176: Restoration in Real Time

In today's episode, I chat with Jessica Rhodes about the reality of owning an Internet-famous house after the attention fades and the long-term responsibility begins.

And later, I'll share how a hands-on window-restoration week in Pine Mountain, Kentucky, sparked a new podcast feature built around voices from the old house community.

But first, I'm Stacy Grinsfelder, and you're listening to True Tales From Old Houses.

Hello everyone, Happy false spring to my northern neighbors.

I hope you busted out a t- shirt and exposed those pasty arms to some sunshine.

Now, last week I made a huge announcement about what we are doing with Blake Hill House, and we were almost instantly rewarded with a new costly project.

Thank you, universe.

But before I launch into that, I want to say thank you to our sponsors Sutherland Welles, Brouns & Co. Linseed Oil Paint, Heritage Supply Co, and Repaint Studios.

They're all old-house-friendly small businesses that I trust, and they keep the lights on around here.

So shop with confidence, and please use my coupon codes to save some money.

Now about that project.

I've been in Salt Lake City all winter, but the Buffalo area has recently experienced 19 days of sub-zero weather, and as a result, most of the houses in my town have severe ice dam issues.

Now ice dams are where ice and icicles.

They build up really thickly along the roof edges, and if the roof below from an uninsulated attic or crawl space is warm then the ice melts underneath and water seeps under the shingles and down the walls and creates leaks inside the house.

That melt and freeze cycle happens daily until the outside temperatures stay above freezing for an extended period of time.

Now, anecdotally, I find that four days is a good start, but a week is ideal.

I know that's a very simplified explanation of ice dams, but they are probably the most common cause for roof leaks around here during the winter, and I don't know a single person who hasn't had a roof leak this winter.

Old house, new house, even insulated houses are having this issue.

Anyway, 19 days below 0 day or night was the longest stretch since 2015.

And I always find it funny that Western New Yorkers have very selective memories.

There's always this old timer who says something like, oh, it hasn't been like this since I was a kid, or there'll be a person at the gas station who says, we have never had a winter like this.

But if someone says to me, I can't remember it ever being like this, can you?

I will say, yes, 2015, no hesitation.

And here's why I remember, because we closed on Blake Hill House in 2014, and in November, there was a major snowstorm that brought about 6 feet of snow here to our house in particular.

It brought even more to some of the surrounding towns.

And in the record books, it's been called Snowpocalypse.

Now, as a transplant from California, I had never seen anything like that.

It was hard enough managing all that snow.

And then in February 2015, thus the memory, the area plunged into a deep freeze.

And apparently, I guess one day shorter than 2026, we experienced our first ice dams here in the house.

At that time, the house needed a new roof.

The roof was much, much worse then.

And so the leaking was much worse.

And I thought the house was going to collapse on our watch.

I thought we were going to be the owners who accidentally destroyed Blake Hill House.

I just didn't know a lot about houses from the 1800s at that time.

I think I still.

Have some pictures, so if I can, I'll post them in this week's newsletter.

I wasn't even sure what to do.

I was catching leaks with diapers.

I went to the store and bought some diapers and some puddle pads, and that's what I used to collect a bunch of leaks.

And then I spent part of each day crying until everything thawed.

And that's why I can't forget that it was 2015.

It was very memorable to me.

But the reason I'm in New York this week is to check on the roof and possibly make a plan to insulate the attic this year.

I came during false spring in case there were some leaks to manage.

Fortunately, everything is good.

But no joke, I was putting the finishing touches on the video version of last week's show for YouTube, and I heard a deep rumbling boom out my office window.

And it actually.

Shook the house.

Just a little bit.

I was wearing noise-cancelling headphones, so, you know, it was really loud.

And I looked out, It's actually the window here in my studio where I'm recording right now, and I saw the entire run of gutters lying on the porch roof below.

And that ice, all the ice on that had pulled down that entire run, 120 feet, that I had just replaced last summer.

Not only that, it dragged all of the roof cables that I had installed last November, right before I went to Salt Lake City.

And if anyone wants to know if those heated cables helped at all this year, the answer is no, not at all.

Not even a little bit.

Then I heard one more loud bang.

And like a final punch from Mother Nature, I saw the shutter from my bedroom window lying on top of the whole mess.

Now it gets better.

Because the next day, sitting at my desk, tap, tap, tap.

Typing out stuff, working on the newsletter, working on this week's episode.

Boom, same thing, different side of the house.

This time, it was the entire run of gutters from the front of the house.

Pulled off the gutters slightly less than 120 feet.

This time it's about 100 feet on that side.

Pulled off the gutters, pulled down all the heat cables.

This time, the electrical lines were involved.

