I Want to Show You This Historical Beauty!

While this is my personal and ranch blog, I just can’t resist sharing something we are doing in one of our businesses, Hearts Homes and Hands, which is a personal assistance service for Milam and surrounding counties.

We just opened the business, and are currently sharing the lovely old church building where we run a real estate business and host meetings/events. It’s fine, but not terribly accessible for people dealing with physical handicaps, and we’re a bit cramped.

So, we were pretty excited when we were finally able to close on this amazing old house with a cool history. We’d bought it from a really great family that was having trouble keeping up with the payments, due to family illnesses and other issues. We were happy to help out and even more happy to finally own the first brick home built in the city of Cameron, in 1905.

The house was originally owned by a doctor Pope and his family, who were beloved in the city’s early years. Their piano-teacher daughter lived there until the late 1950s, using the bottom floor as a boarding house for income.

Many changes had happened to the house over 115 years, and when we got it, there was a lot of paneling, wallpaper, and interesting interior changes. The biggest change was when the previous owners hired a contractor to install a staircase. It wasn’t exactly safe. (The house had an exterior staircase, since the upstairs started out as a home and the downstairs a doctor’s office, then a boarding house for many years.)

We finally got the funding to start renovations and OH MY. The house is even cooler than we thought it was! ALL the downstairs walls are brick! And the current small doors into downstairs rooms were originally lovely arched openings.

We’ve only been working on the house for two days and are sort of ridiculously excited. It’s been fun to see Lee and Kathleen get all giddy about each new discovery. Seeing my family members happy has really made me feel good.

See, I’m not grumpy all the time! Just show me an old house being restored to its former glory, and I’ll perk up!

We just can’t wait to see what other treasures we discover. And I have something to focus on other than the news of the world. Here’s something we CAN make a difference on.

Let me know if you’d like periodic project updates. We will report more extensively on the Hearts Homes and Hands site, or you can follow them on Facebook. I’d link if I didn’t have a dog on top of me preventing access to my laptop.