The Cross House

        The first-floor section? I have been dying to paint this for over three years. But soon! Soon!!!!!!!!      

Today, I did something I have long wanted to to do. Something I have yearned to do. With an ever-increasing quiet desperation. Something that I fretted might never happen. Something which took on an aspect of impossibility. Well, can you guess what I did today? OK……………..I SAT IN THE PARLOR!!!!!!!! What? You are unimpressed? Oh!…

Today, Young Brian stopped by the Cross House. As we talked he commented something to effect that I was not doing as many posts as when the blog was new in 2014. This both startled and confused me. I replied: “I do at least five posts a week, and often more. I know of no…

    On the bright side, most of the exterior is not like this. The previous owner, Bob Rodak, laboriously removed most of the paint on the house down to bare wood. Had this work not been done I would have NOT have purchased the house. The last thing I wanted or needed was an…

  When one nails on a shingle, the nail goes into the upper part of the shingle, where it will be covered by the next layer of shingles. But somebody had just pounded a bunch of flat-head nails into these shingles. Oh, the horror. These, of course, had to go. While removing the nails however…

So, I got up at 5AM this morning, breathless to paint the swags on the tower. Would this solution work???????? When I arrived at the Cross House at the crack of dawn, I had no idea how to reach the swags. My ladder is not tall enough. Still, I was desperate. MUST SEE SWAGS GREEN!…

        Well, I have no idea how to make the upper band right. So, brilliant ideas invited! One option not Photoshopped is to JUST paint the swags green. This seems like a good idea but would be stylistically at odds with how all the other decorative stamped tin flourishes are treated (green,…

        Last year I had the two trees to the right severely pruned. Each had developed Y-shaped trunks, and these would have split in two during an ice storm. After pruning, the trees looked kinda lopsided but this year they are looking good! The trees were planted by the previous owner, Bob…

Stewart asked what was this “grinder” thingy I was using on the exterior of the Cross House?     Properly, it is a disk sander. I call it a grinder because I was introduced to the tool by somebody who called it that. It is, I find, indispensable and cannot imagine how much harder it…

Last year I discovered that I was not painting the exterior of the Cross House in its original colors, as I had supposed. Oops. It developed that while I did get the olive green trim color right, I was painting the walls the second color the house had been painted with. The first wall color…

      I did get some of the huge curved cornice grinded down to bare metal but I felt like I was being roasted by the sun and heat in the full Tyvek suit, the industrial fan notwithstanding. I gave up, came home early, and took a delicious nap with the AC on arctic….

    The architect of the Cross House was Charles Wesley Squires, who lived a block away, and designed an astonishing 2,700 structures, and more in Emporia than any other architect. When I purchased the Cross House in 2014 I had never heard of Squires. Today, I adore the man. His work all exhibits a…

Today I woke to an email from young Brian. He found an image of my long long long lost neighbor, directly across the street to the west. The historical society has no images of the house so it has been something of a mystery.           So, points for Brian!!!!!!!!    …

After months of working on the parlor, I have at last resumed painting the Great North Wall. And the NE corner. Really. Really! Wanna see?