The heat cable draped over it.

Had to call the electrical company.

Luckily, they came right away.

Solve the problem.

They were here within a couple of hours.

That was that.

So there you have it.

From the highest high of announcing that we're keeping the house to the very lowest low of setting money on fire to fix ice damage.

At least I know what's on my project list this year.

No mystery there, and I am happy to report that I am not crying in 2026.

We'll get through this, and we'll work to resolve the ice dam issue with a more, hopefully permanent solution.

I'm working on a plan, and that is something that I will share with you in an upcoming episode.

Now, let's take a quick break.

I'll be back in a few.

Commercial Break

My guest today lives in a house that captured a lot of attention when it was featured on Cheap Old Houses.

That attention followed her family through the purchase and into the early years of ownership.

But that was several years ago, and what remains is the daily reality of caring for a large aging structure with its own needs, history, and limits.

In this conversation, we talk about the shift from public attention to private responsibility and how different those experiences can be.

Hi, I'm Jessica Rhodes, and my family and I are fixing up a historic Italianate home in upstate New York, and it has a name, it's called Danascara Place.

Hi, Jessica.

Welcome.

Thank you.

Thank you for having me.

So Danascara place, is that how you pronounce it?

Yes, Danascara place, it's been called different iterations of that over the years of Dada Nascara.

I believe it comes from a Native American word, and it means tufted trees because there used to be a lot of hemlock trees in this area, although they're not here anymore.

Oh, interesting, I always thought you gave it that name.

I didn't realize that it had.

It had this name a whole time.

Yes, it had this name the whole time.

It's it's on the historic plaque out in front of the house, and it's also the name of the Creek that goes by the house that goes into the river nearby.

Yeah.

Oh, I guess I should have said you, and I kind of know each other a little bit.

We know each other somewhat.

We know each other from Instagram, so we have a little bit of a history together.

So when I launched right in there to oh, I always thought you named it I was a little too familiar right off the bat, but yes.

That's what'll make it fun.

That's good.

I guess it's been several years ago, we had a conversation on Instagram.

I used to do some informal sort of true Tales from old Houses conversations on Instagram on Fridays.

It's probably been four years.

Time flies, right?

Yes.

Wasn't that during the pandemic?

It must have been.

It must have been, which feels like yesterday and also ten years ago at the same time.

Absolutely, it does.

How long have you owned the house now?

So we officially closed on the House in July 2019.

OK, 2019, I was trying to remember that because I thought, gosh, you've owned that house for quite a while now.

I mean.

It has been quite a while.

It really creeps up on you.

It feels like it just went by really, really fast.

When I look back at it, I'm like, well, we've done a lot since we've been here, although we have a lot to do as well.

Yeah, for sure, for sure.

I get that and it is a large Italianate as you said, and your house had a moment that most old houses, they never do.

First, it was featured on the Cheap Old Houses Instagram.

Is that where you initially saw it?

Is that where you originally saw it?

I mean, you're from the area, right?

I'm from the area, so I knew about the house, and I had encountered it in various ways through the years, and I knew that it was up for sale.

But while we already had an offer in on it, it actually popped up on the Cheap Old Houses Instagram, and we were kind of in negotiations to buy it for over a year because there were all these different title issues with it.

It has quite a past SO.

Well, at that time, I think the Cheap Old Houses, Instagram, maybe had two million followers.

I think now it's closer to 3,000,000.

So you bought it, and that kind of put your family in the spotlight.

Everybody was like, oh, who bought this giant house?

And then eventually the house itself ended up on the cover of the Cheap Old Houses book, which was published in 2023.

So it was kind of a big deal.

You were all over Instagram for quite some time, which, you know, people are like, oh, Instagram, no big deal.

But in the old house community for a while, that was a pretty big deal.

Many of us secretly wonder, maybe not so secretly wonder, does having an Internet-famous house make things easier or harder long term?

I think it can be a little bit of both.

I think when we first bought the house, it definitely had kind of a viral moment.

At least it felt that way for me, because I only had about 1,000 followers on Instagram.

And then I posted the tour of the house, and it was just something that would happen when Instagram was smaller.

It kind of went everywhere, and I gained up to I think it was 60,000 followers in just like a couple weeks.

So all eyes on us when we were doing that initial renovation, which I didn't quite anticipate maybe how that would feel, and I didn't maybe know how much we didn't know about fixing up a house like this.

We had bought a house that was built in 19 O 1, and it was renovated in the 70s to have a lot of 70s-style decor.

That was our first house, and we had renovated that, and that was comparatively to this house a lot easier because most of the fixes that we were doing were cosmetic.

