The House at Royal Oak (12 page)

Another factor to consider is furnishing the place. A bed-and-breakfast requires that charm quotient, an elegant aura of the romantic, the bygone, the exotic, or the rustic, a pleasing suggestion of “elsewhere,” that allows guests to escape from the everyday. And that, everyone who knew of our scheme warned, is really going to be expensive.

No, it won't, I answered, because I knew our budget and the secondhand shop in our village where unbelievable finds awaited anyone willing to do a little work on the furniture you bought there. I also knew the family attics. Between my father-in-law and my own mother, I calculated that there was a staggering 178 years of living to draw on without even counting what had been passed on to them by their parents. So I started with what we already had and planned a short shopping list of lamps, linens, and new mattresses. Bed-and-breakfast guests
rank good beds second only to private baths on their list of preferences, according to industry studies.

Another preference among guests, as it turns out, is for an absence of teddy bears, chintz, and bric-a-brac. Some guests will specifically inquire about this before booking as a prelude to asking about dust and allergens. For others it's a question of aesthetics. This was lucky for us, because my own strong preference was for a suggestion, an evocation of the past, not a full-blown set piece.

Even so, we were going to need a certain amount of stuff beyond my short list of basics. After exhausting the attics, I took frequent walks down to Julie's Oak Creek Sales to hunt for fixable chairs, tables, dressers, mirrors. In time we had to look further, stopping at thrift and used-furniture stores wherever we happened to be, usually on trips to and from the hardware and lumber supply stores.

The idea of saving a house that would otherwise bulk up a landfill is hugely appealing. Old houses also hold history and secrets that you can sense at every turn, in their nooks, their hand-hewn beams, windows, mantles, and unpredictable corners. I used to avoid impassioned conversations among home renovators, but I came to understand. It becomes an obsession with addictive rewards if things go well, a kind of gambling. No wonder saving old houses is an industry and a culture all its own, with blogs, Web sites, magazines, newsletters, TV shows, clubs, and stores.

The same rewards lie in preserving smaller objects, and an unexpected advantage of starting a bed-and-breakfast is that what could be a time-consuming, not to say expensive, hobby
becomes your business. After more than a few futile efforts and mistakes, I began to get the hang of this new sport, sizing up quickly if a thrift store had something we needed and could work with. It might mean nothing more than reinforcing a shaky structure, a wobbly chair or table legs with L-brackets.

I explained to Hugo how I had seen my father do it. The first time Hugo tried, he screwed the brackets to the outside of the chair. “Think anyone will notice?” he said, reaching for the screwdriver to move them.

It might mean sanding a stained or chipped surface or just brushing on furniture stain to bring an old end table or bookcase back to life. At the home supply store I came across marker pens in many different wood finishes—oak, beech, mahogany, walnut, ash, cedar, redwood, cherry, and “colonial”—and bought them all. I walked around the house with these pens in my pockets, ready to touch up scratches on the thrift store furniture until it crossed a line in my estimation between neglected and well cared for.

Sometimes we returned from shopping empty-handed and frustrated, certain that although we had come far, the shoestring was just too short. A pleasing ambience was beyond our reach. How do you improvise a good, solid bed frame that also shows style? Then a real find would give us energy for more hunting. At a secondhand clothing store that also dealt in used rugs, books, and odd pieces of furniture, Hugo spotted some dining chairs shoved in a back corner.

Unpriced, they were wobbly and needed new upholstery, but their beautiful, spare grace would distract the eye from our undistinguished dining table. Hugo asked if they were for sale.

“They're in bad shape,” the owner said. “Fifteen each?” Hugo paid for all six and picked up four, two in each arm, leaving me to follow him out of the store with two more. He hurried to load them into the truck, explaining that we needed to get out of there before the owner changed his mind. If they aren't Duncan Fife, he said, they're fine copies. I didn't know this famous furniture maker and asked how he knew. The usual, he said—a book.

