ANTIQUE ELEGANCE The interior decorations and wallpaper correspond to the Scholls’ goal for their home: restore to original condition and atmosphere.
“I was in charge of demolition, and Bill did the finish work,” Nanc reports. “We did not borrow a dime. If we couldn’t pay for it, we did not do it. And we tried to do one room at a time.” Restoration included replacing all of the ceilings on the first floor, rewiring the entire house, reinforcing ceilings, gutting the kitchen, refinishing floors and preserving plaster walls. An Amish carpenter in Ohio recreated damaged and missing spindles for the front and back porches. Donald Haynes, a friend and certified electrician in Junction City, provided invaluable expertise and labor during much of the restoration process. And the couple took well-meaning advice to heart. “Our Realtor advised us not to do our
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Sunflower living summer 2013
kitchen first, after observing that many people start with their kitchens and end up doing them over at the end of the renovation process. It took us 15 years before the kitchen was finished; deciding how to restore it, make it usable, and have it look like it did when the house was built. The cabinets are recreations, but they reflect what might have been in place when the house was new,” Nanc explains, as she proudly points out features in the kitchen including the back stairway, the butler’s pantry and an original heat register. Another unique feature of the house is the hand-blown Venetian glass chandelier hanging over the dining room table. It is one of 11 chandeliers purchased and shipped from Murano, Italy, to C.L. Brown, an early Abilene entrepreneur and philanthropist.
Brown gifted it to his electrician, who gave it to his son, Howard Stone—also an electrician. Howard, who worked alongside Bill and Nanc in their restoration process, presented the chandelier to them as a gift to hang in a place of honor in their home. The couple have since located a business in Long Island, New York, that sells vintage Venetian art glass, where they have acquired nearly all of the pieces that were missing or broken. Tears well up in Nanc’s eyes as she relays how touched she and Bill were at Howard’s gesture of kindness in giving them such a beautiful historical artifact. In 2012, the home’s most recent largescale project was completed. Bill had long admired the vintage wall paper hung in the Lebold Mansion by restoration experts Gary Yuschalk and Larkin Mayo