We were refinishing floors, we were taking down wallpaper, and refinishing doors, and that kind of stuff is just a lot different than the things we have encountered here, and maybe didn't know what we were getting into at first.

So I think that being in that position and having a lot of eyes on us was a little bit challenging in some ways, but it definitely has helped because I've met so many people like yourself where when I have a question, I feel like I can go to an expert and ask the question and make sure that I'm doing things the right way.

We still have so much to learn.

We know a little bit, but there's so much with an old house that can be really tricky, and you need expert advice.

And we live in a more rural area, and I wouldn't say there are a ton of experts in old homes, and old home construction, and old home renovation around here.

So I sometimes have trouble finding people in person.

So I think having the house on Instagram and the renovation has given me access to people that are experts.

And I know that when I'm ready to do a project, I have people that I can go to and ask the little questions that I can't research online fully.

So what surprised you, would you say, about owning a house that so many people felt invested in?

What surprised me in a positive way, I have seen that people in our community and in the counties nearby are so positive and supportive about anything that we do.

And it's such a good feeling because I think that this house sat abandoned multiple times over the years.

And when we had bought it, it had been abandoned, I think for eight years.

So I think a lot of people had lost hope that this house would be able to be taken care of in a way that does it justice.

And not that we are quite there yet, but I-- that's our goal.

That's always the goal that we're going toward, is to kind of bring it back to its former glory in a way, or maybe make it even better with modern conveniences.

So I think that people are just so happy that we're doing this, and in any way they can help.

People are always offering to help.

And that's just a nice feeling, not help in a physical way.

But just, if somebody has old paperwork that pertains to the house, they'll always just bring it by and be like, hey, I thought you'd be interested in this.

And people will say, oh, you know, I've heard about your house.

I follow it, and I'll follow what you're doing.

I love to drive by and see if there's any changes.

So just to feel kind of taken care of by the community in that way is a really nice feeling because when you're working on that house like this, and I'm sure you can relate, you can get so far into it that it can feel a little bit isolating because it's just different than the way that most people live their lives with more modern houses.

So it's just nice to have that thought in the back of my mind that people are happy that we're doing this and kind of cheering us on, I guess.

Yeah, that's nice.

Did the public attention change how you made decisions, or did it add pressure?

At first, it definitely, I went through a period where it added a lot of pressure.

I think that when we bought this house, there was definitely a kind of a renaissance of old house ownership at that time, wasn't there?

I think so.

It was like this huge thing on Instagram, at least it felt like everybody was talking about restoring old houses.

And I'm not.

Sure.

If it was because Instagram was also exploding in the old house community or whether everybody was buying old houses, I don't know which came first.

You know, it's a chicken-or-egg situation there.

Yeah, me either.

So when restoring old houses, there are kind of like 2 extremes.

There's like the DIY, more grassroots restoration, and then there are these very expensive purist restorations.

And I think that dichotomy was really hard for me to figure out in my mind when we were doing ours, because both are equally present on Instagram, and we're definitely more of the DIY, grassroots, figure-it-out-as-we-go-along type of restoration.

So I sometimes got very discouraged. 1 instance that comes to mind is when we realized that the entire roof had to be replaced.

We had thought when we moved in here that we could, with a slate roof, kind of replace it in section by section.

But we realized that because there was so much deferred maintenance and so many bad repairs over the years, people had like tarred areas of it.

And it just like really, really bad repairs that the whole thing had to be replaced.

And when we found that out and again, we're not having people nearby who even do slate roofs, we realized that we wouldn't be able to replace the roof fully.

And that was a huge turning point for me to just realize that you can have the best intentions and want to really do right by a historic restoration, but you might not be able to do certain things because of the availability or just the financial aspect of in our area, the cost of doing that roof would be so far over the worth of the entire house in any capacity even now that house prices have gone up that it wouldn't make financial sense to do that.

It would be a very bad decision in that way.

But then, on the other hand, weren't honoring the original material of the roof.

That was a really hard thing for me to realize that there are two different types of renovations that go on, and the roof had to be done then because it saved other aspects of the house that we wanted to save.

So it was kind of making that decision to, OK, if we want to save all this beautiful woodwork that's on the House, if we want to save the brick, all of these things that are being damaged by the roof leaking in so many spots, then we have to replace it with what we can now.

And maybe who knows, later down the line, it's possible that we could replace it with a more true material that was closer, but we did the best that we could in that instance to save the other aspects of the house.

So things like that, I think it's hard to be in a public position redoing the house and making those types of decisions because obviously everybody has their opinions on what is the right thing to do.

So yeah, that was a difficult thing to navigate for me.

But I think we've come to a point where we're more comfortable knowing what we want to share when and how far we want to get into conversations with just everyone on the Internet about our decisions and how far we want to just go with just making the decisions on our own, right?

