walrus, I've cucessfully used cedar for many years and find it the best and probably the most expensive. I oil base prime the pieces before installation on all sides, including edges. Then I assemble them in place. Yes you can wrap the top with some horizontal detail trim but you probably won't find it in cedar. You'll have to use pine here. A gap at the bottom of the column is always a good idea as it helps keep the rain water from soaking into the wood. After completion I put two coats of acrylic latex top coat either in low lustre or satim finish. To close the gap on the bottom of the post you can always add some kind of complimenting base molding. Good Luck, The PorchGuy Here is a link that might be useful: My Album

Fixation seems like a weird way to describe my determination that something around 3000 square foot is the minimum I believe would provide for my family's needs AND my realization that building larger would cost more. What lazy_gardens is saying not that you should get a house BIGGER, but that you might very well be able to get a SMALLER house that will more than meet all your needs. It's not the square footage of a house that determines whether a house works well for a family but how it's laid out. The house I raised my 2 children in was 3200+ square feet, not including the basement. However the house was so poorly laid out for a family we probably didn't use half the house. The house was 4 bedrooms, living room, dining room, sun room, kitchen, den, playroom, and a room we used as storage (and that room was larger than most people's dining rooms) We spent most of the time in the family room, the kitchen and the bedrooms. When the kids had friends they would then use the sun room to visit. Occasionally we'd use the living room and 2x a year during holidays we'd use the dining room. My ex used the basement as his office. Which proves we didn't need 3200 square feet but needed less space laid out better for how we lived at the time.

Just keep it white...

I recently went through this with my own house (built in 1892 in a large city), and it looks very similar to yours. And given my related education, I went down quite the research hole! First, the years given for eras of architecture, art, and design histories are the popular years — so it is possible for a person to build a Victorian house after it fell out of popularity, especially considering these particular architecture eras (Victorian, Edwardian, etc.) are based on the years of queens and kings (i.e., Queen Victoria‘s reign was 1837 to 1901). But I think there is definitely something to you finding the earlier record and the information about the fire. In my city, they started classification at the year 1900, so homeowners with the year 1900 have to take additional steps to dig deeper for the exact year — I got lucky and found my house with the label “being built” on an 1892 map. Secondly, the use of “folk” and “farm” are generalized terms. The style of your house is Victorian Carpenter Gothic — this is a specific type of the Gothic revival period that took place during the Victorian era. If it would’ve been built in a rural/farming area, then it would more so be referred to as folk or farm, or even Rural Gothic. The Carpenter Gothic house style was extremely popular throughout the US, as the invention of the scroll saw allowed basic carpenters to easily create ornate trim from wood or purchase it from mass-produced options. A general google search for Carpenter Gothic house will yield a ton of results from extremely ornate houses to simpler versions (like your house). I spent so much time looking at examples online to brainstorm the exterior rehab I’m doing, I finally checked out a book from my library called “Storybook Cottages: America’s Carpenter Gothic Style” by Gladys Montgomery, and it’s a great resource of photos and history — I highly recommend it! You can also buy it used on Amazon. And if you want to try and find your house on a map, one of the best sources are Sanborn maps; that’s where I found my house mapped. You can view a lot of these maps on the Library of Congress’s website, and then filter the results for your state, city, year, etc. The Sanborn Map Compamny was based out of New York, but they created maps all over the country specifically for fire insurance companies to use in assessing liability in urban areas — so the maps also include details concerning building materials, number of floors, etc.