My comment is about the concrete. (It applies to pavers too). It is a mistake I made that would be too expensive now to rectify. There is an area of the backyard in which we had concrete installed. (nicely done, with red brick borders. More expensive than you'd expect, after all it is just concrete!) To cut down on future maintenance, we had the concrete poured right up to the property line/fence that separates the neighbor's yard from ours. The concrete professionals asked if we wanted to leave the ground along the fenceline uncovered by concrete in case we wanted to plant flowers/shrubs/small trees. We said no, we did not want the work of maintaining a planting area. We had the rest of the yard for gardening purposes. Well, later the neighbor moved out, the little house was sold and then demolished. The huge avacado tree in the neighbor's yard that screened his yard from our yard was removed. ALthough the empty lot has been vacant for 6 months, undoubtedly the new home will be larger - much larger- than the original home. So now I would give anything to have a planting area where I could grow some hedges or small trees to screen out the new home which will overlook our house and much of our yard. So while concrete is no-maintenance, leaving enough area for future planting would be wise. Plus concrete is HOT and not especially relaxing if you enjoy plants and nature. PLUS pets who regularily do their business on concrete can make your little yard smelly.

Can I get on the bandwagon, even though this thread is over a month old? ;-) What vernacular Michigan has is mostly probably shared with other Midwestern states - a hodge podge of styles that worked there way into the frontier, then got adapted. For whatever reason, the gothic style never really took hold. So mostly you get Greek Revival. It ticks the need for reasonably steep roof pitch to shed the snow, and could be built easily with whatever was available Locally, we have the Veneklasen brick houses. Western Michigan was settled by Dutch immigrants, who were used to building with brick. So the Veneklasen company supplied it, from a couple of local yards. Since the brick from the Gronigen yard was red, and that from the Zeeland yard was "white", they began to be used in decorative patterns. You'll see a lot of standard architectural styles (cross gable, Greek revival, four square) reimagined in Veneklasen brick: Something of a local treasure, there is an effort underway to preserve those that remain. Another that leaps to mind, is probably less a vernacular style than a... hmmm.... tourist attraction. The Earl Young houses (aka mushroom houses) in Charlevoix are their very own thing. Often admired but pretty much never duplicated. Earl Young was a student of FLW. He had his own ideas about incorporating natural forms, and so his homes usually don't have straight walls or anything approaching rectangular rooms. I'm given to understand that they're very expensive on the upkeep. Neat to look at, though, and the Harsha House museum can provide you with a walking tour brochure:

Pruitt-Igoe may have worked if it had been executed as originally intended. In my city, a high priced trio of concrete high rises built for slum clearance in the 1960s still thrives blocks away from an old trio of public housing high rises from the same era were partially imploded in the early 2000s. Actually they were able to maintain one or two of the highrises after rehabilitation and rethinking of the project, while most other clusters have been imploded. The construction methods of both were about the same. What happened to Pruitt-Igoe? 1) they did not budget for maintenance. Maintenance was almost non-existent. 2) they gave apartments to non-intact family units and female heads of households. One early family said that her parents were married and they divorced so they would be able to get an apartment in Pruitt Igoe rather than stay a family of 8 or so in a slum. 3) the fixtures and finishes were chosen with the assumption that the tenants were going to vandalize them. The lightbulbs were bare and in locked cages. The tenants could not change a bulb in the public spaces if they wanted to. One person said as kids they tried to figure out ways to break the bulbs (cold water thrown at them). 3) they kept white applicants out. they kept applicants at the higher end of the income pool out. they helped and encouraged white applicants to buy in suburban developments and helped them get mortgages. 4) as systems started failing due to lack of maintenance and vandalism, they moved people into better buildings and out of worse buildings. The worse buildings were taken over by squatters and drug dealsers. The police and fire department stopped answering calls to Pruitt Igoe. If Pruit Igoe had been properly maintained, managed and implemented as was originally proposed it may not have become such an abysmal failure. The other aspect of International Style living is that mostly-white occupants of similar high rises had cars and other places to go and their children had other options for recreation and went to better schools. They weren't trapped in their 20th floor unit.