Boundaries, boundaries, boundaries.

That's it.

Yeah, no, I think that makes a lot of sense.

And in fact, I was telling somebody, you know, that that's one of the reasons why this podcast exists to a certain extent is because of those two camps.

So vehemently holding so fast to their ideals.

And I just really wanted to be able to present this information in a way that people can see it from more than one perspective and to understand that, you know, there is more than one side to this.

People have budgets, people have limitations to what they can afford.

And there's a way to achieve a pretty good rehab to an old house that's better than it sitting empty and decaying into nothing.

Absolutely.

And I love that you do that.

I love that you kind of walk both lines, and you have experts that kind of bring both points of view in.

That's so useful to people, and it's been very useful to me.

Well, good.

I hope so.

That's the intent, I guess, behind it, or at least the hope that I have in sharing this show with people and the content that on Instagram.

This is not a show about me.

Sorry.

Let's get back to you.

But when I heard you say that, I thought, great, that's what we are trying to do here with the podcast and with the content on Instagram.

Another question that made me think of was, you know, how did you, I guess, eventually mentally transfer from that, you know, this is kind of a viral house to just our house.

How did you set that boundary?

Did you and your husband talk about it, or did it just sort of naturally occur from watching people double down and talk negatively about maybe your project or other people's projects on the Internet?

I think it was just a gradual learning process about what I want to share.

I heard someone say, only share things that you want to have opinions about.

I know that seems obvious, but you don't always know that when you're first sharing things online.

So I kind of operate by that.

Now, if there's something that I don't feel super comfortable about, a decision that was difficult, I don't always share it in the moment because I know now that that needs to be kept private until I can become OK with the decision.

But honestly, most things that we do to this house, we really do try to make the best purist decision if we can.

And usually that's achieved by us doing it ourselves rather than having a contractor come in and do it, who may not know the criteria that we're following in our heads.

So that makes everything a lot slower, obviously, but it helps us to stick to exactly what we want.

I think the kiss of death on the Internet is when somebody else says, I did this thing, what do you think?

And in my head, I'm always like, danger, danger, danger.

Are you sure you want to ask that?

Take it back, Yeah.

Exactly.

I have the same red flags.

I think when you've been a person on the Internet for a long time, you're like, no.

Yeah, that is not what you wanna ask right now.

You're walking into the swamp right now.

Right.

But I know what you mean about doing it yourself and, and taking a long time and also not sharing in the moment because if you've already done it, then you can just say, look, this is what I did and hey, we're happy with it.

We like the way we did it.

All that attention, I guess that you got on this big house.

That's just one part of the story.

The other is the sheer scale of the house and taking care of it and fixing it up even now, seven years later, particularly because you inherited so much deferred maintenance.

So initially, I think you were kind of probably saving the house, quote, saving the house.

And there was a time when a lot of it was triage, mostly triage.

Would that be fair to say?

Yes.

When did that urgency, would you say finally slow down or I mean, did it ever?

I think the urgency slowed down once we finished the projects that were left kind of unfinished by the initial renovation.

So we had bought the house, and we got a renovation loan to take care of the things that were urgent, which was there was no heating system, there was no plumbing, there were no light fixtures, door knobs, all of that.

So the house was originally listed for only $86,000.

And that's what had prompted us to go look, look at it, because we thought, how could this landmark property that everybody knows about in our area be listed for that price?

Let's just go see what it's like.

So we walked through, and again, part of it is us not knowing what we didn't know, but we were really surprised that it wasn't in worse shape.

It did have a huge wing on the back of it that was built in the 1980s, that had burned in 2011.

So that was just this big burnt shell on the back.

And obviously that's terrifying when you're going and looking at a house, and you see, oh, half of it's burned down.

But we realized when we looked at it, and that didn't actually hurt the original structure of the house in any way.

It just, it left like a, a black mark on the brick.

But other than that, the original structure of the house was still perfect.

So we were surprised by that.

And we saw that the foundation looked good.

There was a lot of foundation work that had been done in the 90s that was still doing a great job.

We knew that the windows needed to be replaced, roof needed patching.

It didn't have a heating system, it didn't have any plumbing.

The kitchens and bathrooms were not functional.

So we knew that that's what it needed.

But we thought if we could get this house for such a low price, we could pretty much put the equal amount of money into a renovation.

We hoped that was what we had hoped for is that we would put another $80,000 into it, and we would renovate it, and then we would renovate it as we went after that.

So it didn't have any plumbing?

Like did it never have any plumbing?

What happened to the plumbing?

It did have plumbing originally, but when it was abandoned people had gone in and stolen all the copper piping because I guess people will sell that and.

