When Preservation Fights Back

I usually began a restoration with one simple goal. Preserve as much as I could.

Every old dollhouse carries evidence of the person who built it; the way they framed a wall, the trim they selected and the small decisions that quietly revealed how they imagined the finished home. Those choices deserve respect. Even when I plan to take a house in a completely different direction, I want to preserve the craftsmanship that came before me whenever I can.

That's how I approached the Lodge Harrison. The first real test came with the roof.

The original builder had hand-cut and individually installed every shingle. It must have taken hours of patient work, and I could see the care that had gone into it. I wanted very much to preserve it. But the closer I looked, the more complicated the decision became.

The shingles varied in thickness, depth, and spacing, giving the roof an uneven, almost thatched appearance. That alone might have been something I could have worked with. The bigger challenge was what held it all together.

Glue. It was everywhere.

Large globs had squeezed between the shingles. Bubbles had hardened across the surface. Lumps were visible beneath the rows, making the roof uneven in ways that couldn't be corrected without taking it apart. The glue had become part of the roof itself.

For several days, I worked carefully with a heat gun, removing each shingle one at a time and trying to preserve as much of the underlying structure as I could. At one point, a bead of hot glue found its way onto my hand, leaving me with a third-degree burn—a painful reminder that restoration wasn't always as gentle as it looked.

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By the time the roof was finished, I wasn't celebrating. I was grieving a little. Not because I doubted the decision, but because I knew how much time and care someone else had invested in creating it. I had already crossed the line I had been most reluctant to cross.

So, when I began uncovering the same glue beneath the trim, around the windows, and hidden behind nearly every exterior detail, I understood this wasn't going to be a simple cleanup. It was going to become a conversation about where preservation ended and restoration began.

At first, I kept telling myself I could work around it. I wanted to save as much of the original work as possible. But restoration had a way of asking difficult questions. At what point did preservation stop serving the house? How much of the original work should remain when the original work was preventing the house from becoming its best self? I still don't think there's a best answer. Every restoration asks something different. Some houses asked to be preserved almost exactly as they were. Others quietly invited a new chapter.

The Lodge Harrison asked me to make those decisions one small section at a time.

Some pieces were carefully cleaned and saved. Others had to be removed because there was simply no way to move forward without doing so. That wasn't always easy.

There were moments when I wondered whether I was changing too much. And there were moments when I realized I wasn't changing enough. Somewhere between those two extremes is where restoration lives—in understanding when to preserve and when to change.

The irony was that, despite all the frustration, this house taught me more than almost any other. It reminded me that honoring someone's work didn't always mean preserving every decision they made. Sometimes the greatest act of respect was allowing the best parts of their work to shine again.

The Lodge Harrison and I had that conversation all the way through the exterior work..

Some houses tell me exactly what they need. This one argued every step of the way. And maybe that's what good restoration was always meant to do. Not simply preserve the past. But thoughtfully decide what should be carried forward.