer, so that was almost 12 weeks of zero renovations. But I am glad to say I am healed up!! No more arthritis, no more bone spurs and no more pain!! 

So now we are entering our "slow" season as Innkeepers. In Wisconsin, we get our most visits during the spring and summer. So now it is full steam ahead with finishing projects. But first...

Pete and I made it our goal early on to operate the B&B April through October, and spend winter months sailing on our boat. Every important decision we make, we keep our goal in mind. In a few weeks, we will be sailboat shopping at the Annapolis Boat Show, getting steps closer to making our dream a reality. 

It's not easy. It sucks somedays :-)  But you really weigh out what is important. Should we get a new car? Or just buy a used one? Should we take vacations? Or save money toward our goal? As the time gets closer, it gets BOTH easier and harder, if that makes sense. Easier because we can see the light at the end of the tunnel, harder because I am NOT a patient person!! 

So.. the blogging will continue :-) I now have more time to update everyone on our renovations, our story and even throw in some yummy recipes and tales of Innkeeping. 

Leave me a comment about what projects/stories/recipes you want me to share! xoKeri

1890's Pump Organ

 Just a brief, but fun story today..

So when Pete and I decided to renovate the house, my mom's family got together and gifted me this family pump organ. 

My great-great grandfather was a Pastor, and his daughter, my great-grandmother, was the organist in 3 different churches in the 1890s. They would bring this organ with them to the different churches. 

Back then, it was quite a workout! You pumped with your feet, you pressed your knees out and in for volume, and you played the organ. I couldn't imagine remembering to do all 3 at once. But she did that for many years, then it was passed down through my family until it landed with my mom's cousin, David. Everyone kept it tuned up, and we are excited when guests stay with us that know how to play it.

My great-grandmother, Cora, on we believe must have been a graduation or wedding day. 

Our guests that were just here were visiting their son who is attending Maranatha Baptist University here in town. He sat down to play the organ for us and just played a song by memory..

 

 

It sounds so beautiful!!! So I thought I would share.. 

If these walls could talk... they do!

 When you renovate an old house, you usually are really surprised at what you find. Sometimes it's even what you find INSIDE the walls that makes for great stories.  We planned out the renovation so that we tried to preserve as much of the plaster and lathe as possible, and only removed what we absolutely needed to.  The kitchen was a complete re-do, so hundreds of pounds of plaster had to go.  When we started to remove a section of the outside wall, we found two really cool items inside the wall. 

 One was a yardstick from the local company Chas. David. Which, through the years has now become David and Sons. We also found a rolled up American flag with 48 stars on it. You wonder who thought to put these in the walls, and why? 

We also found a doctor's return to work note, dated 1927, when we moved an old cabinet out of the kitchen. 

When we got it, the house was a duplex, with a staircase on the porch to go to the second floor. On the wall of the plaster, someone had written 1929 with their finger in paint, we assume when they were creating the duplex. And we found an old punch card for newspaper delivery from 1949.

I wanted to leave our mark on the house inside the walls too.. so after much thought, I left this note.... 

Coincidence? Or Meant To Be?

 So shortly after we decided to turn the house into a Bed and Breakfast, we met a wonderful lady in town. (Several wonderful ladies actually, but we will focus on this one) We invited her to come see what we were doing, and we had a great afternoon showing her around. 

Back then it was "and here we are going to have this and this and this.." as we pointed out each area covered in dust, building materials and grime. "Can you see it?" we would laugh. The answers ranged from "Um, not exactly.. to Mm hmm, and how long do you think this will take?" 

But this lady could see the visions we had and was excited to spread the word about what we were doing.  About a week later, she called and said "Hey, I was talking to my friend Mary about what you guys were doing with the house. Mary asked what house it was, so I pulled up a picture and showed her. You aren't going to believe this! Mary is the great granddaughter of the owner! Her grandmother is the Katherine that you are naming the house after!"

We were completely stunned. What kind of crazy coincidence is this? Mary lives 2 hours away near Door County, and we would have never been able to trace the house to her without our dear friend.

Mary came to visit a few weeks after that, and told us stories about her grandmother. She gave us these two pictures that I framed and put in the entryway for everyone to see.

These are Katherine and her husband. (they look a bit off center because of my poor photo taking skills) 

Recently, Mary called me all excited because she finally found the newspaper article from 1910 about Katherine and Franklin's wedding date. It was written in the German newspaper, so I will have it on the wall with the translation. They were married here in the house on November 5, 1910.  We feel so connected to the family, that it had to have been fate that brought us to this house and gave us the life we love.