Yeah, yeah, copper.

So, for sure, when you said no HVAC, did it never have any of that?

So this is an interesting part of the house's history is, that in the 90s, well from the 70s to the 90s, it was owned by a man locally.

He owned an electric company, and he gutted the house.

He built out the walls because originally, it had been plastered directly on the brick.

So he built out the walls.

He put an entire electrical system in, and he did a lot of foundation work.

He put big metal supports in the walls to hold up like the tower portion of the house, because it had been sagging.

So he put a big metal support in.

Girdle like a house girdle.

Yeah, yeah, basically all throughout.

So he did amazing work.

He also made some choices to kind of modernize it to his stylistic choices as well.

So he had opened it up the whole downstairs into kind of an open concept.

So what he had done is he made this house a summer house for him and his family.

So he put these smaller electric heaters in the walls and I electric heat is is I don't know, is it having like a renaissance or?

Well, yeah, because in New York, where you are and where I am, they're trying to phase out natural gas because of fracking and whatnot.

So I think everybody's like, oh, let's go back to electric.

So yes, I, I think it is having a moment maybe in our state, maybe all over, I don't know.

OK, so the thinking had always been in upstate New York, it just gets so cold that electric heat has a hard time heating large houses like this.

And the heaters on top of that were small, and they weren't meant to heat a house like this.

So he had made this house at Summer House with those little heaters and all of the rest of whatever heating system had originally been here.

We don't even know what it was.

There's no like evidence of it in any way anymore.

So because he had replaced the floor, so we can even see if there, I'm assuming there probably were radiators at one point, but we don't have any evidence of that anywhere.

So it needed an entire new heating system from scratch.

So you were thinking we go out, we get a renovation loan, you were thinking $80,000 or something and you can bring it back to a point where you can move into it.

So you went to a bank, I guess.

How hard was that?

A lot of people don't realize that that's a possibility.

Maybe.

Yeah.

So we had always heard that it was challenging to use a renovation loan because we had been thinking about doing something like this for years.

We, I guess we got excited by our first house and the way that we could transform it and make it something better.

And we wanted to do that again on a slightly larger scale, although we had no thoughts of a house like this.

So we had heard that it was difficult, but it actually in practice ended up being not as difficult as people said.

I think it really depends on whether you have a contractor who's willing to work with a renovation loan, because the way it works is that you get a certain number of payouts from the loan.

So you get an initial payout, and then the contractor does work, and then an inspector comes and sees the work that they did, and then they'll give you another chunk of the payout.

So basically, the contractor may have to be working on money that he hasn't received yet.

I'm not really sure if that's what our contractor had done if he was in a situation like that, but it can be a difficult situation for some contractors, which we did run into with some of the subcontractors not being super thrilled with working on a renovation loan project.

So that's part of the issue that people run into.

But we had a great experience with that because our contractor had done it before.

So I think if you're going to do a renovation loan, just make sure you have a contractor who's familiar with the way that it works and is OK with that.

Yeah, cuz the contractor has to pay their Subs too, so they need money to pay their Subs.

And yeah, it can get complicated, you're right.

It can, yeah.

So I think because of that, and the contractor is also a family friend that we work with.

So it was just a really nice easy relationship and it worked out really well for us.

And then also, depending on who the inspector is that comes out, I believe the inspector comes from or is hired by the bank giving the loan, who comes out and checks the work that's been done.

So, depending on how strict that inspector is, that can affect your experience with a renovation loan as well.

Yeah, yeah.

Interesting.

So did you go over budget?

Did it take you more than you expected to get into the house?

I mean, I know we'll talk about, I know since 2019 this is different, but yes.

It's so different now.

I don't know if we would have been able to do this if we did it now, but we did go a little bit over budget because the heating systems ended up costing a lot more than we expected.

We had looked into doing geothermal, which I I still wish we could have done that.

That would have been so cool.

But it just on the scale we would need to see this house it.

It didn't make sense again financially in the even the people at the geothermal, I guess they usually try to say that you will recoup the cost of the geothermal installation within a certain number of years.

But they told us that we would never recoup the cost in the time that we would live here because of just the size of the house.

So that didn't work out, and it would have been cool to have a heating system like that, but we ended up having to put in two horse hot air propane furnaces.

We put one in the basement, we put one in the attic, so that just helped us to not have to really tear up the house too much with the ducting.

Right.

Yeah.

It's always interesting to me how people figure out how to heat these big old houses.

The HVAC people who figure it out, I think, are fairly brilliant and don't really get the credit they deserve because each house, to the best of my knowledge, is kind of an individual project.

There are parameters that they follow, but they're always unique in a certain set of ways.

