Periodically I brag about my house. It’s really amazing. It was built in the 1890s for a very fancy family, and it’s been really well kept ever since. The woman who owned it before us updated everything (like, furnace/ducting and electric) and kept it immaculate. Today I was riding my stationary bike (which we are currently keeping in the front hall) and I was admiring the woodwork just in the hall. Also, I’d love to draw attention to the fact my home has a hall, like where someone in Clue could get murdered! And, since this is rural Western NY, our house was incredibly cheap. (Move here! There’s a bread factory in town so downtown smells like fresh bread every morning!)

Anyway, I took some pictures.

The below photo is facing the closet under the stairs, the door to the dining room (note the woodwork in the doorframe!) and the … reverse? finials on the turn in the stairs.

Below is the same space, but includes a Zandy for scale. I guess the little door is six feet. The big door is eight or nine feet, estimated.

Here’s a bit more of the detail on the big door. All of the public doors on the first floor are this height. The doors in the back are seven feet – the basement door, the back door, the door up the back staircase, and the powder room door. Also in the below photo, really enjoy that wallpaper. I love it. I don’t know what we’ll do when we have to replace it (there’s marker at small hand height all the way up the stairs).

The below is the front door. It’s directly across from the dining room door, and at the foot of the stairs. The round thing in the middle of the door is a doorbell. The lace curtains were left from the previous owner, but I can’t bear to get rid of them!

Below is the same door, but with a Zandy for scale. The bottom of the window aligns pretty well with my chin. It’s much, much bigger than it looks in the first photo.

Here’s a bonus photo of some detail on the fireplace – which is next to the dining room door, on the diagonal. It’s a bit shadowy, but I love the details. The front of the fireplace, the flat piece of wood that is right above the tile running parallel to the floor, is not flat. It’s curved – it curves out in the middle really beautifully. I don’t actually like the tile, but I have an idea of what to replace it with that will bring out the beauty of the fireplace without being incongruent, or without taking over. We currently have some nesting tables inside the fireplace, because we took down the chimney in the attic to put our suite in up there, so it is very non-functional. I actually don’t think the previous owner used it – I think it was purposefully blocked.

Below is the entire fireplace. There was not a transition from the floor of the fireplace and the actual floor when we moved in, so that’s something to fix eventually, too. Lighting isn’t great at this time of day, so let’s blame that, rather than my questionable photography skills. It’s also dusty, which we will blame on photography, and not my questionable cleaning skills.

That’s it! (The bread factory thing is true!)