Saturday Style: My Victorian House

For my Saturday Style post this week I am going to share my love of Victorian houses and how we came to own one.

When my DH and I were dating we used to drive through old neighborhoods in Salt Lake City where we met attending school at the University of Utah.  We both loved old homes and hoped to one day own one.  As our family grew, however, our dream dimmed, because our large family would require a large home, and large  Historic Homes in Salt Lake City were just out of our price range.

We later moved to Utah county with my husband's work, old homes were more affordable here, but still beyond us.  We finally decided to build a Victorian style home, and that is the position we were in when 'Broadstone', the name we have since given our home, came into our lives.

I first saw this red sandstone beauty when my antiquing partner Trish and I traveled to a small town 20 minutes south of Orem, where we lived, to attend an estate sale.  It was pretty much love at first site for me.  Trish's husband is a realtor and she offered to have him show us the house.  At the time we had a building lot in Highland, 20 minutes north of Orem, and where looking at Victorian house plans.

As we drove up to the home, Cliff, the realtor, asked my DH what the chances were that we would buy this house.  Scott said 4%.  But as we looked at the house, much of which was in very bad shape, he started throwing out statements like "Well, we could just ..."
Or "All we would need to do for this is to ..."  By the time we went to bed that night we had decided to make the house our own.  Features like the fireplace to the right, and the wonderful stained glass windows helped us both fall in lovely fairly quickly.

We were not in a position to move into the house just then, so we took two months to replace the various heating issues with two furnaces, re plaster walls that had been washed away by a leaking roof, and redo the plumbing in the main bathroom.  These taken care of we rented the house for two years

We, moved in September of 1999 and have worked on the house ever since.  The carpeting shown on the stars replaced sculpted gold carpet from the 70's.  The figural newel post light fixture is actually a modern reproduction, but we know from talking to a former owner, who grew up in the house from 1911 until 1930 that there was such a fixture originally.

Thanks for coming along and sharing my love of Victorian houses, I will have future posts about the history of the house and our work on it.  Hope you love V houses too!