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From the ground up: City's newest old treasure getting restored to its 1913 glory

Home renovations were popular among Albertans this summer, but one Edmonton couple took their house project to a new level.

Two years ago, Alyssa Chappell and Adrian Rennie bought a charming turn-of-the-century farmhouse on a corner lot in the Mill Creek neighbourhood.

On Monday, the 1913 house known as the Abram Residence was designated as a Municipal Historic Resource, meaning it has been recognized as an important piece of Edmonton's history while also giving Chappell and Rennie a grant of almost $75,000 to help with its preservation and restoration.

"Like anyone says with an old house, we'll just start with paint and see where it goes," Chappell told CBC's Radio Active on Monday. "But it definitely was a bit of a can of worms when we started doing some demolition within the home."

And that's where the new partnership with the city will make all the difference, the couple said.

Submitted by Alyssa Chappell
Submitted by Alyssa Chappell

According to David Johnston, a senior heritage planner with the city, the Abram Residence is an example of Foursquare design, which was very popular in Edmonton in the 1910s and 1920s.

"It looks like a smaller farmhouse property on a corner lot so it has a nice profile on the streets in the area," he said about the Mill Creek building.

The layout of a typical Foursquare house was, as the name suggests, a square footprint with equally divided interior spaces. The simple, budget-conscious design — especially in comparison to earlier Victorian homes — "provided practical and comfortable living for modest middle-class families in the region," according to a city news release.

"There's not as many around today," Johnston said about Foursquare homes, "and [the Abram Residence is] a little bit of a rare example in that part of the city."

As part of the application process to get historic status, Chappell and Rennie dug into the history of its occupants.

The first owners were Benjamin Abram, a real estate broker who later went to work for Account Metals, and his wife Jessie Matilda. They had the house built in 1913 and lived in it until 1919.

The second owner was a British veteran who moved to Edmonton following the First World War.

Frank Nurding would have been one of the early employees at the Pavey Candy Company, Edmonton's first large-scale candy maker which specialized in treats like hard candy butterscotch, horehound twists and lemon slices.

Submitted by Alyssa Chappell
Submitted by Alyssa Chappell

The couple also had to get to the bottom of some major renovations which thus far have included stripping the vinyl siding that covered the original cedar, new windows, upgraded electrical and plumbing, and a new foundation that required lifting the house this summer, Rennie said.

"We've learned pretty quickly that you've got to work from the ground up, so I've had to redo some things," Rennie told Radio Active.

"The big push right now is to get the thing heated. We have some old cast-iron radiators that we got refinished so we're going to get those operational," he added.

Chappell said she'd always been drawn to older homes. The Abram Residence's boasted a claw-foot tub (which "sealed the deal" for her), an enclosed front porch and its location near the ravine and proximity to other old homes.

"We weren't prepared for the scope [of renovations] but we are happy that it's gone this way," she said.

"It makes the work all the more worth it since we know it's going to be here to stay for others to enjoy for years to come."