Dirty Jobs

 So when we started working on the house, it had zero usable electricity or plumbing. We had to use the gas station bathroom across the street. We could only work while the sun was out, because we didn't have any lighting. A lot of the work we did was pretty nasty, dirty work. And, that first summer was pretty hot outside, so we were sweating also, which made us smell as bad as the house! There must have been several animals in the house when the people lived here, as well as all of the squirrels that took over when the house was full of stuff but empty of people. 

One of those stories that you say "some day I will look back on this and laugh" happened when we were working on the kitchen. 

The floor had 2 layers of peel and stick vinyl squares that I had to scrape up, there wasn't really any usable appliances or cabinets, so we started from scratch. To the right of this picture was a chimney for the servants to do the summer cooking in the basement, and it was between two windows. You can see one of them in this photo with the green and white curtain. The squirrels had chewed up a lot of the window framing, and the other window was boarded up because the glass had fallen out. We decided to close up those windows, remove the chimney and put a big window in the center of the wall. I can distinctly remember framing in that window so we could cover it back up. As I leaned into the window frame with my pneumatic nailer, I lined up my 2x4 and pulled the trigger. The impact of the nail shook the wall and years of.... lets call it dust... fell down from inside the wall and landed on me. A big portion of which fell down the back of my t-shirt. Oh, and it was like 90 degrees outside and I was sweaty. It was disgusting. And remember, we had no running water there, and it would be the evening before I was able to go back to mom's house to get a shower. 100+ years of dust, grime, dead bugs, squirrel droppings and who knows what else was now "glued" to my scalp, neck and back. Good times.... sigh..

We closed up that window, closed the right butler pantry door, and that became the corner for the stove and cabinets. When we took out the chimney, we wanted a big window over the sink. I had priced out what we wanted, and it was about $1700 for what I was looking for. Feeling kind of bummed because that wasn't in our budget, I started searching Craigslist. I just happened to find someone selling this window complete with the leaded glass on the top. 

Pete! It's our window!! I practically yelled. He said Get the details and we can see if it will work. It turned out to be a perfect fit for that space. It was part of an old house in another town over, that was being torn down. The city had the fire department take everything usable in the house and sell it. So it was a 100+ year old window with leaded glass, just like the other windows in our house. I bought it for $200.  Another example of God and the Universe finding us what we needed. We have so many of these stories that I try not to forget all of them, and express gratitude whenever we seem to "get lucky" with a find. It's more than luck! 

The How's and the Why's of Victorian Architecture

 So in the first few months, my days were filled with cleaning the house, and the evenings were filled with researching Victorian architecture. We wanted to bring the house back to it's glory. I studied interior design for a few years, and I was always interested in the "why" something was the way it was. 

A lot of Victorian homes from the early 1900s have a similar layout.  The outside of the house would have a front porch that would only wrap around one side of the house. There was an entry vestibule, and then the formal parlor.  The front third of the house was formal, the middle was a bit more comfortable, and the back third was usually quite plain.  The reason for this was that the front of the house was where someone would welcome their guests. It had the best furniture, the beautiful woodwork, and the most elaborate decorating. They homeowners would entertain their guests in the formal parlor.  The middle sections of the house were the family room and dining room. This would obviously be where the family would relax and eat. So the decor was a bit more comfortable, the furniture a bit more worn, but still a very pleasant space.

The back of the house was usually the kitchen, the butler's pantry, the mudroom, and often times held the servants staircase. That staircase allowed the servants to get from the basement to the top floors without being seen by the family. The kitchen area was usually painted wood, bare floors, small windows and completely functional versus beautiful. 

The front door was elaborate to show off to the incoming guests. The porch, as I said before, would wrap around to one side of the house. That gave an additional entry into the house for the family. Since the streets were dirt during that time, the family entered the middle of the house to save the rugs  and wood floors from tracking in all the dirt to the formal area. Because remember, there weren't any vacuum cleaners at the time, so the rugs had to be taken outside to be beaten and shook out. 

The servants would then enter from the back of the house usually into the kitchen area. The kitchen was the access point for the basement because usually only the servants would ever go into the basement. It also had a staircase that lead all the way to the 3rd floor, which was where the servants slept. That staircase wasn't usually seen by the family either. 

The term "Victorian" has been modified and watered down a lot in the last century, to include many different types of houses. Some even add gingerbread designs to the gables of Colonial houses and instantly they are called Victorian now. So my explanations are more about the true homes from the late 1800s to the early 1900s. 