Like they look at the square footage and they figure out where the trouble spots are, and they put together this little plan of how they're going to heat them.

I always find it so interesting.

Me too.

There's so much math involved in having to look at, you know, the architecture of the house as well, like where the windows are, where the spots where the air might now circulate.

So it, it was a huge project.

That was probably the biggest part of the initial renovation that we did.

Yeah, I bet.

I don't question that at all.

I imagine that was a giant piece of the puzzle for sure.

What do you think you'd do differently if you were starting today?

If you were, you know, to go back, would you have spent your money any differently initially with that renovation loan?

It's always hard to say, but I think personally I would have rolled more into that initial renovation loan.

We're comfortable living amongst projects.

We're comfortable living in a house that isn't fully done.

And that's that doesn't really bother me.

But I think that maybe we would have done both of the roofs on the barn and the house in that initial project.

And that would have kind of just put us on a faster track to doing things like fixing all the woodwork on the outside or doing the windows or figuring out the brickwork on the House, doing gutters, different things that had to be done that were kind of held up by the roof.

So I think we would have just rolled more into it if I could go back now and also knowing that like that stuff all costs a lot less in 2019 than it does now.

Right, right.

Yeah.

And it's not that big of a deal.

I mean, we're figuring it out as we go along, just like we expected to.

So it all worked out the way it was supposed to I think.

Yeah, now at some.

Point, of course, the house stops being.

It doesn't stop being a project.

Those projects never stop.

But I don't know, maybe you stopped viewing it as a complete project because it becomes part of your daily life.

And especially because you have two young boys and they're running all over the place.

And at this point, you know, every Creek and every draft and every potential leak.

I mean, this is your home.

And so how has your relationship or how has it changed over the years?

Do you feel like the caretaker or the owner or something else entirely?

It's definitely changed.

I think at first I did feel more like the caretaker, and I felt like the house had to be the showcase ready for a tour at any time, because that's just something that people ask us, and that's normal.

But it'll be like, oh, can I have a tour when they first come?

But I'm just much more relaxed about it now.

It is our home, and we have two boys, they're 9 and 11.

Obviously, they're not keeping the house like a museum all of the time.

So I'm just more relaxed about it now.

I just say, you know, it's a project, and it's our house, so it's going to look like that, and that's OK.

It's not going to look like a museum.

Yeah.

So I think that's the main thing that's changed for me.

It's just becoming more comfortable with that and saying I can have it ready for a photo shoot at one point, but it's going to look completely different than if you just come in the door to visit.

And we love it.

Both free.

I always cringe a little bit when people call themselves the caretaker of a house.

And it's not because I, I don't think we should see ourselves that way.

I absolutely do, you know, we can't just go in and stomp all over everything and tear it all out and say, well, this is my home now.

But I feel like if we only view ourselves that way, then we don't have permission to really settle in.

And maybe that's my perspective as someone who's never lived in one place for my entire life.

And I feel like I've had a lot of different places that I've lived.

But if you don't call something your home or you don't settle into it, then I don't know, you just can't fully embrace your life wholeheartedly in that location.

And you're kind of spending your life with one foot in and 1 foot out.

And I don't know, you know, you're in a chapter in your life in that house, and the house is probably going to outlive you and not you personally, but anyone's old house is probably going to outlive them.

And you know, you need to live your chapter fully.

That's what I think, anyway.

Absolutely.

I agree.

And I think it actually helps you make better decisions for the house.

When you really feel like it's your home and you have that ownership over it and you have that feeling in the house, you just make better decisions because you're thinking about how you live in the house, how a future person would live in the house.

You're thinking about making it easy for anyone to live there because you're coming from your own experience.

So I think that only helps the house if you really embrace it in that way.

Because then people in the future aren't going to be like having these pain points of who knows, like not being able to keep warm in the house because you haven't done all the things that you could to help yourself keep warm in the house.

Or just like basic things, like a door sticking or not having enough storage.

Those are all things that you kind of embrace as you're actually living there, living your day-to-day life, and making it easy for yourself.

Yeah, definitely.

Do you see yourself there in 10 or 20 years?

I mean, what would need to be true for that to happen?

We have always seen ourselves here forever, but, you know, barring any major life change, we're kind of in it for the long haul.

We hope that we can stay here as long as we are able and do as much as we can to keep the house healthy.

And our son Graham always says that he's going to live here after us and take care of it.

But you know, he's 11, so we'll see what he says after that.

That would be neat.

I mean, do you think it would be cool to like, pass this house down to the next generation of your family?

It would be really cool.

Our kids both have an appreciation for houses and for taking care of things and fixing things, and even like decorating architecture.

They both love that.

