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ONE LAST RESTORATION PROJECT We told ourselves that, in our 50s, we had one old house left in us. This is the way old house crazies talk to each other. “It just needs our love! Imagine what

we could do to this place!” When I first met Paul, he had a 3,500-square-foot project in Lockhart, Texas, which had no heat or air conditioning, but really impressive 12-foot ceilings. There

was rusty plumbing, a dizzying array of hideous wallpapers and funeral parlor drapes. Worse, whenever you opened a cupboard, a burst of lead paint chips would descend like poison

snowflakes. At the time, I was living in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, in a Civil War-era house on the Susquehanna River flood plain. Which flooded, because of course it did. But hey, the

wide-plank pine floors were to die for. It’s a sickness, this love of old things and their potential. The only cure is to find someone similarly afflicted. And buy another house together

twice as old as the last one. Homeowners Tracy and Paul Schorn encountered a host of critters during their historic home renovation. Tracy Schorn In our defense, the Waterford house needed

us. The sellers were a young couple who had butchered the woodwork. They’d slopped white latex paint on everything, except where they’d painted walls Easter-egg pastels, tarting up this prim

colonial like some Jersey Shore beach rental. Maybe the pandemic broke their brains and they could only express themselves through destructive paint choices and defiling 18th century

paneling. It’s a theory. Otherwise, I cannot explain what would possess someone to hurt wood like that. The paneling was like a crime victim calling out, “Save me!” Surely, I couldn’t leave

its fate to the vagaries of the real estate market. What if the house were bought by some open-concept HGTV savages? “Tracy, it’s too far gone,” said everyone about that wood. “Live with it

or paint over it.” But because I’m married to a fellow old house crazy, Paul understood my quest to own this house and save the paneling. He did not begrudge me the expense or the misery of

living through weeks of paint scraping and the stink of linseed oil finishes. He feels the souls of old houses, too. (I later felt vindicated when I found documentation that the paneling was

from 1730, and was salvaged from a now extinct property in Culpeper, sometime in the 1930s.) It was probably a bit deranged to take it all on, but no regrets. Not even that first week when

we found five snakes in the basement. Turns out, when you back up to 140 acres of conserved land, you also get 140 acres of wildlife. Some of which eventually made it into the basement.

(Paul got a rake and carried the snakes out to the creek.) Not even after a fox ate our free-range chickens. (Paul disposed of the remains.) Not even after bats flew out of the fireplace

into our bedroom one night and had a little bat jamboree around the ceiling fan. (Paul opened the window and shooed them out while I cowered in the bathroom.) AN APPRECIATION FOR THE PAST

Why does anyone buy an old house? Maybe as a creaky middle-aged person, sloping in all the wrong places, I felt a kinship. But I’ve owned old houses when I was younger, too. I think it’s

because old house owners are suckers for a story. Say what you will, but your vinyl-clad McMansion doesn’t have ghosts. It doesn’t come with a cupboard under the stairs containing the boot

of a Civil War soldier. We were told it was found in our backyard and preserved for generations. The spirits of barefoot Loudoun Rangers don’t haunt your home looking for their shoes.