Our house does have the porch wrapped around one side, and the servant areas and separate staircase. We even have the original servant's bell behind the swinging kitchen door. We have a door to the porch roof that was the "dust porch" where they would take the rugs from the second floor to shake them out, rather than drag them down to the first floor. 

Architecture has always fascinated me, so I hope you enjoyed these explanations.

Some Before and After photos

 So I'm not normally one to toot my own horn, but I am really proud of the transformation of this house. This post will show you some of the great before and after pictures.  

I want to open the blog up to a Question and Answer post for next week. I will post answers in pictures, or I will make videos answering the questions. So start asking away in the comments section, and I will do my best to answer them.

Some Before and Afters...

The Living Room is one of my favorite transformations. When we got the house, there was literally zero usable electricity. So we got the panels installed in the basement and fed an extension cord up through a hole in the living room floor. That became our workroom.  So we basically took turns using the one electrical source for our power tools. We didn't waste it on lighting, we just worked when the sun was up, and went home when it went down. The floor had the gorgeous stripes in it, but was so dirty, you couldn't see them.

 

Quite the transition!!! 

When we bought the house, it was a duplex. Sometime in the 20s, they had converted the house from a single family into a duplex, we figured to make more money by renting parts of it out. They removed the staircase in the foyer and made that a bedroom. We had to open the ceiling back up and recreate the staircase.  The foyer also had a drop ceiling, and parts of the ceiling were missing because pipes had burst throughout the house. It was a huge mess..

and now...

The last set of pictures for this post are of the attic. It was just one giant open space, no walls or anything. We figured out that the female servants would live up there.  We wanted 4 guest suites, so we made the front 1/3 of the attic a suite, and the back 2/3 are our personal space.

If you look closely at the before picture, you can see the electric panel. The wires came in through the window from the street. It had a 30amp/120 system to run the entire house. We joke that someone had to turn off their hair dryer so someone else could run a microwave. It had the original knob and tube wiring throughout the house, and sometimes the insulation was peeled back and lamp cord was wrapped around the wires to add electricity somewhere. Surprised the house didn't catch fire!! 

So.. next week will be Q&A time.. get me those questions to answer!!

The work really begins

 In the fall of 2017 we closed on our beautiful (well, not exactly beautiful yet) house, and began the cleaning and renovation process. We knew going into it that we would have A LOT of work to do, but we could see the potential. We saw the fantastic pocket doors, the 8 foot doorways, the original hardwood floors, and we knew it could be beautiful.  The house was almost 120 years old at that point, so it had been through many, many transitions. It was turned into an upper/lower duplex in the 20s, and split off to different rental areas in the years that followed. 

We began opening everything back up to restore it as a single family home again, and started the renovations.  Some of the hardwood floors had, unfortunately, been covered up with indoor-outdoor carpet glued down.  The kitchen hardwood was covered with 2 layers of peel-and-stick vinyl. There were drop ceilings in many of the areas, because the plaster wasn't taken care of.  And the squirrels had taken over much of the space, so several windows were missing because the squirrels had chewed enough of the frame, that the windows had fallen out.  When the house was a duplex, it only had a very small powder room on the main floor, so the previous people had placed a bathtub inside the Butler's pantry.  This caused the pantry floor to rot and almost completely disintegrate. We could peel up the hardwood with our hands, it just crumbled. You could look down into the basement from the pantry, and had to watch your step or you would fall through.

The house still had the original knob and tube electricity coming in through the 3rd floor window. The system was a 30amp/120 system to run the entire house. We joked that someone had to turn off the hair dryer so someone else could use the toaster! In the basement, the insulation from the wires was peeled back, and lamp cord was wrapped around the wires to add electricity to rooms. It's a wonder the house never caught fire! Obviously, we had to start all of the electric from scratch. So for the first few months, we had the electric from the street to the panel in the basement, and then one electric extension cord from there to the living room. That became our work room. So if Pete needed to use an electric tool, I had to wait my turn to use mine. We didn't want to waste that cord for lights, so we only worked when the sun was up, and closed it down when the sun went down. No heat, no lights, no running water.. we went to the gas station to use the bathroom. We worked like this for the first 6 months of this project. 

But all through this, we knew this house was special. We felt it every day when we arrived. She was happy we were here making her beautiful again. 

So.. the kitchen...