One chair was covered in pale-green, moiré taffeta. I imagined the refined house from which it came, where no one ever spilled anything. For our purposes, I selected darkblue velvet and Hugo showed me how to use the staple gun. The main rule was never hold it toward your face.

I cut out a rough square of velvet, stretched it tight, shut my eyes, and fired. The gun went off with a sharp bang. Opening my eyes, I saw that I half-missed the fabric. The second try was better and I stapled all around the bottom of the frame before turning the seat right side up to see the fabric bunched up. When I yanked it free from the staples, it ripped. My next chair was better and the fifth one looked almost professional. The green taffeta was simply too beautiful to cover over, so I left it.

The decorating, as it evolved, became a real witches' brew, with an antique Persian rug from Hugo's dad next to the thrift store dining table, lace handmade by Hugo's grandmother and mine alongside synthetic silk swags from the remnant table at the fabric store. I was especially proud of this imitation silk
couleur changeant,
which can be seen in portrait paintings by the Old Masters, who delighted in capturing the varied hues of this intricately woven fabric.

My remnant reflected rose and blue, picking up the colors planned for the sitting room. For the dining room's two huge windows, I found ready-made blue silk curtains that fit, so I splurged. When someone interested in such things asks if the curtains are silk, I'll ask them to guess which ones are the real thing.

The dining room became my favorite example of the witches' brew. A 1911 portrait of my father in his white christening dress, still in its original oval gilt frame, presides over a handsome, polished pewter candlestick from Julie's store that she sold to me for $7 because its mate was missing. On the mantle also are an antique English tea box, an anniversary gift from Hugo; blue-and-white pottery shards from the backyard; a sampling of hand-forged nails from the house; the iridescent feather of a wood duck that I found on a walk; and a bird's nest from the attic rafters, complete with the blue half-shell of a robin's egg.

On the other side of the room a somewhat hulking, late nineteenth—century buffet that once served as theater staging dominates. Hugo discovered this marble-topped wonder covered with dust in a barn in western Maryland and used it as the cash register counter in the bookstore for years before its fall from grace to kitchen work counter for the catering business. This was very hard on the buffet and before installing it in the bed-and-breakfast, I spent many days gluing broken pieces into place and applying furniture stain to bring it back. Oak for the doors, a darker walnut stain for some of the inlaid trim. On a band of badly nicked faux ebony, I tried a regular marker pen but it left a shiny scribble so I bought a small can of flat black paint and a fine brush to go over all this trim,
which ran from one end of the buffet to the other. More inset wood with a marled surface required three different pens for the touch-up. When visitors compliment the piece, I can only smile. It took me almost as long to fix it up as for Hugo and Rick to rebuild the front porch.

Before opening, I scrutinized the dining room because guests would be sitting there in bright daylight for an hour or longer. They'd have time to look around and be pleased, or not. Most of the house's original light fixtures were missing by the time we came along, including the dining room chandelier. Where bare wires extended from a gap in the plaster ceiling we hung a reproduction wrought-iron chandelier with amber globes. This large room, which runs the width of the house, demanded a substantial light fixture and an antique, we learned in months of futile scouting, was much too expensive.

The reproduction looked all right at night, but I thought its newness showed by day. The dried flowers I strung into it began crumbling right away and I worried about pieces falling into the guests' breakfasts. Eventually, I hit on another idea. Gathering up my mother's red-handled rolling pin, an egg beater, wooden spoons, ravioli cutters from Hugo's aunt, a berry basket, and an old tin camp mug, I hung them in and around the chandelier and stood back. In an embassy dining room I had once seen something like this made with new cooking gadgets and I decided that whether or not my rustic version worked for anyone else, here it would stay.

Another source for décor turned out to be an architectural salvage business that opened up less than two hours away in
the center of Baltimore. As green a business as could be, it sits in the shadow of the Ravens stadium. We made the roundtrip at least five times to hunt for everything from doors to hinges, latch plates, and antique doorknobs. Wading with a flashlight through snow melt into one of their darkest, deepest warehouses, we came across a hoard of genuine, old interior shutters. Sadly, our house had once been outfitted with shutters inside as well as out, and either for modernizing or an economy of repair, every last one had been removed. The hinges still in place showed where a dozen interior sets, individually made for each window, had hung.

