The Cross House

    After the lost door was hung, I sat back with a silly grin on my face and just stared at the butler’s pantry door (squee!), the lost door (squee!), and the door to the second floor. So much remains to be done with restoring the doors to their original finish but, for now,…

Added to the guest list is young Brian, and Don and EJ will be stopping by after dinner, around 2PM. So, this means 25 now for dinner!        

On Friday, the Cross House, long empty of life, will be filled with people. Squee!!!!!!!! So far, I have 24 people coming for an after-Thanksgiving dinner. This is the list. PLEASE let me know if I have overlooked you: ONE: Sandra ONE: Justin FIVE: Grace and family TWO: Steve and Meade SIX: Dr. Doug and…

                  There are four Cross family members buried in the family plot. Just four. And none have been interred since 1930. This seems profoundly….sad to me. I had expected Mary to be buried here as well, the only daughter of Charles and his first wife, Kate. Upon…

    LEFT: This goes to the basement. The actual door is not original to this location, and was moved from the butler’s pantry. I did a post about this discovery. MIDDLE: This goes upstairs. The actual door is original. RIGHT: The main pantry. The actual door is missing.            …

Two years ago I realized that the Cross House still retained, at least by 1999, its original screen doors on the main entrance (a pair) and north entrance. What happened to them? I contacted the previous owner, Bob Rodak. He thought he might have them stored away. Well, squee!!!!!!!! Since then we have gone back/forth/back/forth/back/forth…

In the vast basement of the Cross House, under the library, is the now-famous Aladdin’s Cave. The cave was stuffed with trim and windows and odd bits from the house which had fallen off over the decades or been removed. Since buying the house I have been steadily emptying the shelves in the cave as…

I am focused on getting the house ready for the day-after Thanksgiving dinner. To this end it was necessary to clean out the main pantry. Easy! I also needed a bit of counter to put a microwave. Thus, I cleaned the pantry counter and then wondered… Oh dear. Wondering is ALWAYS bad when it comes…

        When the radiators are installed, I can at last turn on the radiator system! Except I have no idea of how to do this. To me, this is akin to sitting in a helicopter and trying to figure out how to make it fly. While talking to Justin today about this…

In 1929, Scott Mouse, Sr., purchased the Cross House. He converted the second floor to apartments, and his family occupied a suite on the first floor. In 1950, his son, Scott, Jr., converted the house into the Mouse Palace Motel, and most of the apartment features were removed. By some amazing luck, the floor plan…

I often get asked to take images of the Cross House at night so people can enjoy seeing the beauty of the stained-glass from a  nocturnal perspective. But, no matter how much I try, my camera has never been able to capture the beauty of the backlighted stained glass at night. The camera distorts, and…

          Golly. It surprises me that the house can continue to surprise me. So, it develops that while the flooring shows no evidence of such an alteration, the walls confirm that this alteration did, in fact, take place. I have aways wondered when the flooring was installed; 1929 (during the apartment…

In 2015, Modern Air hauled a stunningly, shockingly heavy long & low radiator to the Cross House. It was perfect for the library, which was missing its original long & low radiator. I had the titanically heavy thing placed in the foyer because the library was not ready for it. The room need new flooring…

Only after buying the Cross House did I become aware of the VITAL importance of good gutters and downspouts on a big old house. When I purchased the house it had but a single remaining downspout. Most of the gutters were filled with debris so water was just cascading over and, ominously, behind the gutters….