So after winning the house and closing on it, we got to dig in! We wanted to start with the kitchen, since it was in really poor shape. There were 2 windows that were divided by a brick chimney. The chimney was from the basement summer kitchen. The servants would cook the summer meals down there to avoid adding extra heat to the living quarters. (It didn't matter that some of the servants lived down there, apparently. Just important that the family was comfortable I guess)

We removed the chimney brick by brick and stacked them in the back yard to use at a later date.  The windows were pretty bad, since the squirrels had gotten into the house. So I happened to be on Craigslist and found someone selling a huge window with leaded glass on the top. We were able to buy it from him pretty inexpensively (which is important due to the amount of renovations we were facing). So we planned out the upper cabinets to fit around the new window. This room also had 2 layers of peel and stick vinyl floor that I had to scrape up, to expose the beautiful hardwood underneath. The cabinets were bought online and we built them and hung them ourselves. We are still working on finishing the tin ceiling look, but otherwise the kitchen is done. As with most of the house, the demo, build, wiring, installing, painting and finishing was done by us! We knew early on this was going to be a BIG project, so the more we learned to do ourselves, the better off financially we would be in the long run. And the sense of accomplishment is fantastic!!

 

What's With The Name?

 So... one of the most common questions we get asked about is the name of the B&B.  Who is it? How did you come up with it? And how do you pronounce "Holle"?  Well, here is the story...

So after we won the house on the auction, Pete started wrapping up everything in Virginia to move to Wisconsin.  I spent my days coming to the house and starting the cleaning process.  It had been closed up for a long time and was pretty bad. So every day I would spend hours cleaning and envisioning what this house could look like.  I would talk to the house and tell it I was going to make it pretty again. 

One day I was on the phone with Pete when I pulled into the driveway. "The house wants to be named 'Katherine'" I told him. When my daughters were little, we named everything. From bikes to cars, stuffed animals to basic objects. Everything had a name. So that day I walked in and said "Good morning, Katherine! We are going to make you beautiful again!"

It became a running joke, on how much fixing up our friend Katherine needed. But it made it feel more real for me, our very own Victorian home.. I was spending the days cleaning it, and the evenings researching Victorian architecture. I wanted to know why it was laid out the way it was, what the purpose of specific areas were, and how we could achieve making it look Victorian, but feel cozy and comfortable.

Anyway.. one bitterly cold day after Pete had moved here. We got to the house to clean and work on it. All of my cleaning products had frozen over. We had exactly one extension cord running up from the basement for any power. No lights, no heat, just one cord. We decided to go to the library and do research on the house instead. So we sat (in the warm library) going through old city directories looking for our address, so we could find out who lived there. Finally, Pete said "Here it is! 119 North Church Street! I found it!" I got all excited and grabbed my pen to take notes.  "John Thauer."  he said, as I quickly wrote it down.  "Oh wow... and his daughter... Katherine."  (Back then, they listed family members in the city directories, as well as occupations. But that's another story)

Needless to say, we were quite shocked.  I now think she had a hand in helping us win this auction.

So we decided it HAD to be Katherine, and we have received gifts and so much support from my mom's side of the family, that we dedicated the family last name of "Holle" to naming the house. Yes, it sounds just like "Holly" but prettier!

Are you serious???

 "Ummm.. what?!?! Are you serious? Did we really win?"

Pete seemed to take a deep breath. He was silent for a minute.  I started getting nervous.  "What's the matter? Didn't we win? Why aren't you talking?" I asked.  He replied with "Oh, sorry. I was checking my fitbit, and just sitting at my desk, my heart rate was 120! And, yes. We won!"

Earlier that day, I had taken our cat to the vet for a small surgery to remove four of his teeth that were bad.  I suddenly realized I was supposed to go pick him up at 4:30. "Oh crap, I have to go get Shadow.  I completely forgot!"

I drove to the vet's office, my mind spinning. What did we just do? Did we just take on The Money Pit? Do we really think we can restore this house? It is in REALLY bad shape. Ugghh... 

The Vet Tech came out with a very groggy Shadow, and started to explain to me that once they got in to remove the teeth, they ended up taking out 17, not four! I tried really hard to pay attention, but I had to stop her.

"Please, can you write down whatever you are saying right now? I can't think. I just won a house."

A few puzzled looks later, and I was on my way home with the cat.  I decided to drive by the house just to look at it again.  I sat out front for a few minutes and just stared.  Well, things happen for a reason, I thought.  There is a reason we won this house. It needs a lot of love and a lot of work. I looked at the dilapidated porch, the terrible siding, all of the trees and plants that have taken over the yard and made the house almost invisible. And then I closed my eyes and visualized a warm, inviting, beautiful Victorian.  Yes, I said out loud to myself, this is our house.