A journal about life in Wisconsin, decorating, and restoring an 1893 Queen Anne Victorian built by Civil War veteran John Olson Wrolstad and his wife Mathea. Read on to see lots of old photographs, and read stories of the second owners Thomas and Maren Quien, and their children who filled the house with memories for 90 years. Very First Photo I Took of the House Feb 18, 2007 - 30 minutes after we bought the house.
We ate our first meal in the house October 2007. My husband fired up the old wood cook stove. I remember it well. I was up on the scaffold in the dining room. I smiled because I could smell the woodcook stove and if you love the smell of a fireplace on a cold day, you know that cozy and enjoyable odor. Until this time, I only smelled a musty house vaccant since the mid 1970s and sorely needing our help.
As I applied latex primer to newly restored plaster walls, suddenly I smelled Virginia ham! Oh my. It smelled so good, and I called out to my husband to tell him how wonderful the ham smelled. He laughed and said, what you are smelling is a pot of Bush's bean and weinners I'm cooking on the cook stove. Nonetheless, it smelled like ham to me! What a wonderful lunch.
At this moment (one year later October 2008) I sit at my computer typing this, and I look through the window sheers to see the roofline and the chimney of the summer kitchen with its faint swirls of smoke, and of course inside the house there's no mistaking the smell of the wood fire from the 1915 South Bend Malleable wood cook stove. I love living here.
