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TOP LEFT: A freestanding summer kitchen on the Nitchers’ property was once used for seasonal cooking by the original owners of the home, but it is now used as storage. TOP RIGHT: This Dresden porcelain-style chandelier in the Nitchers’ dining room is only one of several pieces they’ve found at antique stores and estate sales. MIDDLE: Natural sunlight pours through Janae Fuller’s bedroom window on a hot July afternoon. Fuller renovated the windows of her house shortly after moving there in 1999. BOTTOM LEFT: One can find Dresden porcelain figurines in multiple rooms in the Nitcher home. Greg and Laura continue to search antique stores, flea markets and estate sales for just the right additions to their collection. BOTTOM RIGHT: Janae Fuller says her favorite room in her house is her bath- room, located on the first floor. The bathroom includes a painted tin ceiling and renovated windows.
The Nitcher home includes porches on both stories of the house, as well as a lavish garden in the backyard.
Nitcher family (712 Highland Ave.). Also a brick Greek Revival-style house, the elegant Antebellum home overlooks the Missouri River and includes two-story porches. Like Fuller, Greg and Laura Nitcher have spent a long time restoring house with care- ful attention paid to its original look. Outside, the porch of the house is being restored, and new, white columns will be ar- riving in time for the tour. Inside, Laura says, wooden kitchen cabinets are being installed, as well as a coffee bar. “We’ll have pantry closets, and the doors will match the kitchen,” she notes. “Our goal is to have it done by the time of the homes tour.” Greg and Laura, who bought the house without ever setting foot inside of it, moved to Lexington from Olathe, Kansas, last May, and say they were fortunate enough to be able to purchase several pieces of original furniture from the previous owners. Those pieces include two massive wooden cabinets, measuring 12 feet tall and festooned with ornate decoration – one in the kitchen, and another in the parlor, which is decorated a brighter blue and yellow. “I wanted the colors in this room to be brighter because it was originally so dark,” Laura explains. “We were hoping that (cabi-
“That’s just something you learn,” she says. “This was a labor of love.” Inside, Fuller’s mixture of both original and restored effects has been executed with enough care that one would be hard-pressed to discern where the one ends and the other begins. “The stairs were originally carpeted, so I took that out to expose the original wood,” she notes, pointing to the main staircase. Nearly every room in the house features at least one exposed, original brick wall as well. Fuller’s kitchen originally was the house’s porch, a fact evidenced just by examining the wooden floors. “You can tell it used to be the porch because there’s a little rise in the floor,” she explains. “It was cut into two rooms, so we stripped it and started over again. The cabi- netry was all salvaged, and the trim on the all of the doors was salvaged.” Fuller, who has a friend who does demoli- tion and salvage work, was integral to the restoration and decoration of her home – and made sure everything would be cost- effective, too. “It took on its own life,” she laughs. “I re- ally didn’t have to buy very much.” Down the street from Fuller lives the
Both owners of the homes that will be new to the tour say the key to maintaining the homes’ historical integrity, appearance and feel is in salvaging discarded materials, as well as attempting to match paint colors, woods, and furnishings as closely to the originals as possible. Janae Fuller, 403 Highland Ave., is one resi- dent new to the tour this year. Her off-white, one-and-a-half-story home, built in 1853, em- ploys the Greek Revival style of architecture, and is flanked by a log cabin on its left side. “I had to gut (the house) and start from scratch,” Fuller says of restoring the home, occupied by a German family and their descendants throughout its history. “I bought the house in ’99 and moved in last year. I did some chip work on the paint color, and it’s called ‘tea garden.’ I got as close to the origi- nal as I could. It’s kind of an off-white – I think (the original owners) took white paint and mixed linseed oil into it, and that’s how it became off-white.” Fuller says a big part of her initial work on the home’s exterior involved trying to extract vines that had grown around the building – a gentle process, done with the care needed to keep the original exterior intact.
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