family home preservation projects work in progress

House Excavations Continue

It has been too long since I’ve blogged. That’s what moving to a new home after 30 years will cause – upending-the-blog chaos. Hubby and I are in our new home, still working on getting settled. You know what? It feels an awful lot like the months we spent getting our old house ready to sell. That means I can continue using the image tag “House Excavations” at the top of this post for a…

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family home preservation process projects

That’s a Wrap on Home Renovations

Hubby and I have had a crazy-busy couple of months with getting the house ready to sell. So busy, in fact, that I haven’t had any time to blog. We’ve finally wrapped up all of our home renovations and are in the selling part of the process. I wanted to write a final post highlighting a few of the more interesting projects we finished. During September and October, we painted, and painted some more, and…

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history pragmatic historian preservation

In Memory of Denis P. Gardner

Denis P. Gardner was Minnesota’s National Register Historian. It was a role that was perfect for him because he was so passionate and particular about documenting Minnesota’s historic places. I had the honor of getting to know Denis by serving on the State Review Board, which reviews nominations of Minnesota properties to the National Register of Historic Places. The State Review Board and National Register Historian fall under the auspices of the State Historic Preservation…

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family history observations pragmatic historian preservation

The Quirks of Our House

As I sift through and pack things in our home for our eventual move, I’m trying to look at the house from the perspective of new owners. We’ve made a great many improvements to the place since we moved in roughly 29 years ago. We gutted, insulated, rewired, and sheetrocked most of the old part of the house, which was built in 1894. We also removed the rotted front porch (trust me when I tell…

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history law museums pragmatic historian preservation

Taking History Seriously

I am irritated. I read a story on NPR News about a Pennsylvania guy who stole artifacts, mostly firearms, from about a dozen museums in the 1960s and ’70s. He got caught in 2018 after trying to sell one of the guns. His sentence? One day. One. Day. I am irritated because this sentence shows how unseriously the courts, and by extension, society in general, take thefts from museums. Oh, well, it’s just an artifact,…

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