“You gotta love old houses to live in one,” says master stonemason Mike Ondrick. “If you keep it anywhere near correct [to its era], you’re going to live with cold walls and damp in the basement sometimes.”
Ondrick should know: He’s a founder and project manager for Dominion Traditional Building Group, which specializes in restoring historic structures using historic methods. He’s currently working on a mid-19th century house in Charlottesville’s North Downtown neighborhood—because the home’s owners love old houses.
“We bought this house because no one had screwed it up yet,” says the current owner, who purchased the Civil War-era residence in 2018. The family has been living there ever since—through the pandemic, and in the midst of replacing the roof, fixing gutters, and restoring windows. Because the house is part of a designated Historic District, any work to preserve or upgrade the building has to be approved.
After the roof, the owners tackled the four-room basement, which had been ignored for decades. The previous owner had started to create an apartment there—pouring a concrete floor, sealing the walls, putting up drywall, and hanging electrical wiring from the ceiling—but the space was still a dank, dark disaster. The current owners, seeing the value of a basement apartment, resolved to do it right.
The wiring, heating and water pipes (the house’s original water system was gravity-run) were concealed in the walls and ceiling. Most of the window openings had been covered up with plexiglas or plywood; the original windows were removed, cleaned, and repainted, then reassembled and reinstalled. The bricked-up fireplaces were re-opened and reconstructed. All the wall sealant was removed so the brick could be cleaned, prepared for new mortar, and repointed.
Most of the contractors he asked for estimates kept talking about sealant and drywall, the owner says. “Dominion came in and said, ‘We can fix this basement.’ And they did.”
The first rule in working on historic masonry, says Ondrick (who has worked on more than 1,800 historic buildings in his 30-year career) is “don’t introduce any modern materials. Modern cement mortar is too strong—it sets up too quick, it won’t let the water out of the brick [to bond with the mortar].” And sealant? “You don’t want to seal your structure up—these old buildings need to breathe.” Ondrick mixes mortar specific to each particular building, using only lime and sand.
Ondrick is just one of the “old house-lovers” who has put his skills into this restoration. “One of the best things about doing this house,” says the owner, “has been the people you meet.”
To re-create the basement fireplaces’ wooden mantels, Bruce Courson—who with his wife Virginia Robinson owns Blue Ox Custom Builders in Mineral—copied the one remaining original in the first-floor parlor. Blue Ox also made the custom cupboards and cabinets in the basement stair hall, as well as the replica moldings and baseboards. (Bruce happens to be the brother of Glen Courson, a plasterer on Dominion’s crew.)
The search for period hardware led to Ed Donaldson—“the king of American locks,” the owner calls him—who restored 25 rim locks throughout the house and supplied four restored 1850s locks to replace ones that were missing.
Restoring the basement windows—and all the others, 60 in total—was handled by Justin Pincham, owner of Halcyon Contractors; he invented a steam-box, which made it possible to remove the lead paint safely and salvage the remaining original glass. The disassembled windows and glass were shipped to Shenandoah Restoration in Quicksburg, where owner Mike Watkinson and his team reglazed every sash with linseed putty, primed, and painted them.
“You do feel like they are coming in and taking up where the workmen from 1861 left off,” the owner says. Admittedly, restoring the house has taken over their lives—and they still haven’t started on the first and second floors. But that’s what happens when you love old houses.