Secrets Revealed: More Secrets

Sounds enticing, doesn’t it? Well, don’t get too excited. I wanted to comment on two of the comments I received on yesterday’s post entitled, Petch House Secrets Revealed!

First Burrito asked:

I wonder what the starbursts would look like up on the gables?

Well, Burrito, not only would they look good, but they should be up there. Gable decorations were a popular thing to have in this town at the time my house was built. Sure enough, when I removed the asbestos siding I found “witness lines” (old blemishes in the paint) of gable decorations that were brutally ripped off the house when the house was Eisenhowered.

It’s impossible to know exactly what was there because I’ve never been able to find any old pictures of the house. Grrrrr! I do know what size the decoration was, and based on similar houses, or houses built at the same time, it’s pretty easy to surmise what was there. Here are two local houses, with gable decorations, built about the same time as mine.

Not a big fan of the colors


Shhh. If you listen closely, you can hear this house begging for a decent paint job.


Both houses, while different in size and design, incorporate the sun bursts over the windows, just as mine, and both have a very similar gable decoration. I will be reproducing this on my house sooner, rather than later. The only reason it’s not up there now is because I wanted to paint first.


In another comment Hip from House in Progress wrote:

I love the sunbursts. If the builders had the extra trim in 1895, I firmly believe that they would have added them then.

You are very close to being right. There are two other houses in town that have a nearly identical front stained glass window as The Petch House. Both of these houses employ sunbursts around the stained glass window. This is in part why I added them to my house.





These two house are really the same house design. The blue one lose most of it’s second story and a lot of it’s gingerbread in a fire. The original design predates The Petch House by about 10 years. I once mentioned how my house lacks the copious amounts of gingerbread as other houses of a similar size in the area. I commented something to the effect that my house, while still very much a Victorian, is more forward looking than other, similar houses in the area. The two houses above are the ones I was thinking about when I wrote this. The top house, with all it’s original trim, has far more ornamentation than my house ever had.

They just did not screw around back then.