What Was in the TREASURE Box?

A few days ago, a lady here in town saw our architect Randy Stehling at the house measuring the rooms and dropped off a magical TREASURE box of old photos of the house. The most helpful ones were taken around 1988 when the previous owner bought the home and began his own extensive restoration. While some of the work done has not weathered the test of time very well, the photos make it CLEAR that the home would not have survived until today if Paul Hamilton had not purchased it and poured his heart into it. So for that... we are extremely grateful! And for this box of photos?? Well, I'm just like a kid in a candy store!

Renovating an old home like this is a bit like looking for buried treasure, and these vintage photos certainly provided some serious loot! There are lots of interesting tidbits to be mined in these photos, but some of the highlights I noticed so far include:

*When the house was about to fall down in 1988 it had a metal roof, a very rusty old metal roof. This MAY be grounds for us to claim that a metal roof is equally appropriate to shingle which could possibly save a lot of time, money and effort. Of course at this point everything is speculation on my part. We have many steps to go to get approval on pretty much EVERYTHING we do to the exterior from both the local historic regulation department but also from the State of Texas.

*The photo featuring the old car was taken from the southeast corner of the property and clearly shows that the wood siding extended down over the fachwerk that previous owner Paul Hamilton chose to leave exposed. We were pretty sure that photos would prove that, at the time they did the big Victorian expansion... basically enveloping the original 1840's cabin... they would have covered it completely rather than leaving the half-timbered original construction exposed.

*The 1988 era photo from that same angle (but closer up) shows a room had been added to what we would now call the main living room. Not sure we would want to add in that area, but it's at least interesting to note that someone did in the past.

*The old kitchen.... now the room Paul Hamilton named the "archive room" had a lean-to type addition at some point as well.

*Going through the house so many times now, I questioned how much of the woodwork such as bead-board, rosettes around doorways and fluted trim was original vs. a Paul Hamilton vision. These photos support the fact that there was a LOT of decorate wood and trim inside. This makes me more inclined to keep more of the wooden elements vs. removing. Of course we can paint, make openings between rooms bigger, expose rock etc. I'm just a little more attached to the wood since so much appears to have been painstakingly restored.

*The barn structure in back appears to have originally been right by the archive building but disassembled and moved to the back of the property... and possibly clad with new materials? The side wall of that original structure appears to have been brick, probably added at some point along the way. This makes me wonder if the building was originally the home's smoke house? Especially since it is in back next to the "archive building" which was undoubtedly the kitchen at one time (since in the past they didn't want their kitchen to touch their house due to increased risk of fire.) Any thoughts or ideas?