Living in the past

Fans of old houses share fondness for unique spaces

Advance notice of a powerfully bad smell would keep most people from touring a house for sale, but not Lucy Breyer and Ben Kroup. Forty years ago, the couple were new in their state jobs at Peebles Island State Park and looking for a house to buy. They knew and admired the Greek Revival at 51 Second Street in Waterford. A friend who looked at it told them about the smell. There were dozens of broken windowpanes and a leaking roof, too.

They bought it anyway, for $20,000, and, Kroup says, “learned the hard way how to fix up an old house.”

Owning a historic home is an opportunity to steward a structure that has been home to generations of people. But it is no easy task to maintain an old home. The Capital Region has some of the oldest architecture in the country, with private homes that date to the 17th century. They are the houses we drive by and admire and preservation groups work to save, but what is it like to live in one?

Breyer and Kroup started renovations on 51 Second St. by salvaging old house parts, some that were already on the burn pile. Next, they sanded the f loors to bring back the luster.

For a while, they lived in two rooms, while their oldest son, born shortly after the family moved into the house, learned to crawl in the only room with carpeting — the rest of the f loors were a mess.

The house once belonged to a wealthy family, the Ormsbys, who owned a mill in Waterford. It had good bones and lovely features under the grime: parquet f loors, numerous built-ins, leaded glass, beautiful tile in an upstairs bathroom, tin ceilings, unique molding and a marble fireplace.

Breyer and Kroup put a lot of effort into their house, work that continues with periodic painting of the exterior and occasionally refreshing the storm windows. They replaced the terne plate roof with copper. They also raised three children in the house; Kroup is now retired and spends his days working through a punch list of maintenance projects. Currently, he’s chipping paint off the exterior.

In 2013, Kroup and Breyer began working on the house behind theirs, which they bought out of foreclosure in the early 2000s.

“Basically Federal,” Kroup said, it wasn’t built on the location it now stands. Kroup and his son, Adam, who

John Carl D’annibale / Times Union Ben Kroup and Lucy Breyer bought their house on Second Street in Waterford nearly 40 years ago, and have spent much time bringing it back from ruin.