A few days ago I received a text from Bob, the previous owner of the Cross House. “I found something.” My reply: “The missing window sash pulls?”               Bob arrived with his wife, Sandy, and the three of us spent the next 5 hours touring the Cross House and…

        Whew! I can easily restore a shellac finish. The same cannot be said of a faux bois finish. Stay tuned!      

          This is all VERY weird. I have no explanation for all this. But…I do know that God is jerking my chain. And I have proof.         WTF? WTF? Again, these pieces of wood are from the 1960s. From a different building, under a different 1960s owner than…

  The left shelf revealed…to my great surprise, as previously detailed…a seeming faux bois (painted wood) finish, as is common throughout the Cross House. But why would the pantry have such an expensive finish? The right shelf revealed…to my great surprise…exactly what I expected: under numerous layers of white paint there was an original shellacked…

Today at the Cross House I did something…unexpected. I had not planned to embark upon this small adventure but curiosity overtook me. Soon, I was in the basement shop, working away. When….I encountered something unexpected. Something annoying. Something which made me mad. While driving home I knew, of course, that I would blog about this….

    You are likely thinking: And why is a fully restored window sash extraordinary and wondrous?  Because…drum roll, please…this sash is the very first part of the carriage house to be restored. The very first. The poor structure has been in bad shape for a very long time. And…the horror…the structure has actually gotten worse…

    After I blogged about the Kenny chair, Lynn contacted me. She thought she had…drum roll, please…a matching chair in storage! I gasped! I exalted! Lynn wrote: “My father told me that this was his great grandfather’s chair and it came with him from Germany. I hesitate to say this is factual because other…

  The Cross House vacuums up money. Every year. For seven years now. Massive amounts of money. With no end in sight. So, you might imagine my…particular thrill when the house spits up some cash. With the Great Cleaning now almost complete, a lot of metal, aluminum, and copper was hauled off and transformed into…

Directly across the street from the Cross House, to the west, is an unattractive 1970s one-story building behind a parking lot. When I purchased the house in 2014, the building (originally a restaurant) was being used by the local historical society. I stopped by often. But the building looked rather desperate. The historical society then…

I have restored a number of houses over the decades and one thing I endeavor for is being a good neighbor. Nobody likes to spend years looking at construction debris across the street, or old toilers and tubs sitting outside for ages on end. Yet…yet…over the past seven years of owning the Cross House small…