Once, many decades if not a century or two ago, the home you just purchased was beautiful. But that was before the original wallpaper had been scraped off, dropped ceilings put in, original walls knocked out, and the pine-plank floors covered with linoleum.
Clearly your home deserves better and you have every intention of restoring much of its former beauty. But just where does one begin to discover what the placed looked like in its heyday?
The first step, says Lynne Dakin Hastings, curator and chief of cultural resource management at Hampton National Historic Site, is to seek out those who can help implement your plan of action. Hastings recommends first taking care of the floors, ceilings and walls and worrying about the furniture later. “It's almost like one has to internalize the personality of the house,” she says. “There are some things that are correct for Hampton Mansion, but that would make no sense in a log cabin.”