Victorian? Queen Anne?

It is not, right in the middle of town, however did learn from locals that it is one of the four original homes in the town. On about half an acre lot.

Some Victorain trim but it looks to be agreat old farmhouse . Is it on a farm? I think staying true to the style is a nice thought but IMO some spaces need to come into the 21 st century like kitchens and usually bathrooms to some extent too. Have you checked out all the basics like plumbing, electrical, heating and the roof those are the first steps to any renovation no point in the pretty stuff until the guts are good.

Cross gable farmhouse with a pyramidal roof over the main part of the house.

Yes, electrical and plumbing has all been updated, looks like a 90s renovation on the kitchens and bathrooms. Which is why I was wondering about specfic styles and colors to try and put a updated touch on a beautiful time period!

I think if you don't rip out or paint original wood (within reason -- you might need to paint a closet door or the inside of linen cabinets, and are good to the floors, you can have a very free hand with how you actually decorate as long as you don't go generic big box purchases.

You can often get a lot of inspiration by looking at renovations of historic "listed" homes from Great Britain, which have old bones but get crisp, fresh interior decor. You can often find furniture with great character (and better quality) but looking on line at Chairish.com

If you and your family like wallpaper, for a house like this it can sometimes solve 75% of your decor needs!

Have a great time. I would call your house Vicitorian with interior aspirations to American Empire and do some searches for furniture and lighting in that mode

This is a fun website for getting you thinking outside the box and what's possible if you have an old house. A lot of this is really high end, but you can pick up the spirit of how less is more, and letting the house speak for itself while still being a bright new place for you

https://www.houseandgarden.co.uk/topic/houses

We have a similar gingerbread cottage built in 1906 ish Maine….yours has better preserved interior features. Ours was updated at some point and has real closets! I think the main thing is not to destroy anything original. We only have original woodwork in the front hall. The rest has been painted dark brown…we will keep the original stuff original and paint over the dark brown!

It is Victorian.

Yours looks very similar to mine and we call it Victorian.

Like you @Centerspace I asked what we had when we first got it on this forum, and it was undecided between Farmhouse and Victorian.

Call what you want, I am not the House Style Definition Police. But i hope you get it, as others have said this site tends to be high end in flavor but a few of us really like old homes. I hope you get the house as its nice to see someone with older house vision.

Following…love older homes. Here in NS style is called Loyalist, for the British settlers who left USA and came here. Common along the south shore coastline. So harkens back to New England and Victorian likely.

Researched by a local architect; on the area mentioned above, in Nova Scotia. Might be of interest, depending on your location. Discusses architecture features.

Late Victorian. Yours is a late example as the style is fading out and is starting to have some influence from classical revival styles. Looks like a great house. Dover has some great period books that are fun. They are all black and white but show ideal versions of how the rooms would have been in the day.

Looks like a real diamond in the rough. Love the woodwork in the foyer--don't paint it! Lots of potential, could you post more photos of the interior?

@Travis… I grew up in Maine and immigrated to Canada. There’s definitely quite a connection.

I would categorize it as a Queen Anne home. Very popular style in the late 19th century. Your interior looks identical to ours which was built in the 1890s. It contained the same machined woodwork that your entrance hall possesses. Oak. The furniture style that complimented it is Eastlake. Machine carved. Our home was built on the Main Street of the town in which we lived. I assume yours is aluminum sided? Ours had decorative, fish scale shingles on the front porch. But like yours was aluminum sided at some point. (Sad!).

PS: When we bought our home, the woodwork on the first floor was unpainted. Original. We did have a huge round oak ball on the top of our newel post. Gorgeous. Stupidly, when we re wired the house, we removed the mother of pearl/ebony/brass push button light switches. Yes, they are still made, so if you buy the house and have it rewired…KEEP THEM! 😉

@ptreckel has vinyl siding on the home as of right now, but I checked and the original wood siding is still in tact, if in good enough shape I plan on restoring the original siding!

AWESOME! One thing to ask…has it been insulated? The owners of ours had holes drilled into the exterior walls and blown insulation was installed. That meant that there were holes everywhere in the wood siding (that was covered by the vinyl.) Just be prepared for that. You might be able to acquire old photos of the home from your local historical society. We were able to do that. Especially if your home was one of the originals in your town. GOOD LUCK! And keep posting if you buy it and restore it. You will get lots of excellent advice from PROs here who specialize in restoration work.

@Diana M. Bier I would never paint it!!! Here are some more interior photos! Since these photos the green carpet has been removed to expose the original hardwoods!

You can look up the property records in the town to find the date it was built. The chain of ownership is likely more informative than the town tax record. Our tax record date is before the neighborhood was developed and you can see in photos the bare hill without our house before the neighborhood was developed.

Over the years, owners may have added/changed "period" details. Just because something looks old doesn't mean it was original. For example, a boarded-up fireplace that lost its original mantle might be restored by a later owner who found a period mantle from a salvage place.

Your fireplace and knotty pine looks '60s to me.

@sigrid it does look they tried to update it a couple different times throughout the years! Fireplace is totally not original to the home, or at least the style of it. I wish I could find out what it used to look like!

That was my impression of the fireplace and knotty pine too.

You can research Queen Anne Victorian homes and see how they were originally built to get an idea. I actually had a client who totally restored his family's QA home--I'll see if I can upload some photos.

Here are a few ways to sleuth more into the original look of the home:

1. Google the addresses of other original homes in your town and see if they have old zillow or other real estate postings with pics inside.

2. Historical society or library - Get in touch with your local one and tell them what you are doing. The might have a photo archive that includes interiors of some homes in your area from that time period.

