The Dream Page 5

  On this website, we refer to this tribute to Victorian Architecture as “Castle Victorian”. However, we don’t actually call our house a castle at all. When it was being built, it stood on the hilltop covered in heavy, black tarpaper for months as the work progressed rather slowly. During this time, the neighbors in the surrounding hills began to call the structure “The Black Castle”. It wasn’t until we moved in, that we discovered that our house had been so dubbed. This was not a name that we cared to use, and we just called it “The Brick Victorian on the hill,” when the occasion to describe our house presented itself. Our house can be seen for miles, and is somewhat infamous now as a landmark. While the photos may appear to make the house look quite large, it is essentially the same size as the original, and is void of any particularly large interior rooms. The name “Castle Victorian” comes from the desire to have a memorable web address for this site and nothing more. Many of the less pretentious web addresses were not available, so when I found that “castlevictorian.com” could be obtained I purchased it, and so it follows that we have dubbed our house “Castle Victorian,” but just for the sake of this website.

  Castle Victorian includes 3,000 square feet of finished space on the first and second floors combined. Like the original, and like most Victorians, it is comprised of quite a number of rooms. Unlike modern homes, Victorian houses do not include “Great-Rooms,” or an “open floor plan,” opting instead for separate rooms for separate activities. By today’s standards, this floor plan is not particularly efficient, and includes several hallways and some quirky-shaped spaces. For those who love old houses, these are welcome deviations from current building designs. We chose to have it this way, and like it, but we realize that not everyone shares this view. The first floor includes: an entry, parlor, formal dining room, den (sitting room), kitchen, breakfast nook, laundry room, ¼ bath, and a turret landing (we put our Christmas tree in the landing). The second floor includes: a library with a turret windowseat, two guest bedrooms, a full guest bath, a sewing room, master bedroom, and a master bath with a walk-in closet. The ground floor also includes a large wrap-around porch. The second floor includes two covered porches; one on the front of the house off of the library, and one off of the master bedroom. The basement has nine-foot ceilings and is partially finished.

  There are a number of unique design details that we included in an effort to keep this project as true as possible to the Victorian design style. Our goal was for the house to appear like a very good restoration. We love old houses, but we love them for the design aspects and the things that make them unique, not simply because they are old and need lots of TLC. We have lived in several old houses, and have fought with knob and tube wiring and lead pipes, crumbling walls and leaking basements. We wanted the charm without the maintenance. We made two exterior deviations from the typical "Old House" construction practices on our Victorian. Our windows are “Marvin” brand, double-insulated, double-hung, with enamel-coated aluminum cladding. And our decking material is composite with an oil-based paint covering, indistinguishable from wood. These are both deviations from the original choice of wood, as it would have been in 1885, but they are also updates that would be present on a restored Victorian. Our "out-in-the -country" location makes these updates very welcome, as the wind and weather take a toll on windows and porches.

  On the interior, we chose to place both furnaces (all-electric, 16-SEER high-efficiency heat pumps) in the basement. Conventional building practices for a house this size would generally call for the second heat pump to be installed in the attic. With an attic-mounted second story HVAC system, the heat ducts would have run through the attic coming down into the rooms from the ceilings. Victorians did not do this. Actually, the original house design had six fireplaces; so there would not have been any ducts at all. However, since we were not about to do without central air, we chose to follow early building practices and have the supply registers in the floor on both the first and second floors, and to mount the return-air ducts high up on the walls. All of the floor registers (from Reggio Register) are Victorian-style cast iron, and the wall-mounted versions are painted, cast aluminum.