From our interview with Laura and Mike Brosius

Laura: We met in Denver and got married in 1984. Later that year, we moved to Los Angeles to work for Target. Then Mike began working at Costco, and I became the apparel production manager for the couture clothing designer Marian Clayden, where I worked for nearly a decade.

Mike: I worked for Costco for almost 37 years until I retired about two years ago.

Laura: Our family has lived in many cities across the United States, as well as in Seoul. When we were living in Portland, Oregon, we would drive along the Oregon Coast and go through Astoria. We’d look at the Victorian houses and think about moving here someday. Throughout the years, we would return to Astoria and think, “This is so cool.”

In 2011, we started looking for our retirement home. We knew we wanted a fixer-upper in Astoria. We had restored four other homes in other cities, but no Victorians. We looked at other homes in the area, but nothing came close to this house, especially for Mike.

Laura: In a town of 10,000 people, we found talented craftspeople and individuals who all rose to the occasion and helped us through this project over the years.

Mike: Jason Banks, who made our kitchen and bathroom cabinets and bookcases, also made replicas for the small amount of exterior woodwork that was damaged or had dry rot. The siding is actually fir floorboards. Our general contractors, Ben Crockett and Drew Olson, searched for old-growth fir to match it.

Laura: The previous owner left us a photograph showing the original owners in the main parlor, and it gave us clues to a few things. For example, our attic had piles of ornate molding, dirty and in pieces. Our library had molding installed for a picture rail, but the photo showed the molding also was used in the dining room and main parlor.

We had rosette blocks in the trim of our interior doors and windows, but the photo showed they were topped with battlement molding, like our library and entry doors still had. We figured out someone had chopped off the merlons in every other room. Our contractor cut pieces from a dowel, and we put them all back.

The dining room has Lincrusta wainscoting; Mike believes it was added in the early 1900s. Painter and finishes expert Christy Mather patched the wall covering where it had been damaged and re-created the pattern through an embossing technique. Joanne Lumpkin Brown, an artist who used to work on movie and TV sets until she retired to Astoria, matched the plaster coloring to all the finishes.

Throughout our house, we have fir trim and doors that use wood graining, where faux grain is painted on top of primed and painted surfaces.

Mike: Joanne and her daughter, Faith Brown, redid the wood graining on 29 doors, six pocket doors, and 31 trimmed windows. In areas where the original graining was intact but yellowed, Joanne would colorize it and went over it with a glaze to match the new graining.

Laura: Joanne also re-created a wood-grained swan detail that was original to the house and appears only once, in the midrail of the door between the dining room and kitchen.

Mike: In the formal entry, first-floor hallway, main staircase, and formal second-floor areas, Joanne and Faith also re-created the trompe l’oeil wood-panel wainscoting on the plaster walls. The design matches the original trompe l’oeil wainscoting, some of which had been wallpapered over. Altogether, Joanne and Faith painted 125 linear feet of faux paneling. We managed to save one of the original panels, near our front entrance.

Mike: In the library, I spent around a month stripping about six layers of paper from the walls and ceiling. When I took off the picture rail molding to clean it, I found remnants of a wallpaper frieze. Unfortunately, the paper had a lot of damage, both from water and scraping; it was completely gone on the south wall. Joanne patched and colorized it, and freestyle-painted the frieze back onto the wall to match.

She also lightly touched up the original ceiling wallpaper because it was faded and damaged. A wallpaper expert from Portland, Bo Sullivan, came out to document it; he had never seen such patterns before.

Laura: While demolishing the kitchen corner behind the former stove, we found a piece of the original linoleum flooring. We used stencils and stickers again to re-create the pattern on the fir floorboards. We first masked off and painted the green layer, then masked it again and painted the gold layer. Then we applied stickers to paint about 6,000 dark green squares, before finishing it up with two clear coats. This took about five weeks.

Mike: We also found original stained-fir wainscoting in that kitchen corner. So in the back servant staircase and second-floor area, Joanne painted 75 linear feet of trompe l’oeil boards on the plaster walls to match. Nobody can believe the wood isn’t real.

For anyone interested in restoring their period home, choose your contractors wisely. Wait for the right people rather than jumping in, and make sure their goals match your goals.