$1.75 million Jack Keeping remembers a beautiful Victorian house with a stone wall up the street from where he attended high school in Stouffville. But it faded into his memory until many years later when he looked to his old hometown for a place to raise his family.
“Wow! This is nice,” he recalls thinking seven years ago when he set foot inside the yellow brick home and caught sight of the tall arched windows and 10-foot ceilings outlined with crown moulding. The historic residence he once admired in passing is now a spacious and comfortable home for Keeping, his wife, four-year-old son, toddler daughter and Labradoodle, Teddy. But it was only recently that they learned some of its history from a stranger.
The woman was a previous owner who’d seen the sale sign and dropped by to offer them her 1983 relief wood carving of the house. She’d lived there with her husband until the mid-1980s and talked about all the improvements they’d made. Of particular interest was the wall in front which they built by carting wheelbarrow-fulls of stones from an old barn foundation behind the house.
The visitor also described how they refinished the original woodwork inside, opened up and restored the closed-off entryway, and built an addition at the back of the house. A stained-glass window above the French doors to the living room was the woman’s first creation trying a new hobby, according to Keeping. “She was just learning and having fun,” he says, describing the colourful .
