About the Nancy Shepherd House restoration. . .

Below are photos of the Nancy Shepherd House in 1987, in a state of ruin about to be saved from destruction. Everybody said it could not be done, but we did it. Most people who restore old houses find it so much easier to gut them of all old fabric and replace evrything with new material. We saved every bit of original fabric, replacing only what was missing. We even saved the original plaster, which we were told could not be done.

Below is a photo of Nancy Shepherd McLaughlin sitting on a paint bucket, hand scraping layers of wallpaper and paint down to the original paint on the dining room stairwell. It took her over one hundred hours of scraping by hand to expose the original paint on this one thing, showing the hand-plane marks and wrought nails. We could have taken a power sander to all the wood, but can you imagine what it would have done to the plane marks and hand-wrought nail-heads. That is what most other people do. They don't understand why it took us twenty years to restore this old house.

Below are some shots that best represent what shape the original plaster was in after removing layers of wallpaper. We kept every fragment of original plaster, made of mud and staw (undercoat) and lime powder, mud, and horse hair (final coat). Everybody thought we were crazy and that we should just gut the house and replace the plaster with drywall. That is the usual trend. We did not agree and instead, re-attached the loose plaster to the original split lath and filled in where it was missing.