So I could see that happening, but you never know where life goes.

I just love the idea of passing it on to anybody and having it be better than it was when we bought it, which obviously even though it has a long way to go, it's, it's better than it was when we found it so.

Oh, for sure.

Yeah, well.

It's not empty for.

Yeah, first step.

You're doing a lovely job.

So I have really basically one more question for you and that and that is, you know, if someone was standing, I want your advice.

You know, you've been doing this for a few years.

So if someone was standing in front of a big empty house and they were thinking, I want to buy this, but what would you want them to understand before they take the leap?

I would want them to understand that it takes.

I think most people would understand this, but it takes an incredible amount of just being constantly willing to put in hard work.

You can't expect that you're going to be able to necessarily hire someone for every little thing that an old house like this means.

You need to learn how to do a lot of it yourself.

And just being familiar with at least partially what those types of things are that you might have to do.

Like, obviously, you need to know how to paint.

You need to know how to figure out the things that you don't know, too.

That's a huge thing that we've learned.

What do we do when we don't know even where to start on something?

Where do we go?

Obviously, we have so many resources at our fingertips now.

And yeah, I'd want someone to understand that they have to be flexible and be willing to learn.

I think that that's the main thing.

I think that's the number one thing that you need to know.

And then that I think you have to think of finances in a different way.

If you own a house like this, like you are using your income to invest in this house that you own, you aren't able to live in it in a different way.

When you live in an old house, you have to think of it as like an investment in your portfolio like this, a home and the money that you're spending to take care of it is going into this investment that is appreciating in value as you take care of it.

And sometimes it won't be like a 1-to-1 transfer either.

So I think that that's just something you have to know ahead of time, that your finances are going to look a little bit different when you're taking care of an old house than somebody who has a house that, I mean, all houses have problems, but old houses just have more, and that's normal.

Right, all good things to know.

All right, before we wrap up, if people want to follow along or see how this has unfolded from the beginning, where can they find you?

I have some blog posts on www.parkanddivision.com about when we first bought the house and some of our first few projects.

But most of the projects that we do live on Instagram at Park and Division, and that's where I post kind of weekly updates and anything new that we're doing.

And if you scroll back, you can see it all from the beginning, way back there.

Great.

And are you on YouTube as well?

I am on YouTube as well.

I share more of my hobbies on YouTube in longer form videos and shorts there.

At park and division as well? Yes.

OK, great.

All right.

Well, Jessica, thanks.

It's always a pleasure to see you and fun to catch up with you.

Thanks for coming to the show and talking about Dana Scara.

Did I say it correctly?

Yeah, that's one pronunciation.

People pronounce it in many different ways.

Is that how you?

Pronounce it, I say.

Dana Scara.

Oh, Dana Scara, darn it, I messed it up.

OK, well, thank you for talking about Dana Scara.

It's great to see you, and hopefully we'll catch up again soon.

Yeah, thank you so much for having me.

We're going to take another quick break.

I'll be right back.

Commercial Break

We are back.

Last October, the Window Preservation Standards Collaborative, also known as the WPSC, met for its biennial window summit at the Pine Mountain Settlement School in the remote hills of Harlan County, Kentucky.

I should do a deep dive on the Pine Mountain Settlement School because it is such a special place, but here are the basics for today.

It was founded in 1913 as a school for children in the Commonwealth, remote southeastern mountains, and a social Center for surrounding communities.

By the way, I am just reading this, so if it sounds like I'm reading it, it's because I am.

The school was the dream of a local man, William Creech senior, who was troubled by the area's lack of educational opportunities and the prevalence of social problems and rampant disease.

He donated land for the school and recruited two women, Katherine Pettit of Lexington, KY, and Ethel Delong, New Jersey native, to establish and run the new institution.

These two women enlisted the help of architect Mary Rockwell Hook of Kansas City to draw plans for the campus and its buildings.

Now, Mary Rockwell Hook, this was the first I'd heard of her name.

Architects out there who listen to the show.

I'm sure she is someone that you know.

Like most people, I was raised to hear only about male architects.

But Mary Rockwell Hook was one of the first prominent female architects in the United States, and she was deeply intentional about connecting buildings to their natural surroundings.

Again, I'm just reading this, but the campus buildings were constructed by local craftspeople using stones and timber harvested right in the mountains.

They were giant stones and really rough-hewn beams.

Gorgeous buildings.

And there are, of course, plenty of original wood windows and actually a significant amount of steel windows, too.

It's a National Historic Landmark, and it's currently used for environmental education and Appalachian Appalachian Appalachian.

We should do a survey to see how people say that word-- Appalachian culture programs.

The campus is situated on 800 acres of wildlands, and it is pure magic.

