Inside the restoration of a historic Elkhart home

ELKHART, Ind. (AP) - Walk down Strong Avenue in Elkhart and it's hard to miss the beautiful Strong-Conn mansion.

The historic fixture built in 1884 has been home to Samuel Strong and later C.G. Conn. It was Conn who commissioned architect A.H. Ellwood, after he bought the mansion in 1890, to update it from its Italianate origins to its current Neoclassical design with large 26-foot fluted columns, hand-turned balustrade and a two-story wrap-around porch.

"We use to live on Riverside Drive and when we took walks we would always admire this house," current owner Tim Shelly told The Elkhart Truth (http://bit.ly/1b7CqeA).

In 1992, he and his wife, Meg, turned their dream of owning the home into a reality.

The first thing you notice walking into the entrance on the east side of the house is a narrow walnut staircase that spirals to the second floor.

Light streams in from tall, narrow windows onto a small space under the stairs with a bench seat. Bright-colored paper in purples, greens, pinks and golds decorate the walls and ceilings of the parlor and library on either side of the foyer. It's a drastic difference from the dark burgundy that had covered the rooms when they moved in.

"There was a lot of old paper on the walls, old carpets," Shelly said. "The first year here was a lot of cleaning things up." The couple worked on the upstairs bedrooms first so they could move in with their two sons, 4-year-old Michael and 9-month-old Andrew.

Then the real work began.

Five of the 4-foot capitals above the columns were missing when they moved in and had to be replaced. A new roof was put on. Several trees were removed from the surrounding yard. One side of the large house needed some foundation work.

And that was just the outside.

"It took about 2ˆ½ years to strip the woodwork," Meg Shelly said. The teacher at Concord High School remembers spending her time after school and during the summers on the project.

Another big task was replacing the wallpaper. The pair ordered hand-printed period papers from Bradbury & Bradbury and commissioned Haselrick & Cross Inc. in Elkhart to install the designs.

In the carpeted parlor, an intricate fireplace sits in one corner surrounded by painted ceramic tiles. Both the fireplace and mirror above it are original to the home. Except for one small chair in the library and a desk in an upstairs guest room, all of the furniture is new.

Also new are the cabinets and appliances in the kitchen. It and the parlor are two of Meg's favorite rooms in the house. One exciting discovery in the kitchen was the oak-wood floor buried underneath layers of linoleum and thick plywood panels.

But the small area also posed some challenges for Meg, who enjoys baking and having space to cook. Another problem was the second stairwell on the opposite side of one wall. "Everything on that side had to be fairly shallow, there really wasn't a lot of room."

They didn't want to change the layout. Instead, they found an Amish carpenter to build a hidden 6-foot-long table with wooden leaves that extended out from a slender cabinet drawer. For the shallow wall, they scoured the internet and found a refrigerator small enough to fit.

Adapting to the lack of air conditioning wasn't hard. Heaters and sunlight keep most of the rooms warm in the winter. High ceilings and doorways topped with transoms keep the house cool except for the three hottest weeks of summer. "That's when we plug in the fans on either side of our bed and wait it out," Meg said, laughing.

Tim compares the home to a child. "It's always there and always needs attention," he said.

After 15 years of attention, the C.G. Conn Mansion was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2007. While it was a great moment for the Shellys, the work continues.

"It's a great neighborhood, great people and it feels good to be able to be here and fix it up."

The third floor of the mansion has yet to be touched. The space is one large room with a hardwood floor and hip-level lights around the sides. "I think they intended it to be a ballroom," Meg said. "I'd like to do that at some point, but it's going to be expensive."

Mixed in with the years of work put into the historic mansion are family memories of their own. Soccer trophies, basketball posters and college pennants decorate the two rooms upstairs where Tim and Meg's sons grew up.

While the Shellys worked from room to room, Michael and Andrew spent afternoons playing soccer in the yard with their friends or scouring for buried treasure and secret tunnels. "They'd occasionally find a glass bottle or a spoon and come running back, 'oh wow look at this, look at what we found,'" Meg said.

Upstairs, the ceiling of the boys' bathroom bubbles and peels from two decades of hot showers and no fans. Canvassing and painting the ceiling is one of the things on the list of finished projects that, after 22 years, need a little touch-up.

It can be exhausting work at times, but more than anything a fulfilling experience for the couple.

"We're very fortunate, Tim said. "It's a great neighborhood, great people and it feels good to be able to be here and fix it up."

It's something they plan to continue, room by room, for however long it takes.

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Source: The Elkhart Truth, http://bit.ly/1b7CqeA

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Information from: The Elkhart Truth, http://www.elkharttruth.com