This bounces light off the white ceiling and gives a more ambient light than pointing them down at the floor. It's indirect lighting and much kinder than cutting holes all over 150-200 year old intact ceilings. Aha. Thanks, pal, makes sense. I have been in any number of houses of people from this generation, either tread on lightly, like this one, when they moved in, or 1960s-70s era renovations (which may have been necessary in a shell). And the house looks exactly the same 40-50 years later when it gets put up for sale. I've seen a couple of these in the last year alone. I appreciate your local insights. Thank you. Such a very different approach to what you find nowadays. And given what you say is coming (sob...), it seems even more of a crime after previous owners opted for the treading lightly approach. On the other hand I am not sure that someone undertaking such a journey at that time would keep quiet about it, or be be able to do it privately. Journals and long letters were a compulsion and expectation then. Much like this era's social media : ) . Very much along the lines of "Pictures or it didn't happen". There's actually a book called "American Travellers Abroad: A Bibliography of Accounts Published Before 1900" by Harold Frederick Smith which runs to several hundred pages covering a little over 100 years. And there were American passports, from about 1775 onward (with a break for the years under the Articles of Confederation). Some of the earliest ones were designed by Ben Franklin and based on the French passport. And not only did the Dept of State take over the issuing in 1789, but various cities and states, and even notaries public, issued their own. But the main restrictions to free travel to Greece would have been more external -- Greece under the Ottomans and as part of the Empire, then the War of Independence, the Napoleonic Wars etc. James Biddle, Nick's great-great-grandson, was born at Andalusia and died there too. From his 2005 obit in the NY Times: James Biddle, a leader in preserving America's homes and landscapes of historic value, including Andalusia, his family's 19th-century estate near Philadelphia, died at home there yesterday. He was 75. He died in his sleep of natural causes, his family said. As president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, Mr. Biddle, known as Jimmy, defended architectural landmarks like Grand Central Terminal and the original exterior of the United States Capitol. Years earlier, he was instrumental in raising the money to save Olana, the Moorish manor perched above the Hudson River that was built by the artist Frederic Edwin Church. "We Americans must decide if we want to preserve what we have or if we just want to pave it over, high-rise it and factory it," he wrote in Travel Leisure magazine in 1972. In his 12 years at the National Trust, the organization reached beyond the East Coast to designate historic sites as far away as California, and it began awarding grants and loans to support neighborhood preservation projects. When he left in 1980, the trust's membership had grown to 150,000, from 13,000. Mr. Biddle was previously a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. There he expanded the American Wing's collection to include pieces from not only Colonial era but also from the 19th century on, acquiring elaborately carved furniture by John Henry Belter. There he expanded the American Wing's collection to include pieces from not only Colonial era but also from the 19th century on, acquiring elaborately carved furniture by John Henry Belter. "He had a great sense for domestic spaces," said Morrison H. Heckscher, chairman of the American Wing. "He had a tremendous sense of design, and he was particularly noted for the way he could put together a room." Mr. Biddle's expertise in historical furnishings was sought by first ladies Jacqueline Kennedy and Lady Bird Johnson, by President Richard M. Nixon in assembling a team to coordinate the country's bicentennial celebration, and by committees in charge of renovating governors' mansions. Enamored of the home, he often expressed his hope that some historical landmarks would remain occupied rather than simply becoming museums. He embraced that ideal by restoring and preserving the 100-acre estate acquired in 1814 by his great-great-grandfather, the financier Nicholas Biddle. Andalusia, which sits along the Delaware River, remains a 19th-century tribute to ancient Greek architecture and a repository of antique French, English and American furniture and draperies. A national historic landmark, it is open to the public by appointment. Mr. Biddle was born at Andalusia on July 8, 1929. He attended St. Paul's School in Concord, N.H., and graduated from Princeton, where he studied art and archaeology. He served in an intelligence unit of the Army during the Korean War. In 1955, he joined the Met as a curatorial assistant. He became associate curator of the American Wing in 1961 and curator in 1963. He left in 1967 to lead the National Trust until 1980, when he became a consultant to Sotheby Parke Bernet and chairman of the National Preservation Institute.