3. Do an archeological dig once you have moved in. In every hold home I'd lived in there were remnants of the past. Remove a section of that wood paneling - which doesn't look original, and see if there is old wallpaper behind it. If so, peel it back in layers and you might find more wallpaper or original paint colors. Closets often have layers of history in them as do fireplaces. I assume you will remove the fireplace and when you do, you will likely find clues in there too.

Wonderful that even though shag rugs, modern fireplace, and popcorn ceilings were added throughout the years, nobody has ruined the beautiful wood work.

Lastly, I'm really into historic preservation, but old bathrooms are often no very safe and old sofas are no joy for my back. The smartest parts of taking a house to its roots knowing when to stay 100% true and when to skillfully find a more modern substitute.

All good points, Kendrah

You appear to have found that diamond in the rough that seems to be disappearing more and more these days! What a fabulous house. Victorian popped in my mind.

As you renovate, Like Kendrah was saying, act like an archeologist. Find contractors who will care for the old moldings, original floors and beautiful architectural elements and are willing to do the sometime difficult tasks of plumbing and electrical in an old home.

So glad this gem has someone who will take care of it the right way. Love the picture of the front area by the staircase looking back - the woodwork, the door style with the brass knob, the pocket doors, the old radiator!

Check on the odd post next to the staircase - definitely not original - maybe there was a structural issue? OR was someone trying to run some electrical inside a hollowed post?

Have so much fun doing this!! Please post pictures as you go along

We “restored” a home years ago that was similar in styling. At that time, we called it Victorian farmhouse. Wrap around porch, second story porch, 3 stories high and all original oak woodwork inside. Never painted! It was built in 1900. We bought from original owner’s descendants! We actually had people in the town help us figure out original aspects. Took us 10 years to get main projects done. Slow but so worth it. Good luck!

Late Victorian but that fireplace is new Id research replcing it with something more authentic. Great house

So all this woodwork is original heart pine and refinished.

This bay window in the master bedroom has a sitting area

All the original cast iron radiators were refinished and hand painted

@Diana M. Bier Gorgeous! Those radiators are the exact ones in this home! Only some are painted white and others untouched!!

Centerspace, what state is the home located in? What county, if you feel comfortable sharing?

https://thevictorianfarm.house/ -Blog about folks redoing a Wisconsin Victorian farmhouse. I don't think the end results are particularly authentic but mostly tasteful. The before pics and during renovation pics might be useful to you.

Your staircase looks like oak, and while beautiful, it isn't an overly ornate Victorian staircase. I wonder if simple descriptors like this could help inform how you decorate. Oak furniture that is not overly ornate but a step above rustic farmhouse.

Friends who had a home with layers of paint on their radiators had them sand blasted down to the cast iron and then repainted.

Eerily similar to 1906 home we bought in Maine…especially the stained glass window…don’t remove original features, don’t paint over beautiful woodwork.

@fissfiss

On a This Old House show they said that stained glass windows in the stairwell was a signature feature of a New England home. I am sure others carried it westerly as they went.

I like the square style and colors of your window which matches mine, which also matches the windows where we go to church. Both are located in Maine.

It takes a lot of time and money to restore an old house, but it is so worth it. Most modern houses look all alike today.

This is my stairwell…

What a gorgeous home! please keep posting so we can all follow along 😊

One of the fun searches I did for our old house was using Newspapers.com. I searched for the names of the families who had lived here before us. I have a beautiful description of the WWII wedding reception of the son and his new bride, including the flower arrangements in each of the four downstairs rooms. The teenage daughter held bridge luncheons for her friends, naming the boys and girls. Society editors were happy to report on overnight, out of town guests or shopping trips or college acceptance. I have a large three ring binder in our front parlor with these clippings in page protectors. It includes the birth notices and obits of the occupants. Unhappily, it includes a divorce notice.

Our 1890s home in Ohio had a stained glass window like yours on the landing. A pattern book plan, I suspect, for lots of our homes built in that era. Yes, plans. These homes were created from them. With some research you might be able to find original plans for your home!

Of the half dozen Victorian architectural styles* the house appears to be a hipped-roof & lower-cross-gabled version of the Queen Anne style. 1912 sounds right.

*Second Empire, Stick, Queen Anne, Shingle, Richardson Romanesque & Folk Victorian

(A Field Guide to Amercan Houses).

photo by: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license. Attribution: Corey Coyle

That was exactly the point of the book that I mentioned above that was written by my architect friend. Houses were very individualized here in the Atlantic provinces until CMHC intervened. Then things became standardized. :(

@ptreckel

Not on this house, but one i just sold this week that was a Four Square: I found the plans for it in an Alladin Kit House pamphlet from the 1920,s. The only difference was the footprint and the bathroom… it ommited it. But all this makesvsense because there was a pioneer house here that burned down, but left the stone foundation intact. The owners simply modified the footprint to account for the foundation they already had. The lack of a bathroom? Outhouses were common in rural Maine houses in the 1930,s!

This is just part of the discovery and fun of old houses, its like buying a house and getting with it a physical house mystery to uncover from a litany of clues. No wonder i love old houses and write mystery novels. Such fun!

A great clue to the age of a home can be the stone work. Here, old granite prior to 1830 was split using a flat chisel and thus had shallow and wide slots. In 1830 feather and wedges were invented so you get to see deeper, but half round cuts in them. In the 1890,s pnuematic drilling stopped that. All these are clues to when the house might of been built.

There was a thing here in the Maritimes, where you could buy houses from Sears… Maybe it was the plans?

Yes Sears, Alladin and others.

At that time you could buy a house and they would send you your house by a few railroad cars to the nearest siding. I think they cost $4500 or so. $6500 for high end houses!

But to get buyers they had to have pictures and floor plans so the more frugal and farmer-types built them from their literature.