In the warehouse two pairs of solid mahogany shutters from someone else's house waited for us. They needed only scraping and painting to put in ours. I say “only” because the first set took about five hours' work but with experience Hugo did the second set in less than half the time. We also found several more sets of shutters that day for the exterior of the house. Of course you never know what surprising gifts you'll receive when you buy old things, and the shutters came complete with a baby bat clinging tightly to a slat. Hugo gently nudged it loose before laying the shutters in the bed of the truck.

This salvage business, called Second Chance, frequents buildings about to be demolished, strips away good windows, doors, bath and light fixtures, staircases, mantles, transoms, decorative architectural elements, metalwork, and lumber to resell. An entire surreal courtyard is filled with claw-footed bathtubs. Operating in several cities now, they hire and train unemployed local inner city residents to do the work.
Our pine front door, two inches thick, was salvaged from a 1901 Baltimore hotel scheduled for teardown. The business is booming and on our last visit they had expanded to five warehouses.

Good luck like that went into the mix, along with gifts from Hugo's beloved aunt. Zia Lillia had followed our progress at every phase, and although she was too ill to come visit from New Jersey, she kept asking how soon we would be in business and what we needed.

Her extra china, book cabinets, and lamps were the very vintage of the house. They filled in around the attic and thrift store finds, giving the house a truly settled feeling. Although she never said so directly, Zia Lillia, the Italian equivalent of a steel magnolia, wasn't happy that she didn't get to arrange her possessions in the new setting.
Could be worse,
I heard her say after I placed a cabinet in a corner of the small sitting room at the front of the house I called the parlor because that's what my grandmother called a like room in her house. The parlor was for company.

Setting a photograph of Zia Lillia in her schoolgirl dress, white stockings, and high-buttoned shoes inside the cabinet, I shuddered. As soon as I moved her to the fireplace mantle, I heard her say,
That's more like it. From here I can see and be seen . . .

I moved on, filling overlooked nail holes as I planned the rest of the decoration and to take my mind off the boring work, pictured Zia Lillia meeting Mrs. Jefferson. In these encounters, as in life, Zia Lillia always got the last word.

If Mrs. Jefferson observed pleasantly over tea,
My house has come back, and I must say I'm rather pleased
. . . Zia Lillia would snap,
Your house? Yes, it's come back, no thanks to you.

Sounds from the driveway brought me back to the present. I looked out and saw two trucks parked. Three men, smoking cigarettes, formed a half-circle around Hugo.

“HAPPY NOW?” HUGO ASKED AS I JOINED HIM OUTSIDE.
Two painter's assistants dragged on their cigarettes, flipped the burning butts into the garden, and followed their boss up onto the porch. We followed the painters. “I know I'm a little slow,” Hugo was saying, “and like you said, if we have some help we can open a lot sooner.”

Summer again—our second year of work on the house. With painting and finishing the walls and woodwork going slowly, it could mean another year before we opened. On the dining room alone Hugo spent four weeks. I assured him I was very happy and went back to see if the painters' cigarettes were still burning.

Greg, the painter, was in demand, with more jobs than he could get to, but he obviously felt sorry for us and our sad-sack house. He himself lived in a development of new houses many times the size of ours, we knew from the friends who recommended him. Greg didn't mind painting just the front façade of our house for now and would do the rest of the exterior when we could afford it. Only after they finished that and moved indoors did trouble start.

I found Greg offering sympathy to Hugo because he had the same problem with his wife—all the wacky paint colors she demanded. They were in the parlor and an assistant painter stared down at the bucket of paint, an old-fashioned hue called ashes of roses I had chosen for the walls, and then at Hugo. He didn't know about other guys, but personally he wouldn't be caught dead in a house with pink paint.