The Cross House

To me, decorating is like playing 3-dimensional chess. Every decision impacts on every other decision. And I long ago learned that the last 10% can pull together the previous 90%. What can look horrible when almost done…can suddenly transform into fuckin’ brilliant when totally done. I have seen this time and time again. In the…

  Above the painted area will be a burnished gold picture rail. Above that will be a stenciled frieze. The ceiling will have different stenciled patterns. Even with just this one corner painted it is obvious how much better the woodwork looks, and stained-glass. I am excited!    

    After the railings are all installed, I need to repair the porch flooring (not hard or $$$), and then get the damn lattice made (really hard and really $$$). Doug, who made the straight lattice for the north porch, has been VERY mean in his unwillingness to make curved lattice for free. I…

          In a week or so the lower sashes will be restored, then all four sashes will be reinstalled in the big gable, and time will have…reversed. I AM LIVING FOR THE DAY!    

    I get a lot of requests for tours of the Cross House. And I have given a lot of tours. The briefest tour was to a woman who just stopped by. Within five minutes I could see she was not actually interested. I suspected that she had assumed a beautifully restored/furnished Victorian-era mansion….

I have implemented a new regime: Every day I have to do at least 15 minutes worth of work getting the damn railings for the front porch installed. A while back I got one section installed. Then… Then… Then… Nothing more. This is inexplicable as I am dying to get the railings installed. And I…

When I purchased the Cross House in 2014, every room looked like a bomb had gone off in it. There were holes in all the plaster walls and ceilings. Some plaster walls and ceilings were missing entirely, like the library, which was 95% bare studs. I sheetrocked the library, and sheetrocked over the heavily damaged…

        The fire escape was a beautiful piece of industrial art. Solid, and nicely detailed in an industrial way. It also allowed good emergency egress from the top floor. It was both thrilling and terrifying climbing it. It just kept going up and up and up. And SO narrow. One clutched onto…

Last summer, when restoring the window frame of the triple-arched windows on the Great North Wall, I found a odd piece of trim, vertical, poorly tacked onto the window frame. The piece was only half intact. I had no idea why it was there, and assumed it was stuck on well after the house was…

    New! Improved! Now, at the bottom of each post, are social media buttons! You can email a post to somebody. Or put it on Facebook. Or Pinterest. Or even to other buttons of which I have no idea of. So, I am hip now! But only a bit.    

      Number 14 would, I assume, correspond to an identical tack on a storm/screen window. Thus the zillion storm/screen windows for the house (all long gone) could be easily found for the correct windows. “I need #6!” “I need #14!” “I need #36!” Cool. I have only recently started coming across such tacks….

  These odd bits are only on some windows. The diamond-paned pantry windows, for example, each has one such bit, at the bottom, right side window casing. So, one bit per window. What are they for?    

  That is the original location of the lost rail. But it looks really odd. I mean, it is HIGHER than the horizontal door trim. Bo commented on this during his recent visit, and I had previously wondered about the same thing. But I never had a piece of picture rail on the wall to…

The Cross House has an amazing 42 stained-glass windows. They are the glory of the house. And they were all falling apart. The Kansas Heritage Grant awarded to the house in 2015 allowed the restoration of 3/4 of the windows, and this work is now completed. A second Heritage Grant, awarded this year, will complete…

  Why does the oval window angle in???????? Have you ever seen that before? VERY weird! And of course I love this eccentric detail! When I purchased the house in 2014 the bath had been totally gutted. Today, the white quartz slabs are sitting in the dining room. The previous owner had all the trim…

  Recently, I did a post about how pretty much everything I knew about the 1894 carriage was wrong. In the above image pretty much the only thing original to the structure is the turret. ALL the others windows and dormers and door are, almost certainly, later additions. But why a turret rather than tower?…