I will share a few pictures on Substack this week, and just telling you all of you this,

Just repeating this, remembering it, is making me want to do that deep dive.

Gorgeous place.

Anyway, I was there for the WPSC summit, which is a week-long hands-on gathering of window preservation people.

We all bunked together on campus with zero cell service, which felt like a gift. Our days were packed with,

We had workshops, and at night we would just spill out onto the porches for meetups that lasted well past our bedtime.

There were all these old-timers that had been at this work forever, and people that I had heard about but had never met in person.

It was one of those really rare weeks where you're just fully immersed in the craft and in conversations and in the community.

And as I tend to do, I packed my podcasting gear just in case.

I was about to spend a week with some of the most experienced people that you will ever meet, so it felt irresponsible to not be prepared.

I found that we all bonded really quickly, and with nearly 100 people from across the US all in one place and at one time, I started wondering what it was like for them, where they were.

Is it hard to find work?

Are there a lot of historic buildings?

Do people even care about historic buildings?

And that was what gave me the idea.

I designed a little prompt: What is the state of restoration where you are sort of like the State of the Union, but it was the state of restoration.

And the idea was to learn if historic preservation was struggling, vibrant, on the rise, or somewhere in between.

I asked them to keep it under one minute.

I wanted it to be a snapshot of historic preservation across the country.

And I also thought it would be fun to do this every few years.

You know, this event is biennial, so maybe do it the next time I am there, but to do this every few years at least, to see if there are any changes.

I'm going to be sharing their responses with you throughout this season.

Now, the shortcoming here is that all of these responses come from people who are actively working in this field, and most of them are window restoration professionals, so they all view it through this lens.

I'm no data scientist, but even I know that is not a way to create an accurate picture of what's going on.

So I would like to hear from you, too.

You're living in your community and experiencing firsthand what's happening to the built environment.

These will be one-minute or less audio-only segments.

And we do have that voicemail button on the website.

You can use it on your computer, your phone, your tablet, and I'm going to make it even easier.

I'll provide the prompt that you can read directly, along with a few sentences to help you get started.

You can even write it down and read it from a piece of paper.

Don't worry about saying or pausing too much.

I'm going to edit, and I'm going to make you sound your best.

Now, keep in mind this is all for the greater good and data collection, and your voice doesn't sound weird to us, even if you think it sounds weird to you.

Now, throughout this season, you may hear from someone from your area, but I still want to hear from you, no matter what.

It's OK to have more than one voice from the same area.

So don't let that stop you.

Also, all of my original responses are from the US, but if you're from a different country, you are welcome to let us know where things stand where you are.

I am always curious about what's happening elsewhere.

And in the meantime, here are a couple of responses to the prompt that I got at the summit.

This will give you an idea of what I'm talking about.

Hi, my name is Kevin Gremillion.

I'm with Cajun Window Restoration out of San Antonio, TX and the state of preservation right now is very exciting.

In San Antonio, we have around 16 historical districts and a tremendously large inventory of old historical homes and old homes in general.

A lot of Craftsman homes there.

We also have a very active and supportive Office of Historic Preservation, and it's a very exciting time to be in San Antonio.

My name is Marie Taylor.

I'm the owner-operator of a window restoration company called True North Preservation.

I am out of Cape Girardeau, MO, so that is Southeast Missouri.

And what I would say is that the state of preservation near me is ever-changing.

We have moments where we can really gather a lot of community support for preservation and then other times where it just feels like we're we're constantly falling behind.

But I have a lot of hope for the future.

I have a a lot of hope for preservation, especially where we can combine sustainability, future practices in sustainability, and also our work as historians and preservationists.

That gives you a little idea of the format of the prompt and how to answer in a full sentence.

And I hope you won't feel nervous about doing this, because I really would love to hear from you.

All the details about this ongoing project will be in this week's Substack newsletter, including the prompt and the voicemail link.

And if anyone out there is a whiz at building interactive maps or just wants to create 1 so we can actually visualize this thing as it grows, let me know.

I think that would be a really fun way to follow along.

OK, that's what I've got for you this week, and I can't wait to see where this goes.

Thank you for listening to True Tales from Old Houses, and thank you to our sponsors, Sutherland Wells Bruins and Co, Linseed Oil Paint, Heritage Supply Co, and Repaint Studios.

To continue the conversation, follow True Tales from Old Houses and me at Blake Hill House on Instagram and subscribe to Notes from an Old House on Substack.

Check the show notes where you're listening right now for a direct link.

I love hearing from you, so feel free to send me messages on Instagram and Substack or emails and voicemails through the website.

And now I need a favor.

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Take care of your old houses and each other.

Until next time.