Editor’s Note: This is the fourth installment in a series focusing on old, historical houses in and around the Charleston area. The series will feature more houses in the coming weeks.

Layers of wallpaper serve as layers of history to tell the tale of an old house just off the Square in Charleston.

Kit Morice, curator of education at the Tarble Arts Center and a member of the Charleston Historic Preservation Commission, lives in a house just off the Square at 400 Jackson Ave. that is more than 100 years old.

“The house was built in 1902 by a man named George Muchmore,” Morice said. “He worked on a number of buildings and houses around town.”

Morice said her home is a turn-of-the-century house with some elements from the Queen Anne style such as the wrap-around porch and a staircase with turned spindles, but it also has elements of a Colonial Revival style home.

“Colonial Revival elements of this house include the corner pilasters and the porch with pediments and columns,” she said. “It’s all very classical.”

Charles and Helen Harr were the originals owners of the home and lived in it with their twin daughters, who continued to live in the house when their parents died.

“After that, the house went through many different owners,” Morice said. “A couple in the 1950s and ‘60s used the home as a boarding house and turned the upstairs into a duplex.”

The house, though seemingly quite large because of the wrap-around porch, has about 1,500 square feet of living space on the first and second floors.

Morice said after the house was used as a boarding house, it was mainly a single-family home.

She and her husband bought the house in 2000, and Morice said they had to do a lot of work on it to keep it intact and maintain its historic integrity.

“While this house had a lot of deferred maintenance, it also meant a lot of the aspects of it hadn’t been changed,” she said. “I have original hardwood floors, original woodwork throughout, pocket doors, the fireplace and the staircase.”

Morice said she was originally drawn to the house because of how intact it still was to begin with.

“I love the big windows and all the woodwork,” she said. “We have hot water radiator heat, which is nice because it doesn’t dry out the air.”

Working to maintain the historic aspect of the house while doing the required maintenance can be tricky, but Morice said it is worth it.

A foundation wall collapsed in 2008, and Morice salvaged brick from a house built by the same builder to restore it.

“I got 600 bricks for free, but I had to haul all of them and chisel the mortar off one by one in my side yard,” she said. “It was such a project, but it saved me a ton of money.”

An important aspect of restoring old houses is doing research, Morice said.

While contractors know their trade, many are not versed in the materials used in restoring and rehabilitating old houses, she said.

“These houses require different things than newer houses,” she said. “Turn-of-the-20th-century brick is different from modern-day brick.”

Morice said she makes efforts constantly to preserve the integrity of her home.

Her current project is her kitchen, where she has taken a wall out.

“It’s the biggest thing I’ve done to the house, as far as alterations,” she said. “They always say kitchens and bathrooms are two things you pretty much have to update.”

The kitchen has seven different kinds of cabinetry, where she keeps everything from dishes to cookbooks.

Morice’s home is decorated with all different kinds of cultural art because she works at the Tarble Arts Center and has always enjoyed unique kinds of art, including Mexican and Haitian pieces.

“I’ve always been interested in Mexican art, especially Day of the Dead, since the early ‘90s,” she said. “I also saw a Haitian exhibition at the Field Museum in Chicago, and I was just blown away.”

Along with decorating her home with cultural art, Morice has worked to keep up the appearance of the house without damaging the historical value.

Much of the work she has done is cosmetic and includes painting woodwork and stripping carpet and wallpaper.

“I’ve stripped an absolute ton of wallpaper off these walls,” she said. “In some places, there are four or five layers.”

Morice describes the process as an “archaeological dig” through the history of the house.

She said she has left some of the wallpaper in the closets because it is so unique and shows different time periods the house has been through.

Though not all the furnishings of the house are original, Morice said she is a fan of reusing things.

The window trim in the utility room next to the kitchen is the trim from the door that was taken down when Morice took out the wall.

Her flooring is salvaged 100-year-old pine from a man in Champaign.

Morice said the flooring is perfect for her home.

“A lot of contractors don’t want to work with salvaged materials,” she said. “They’d rather start new. But I got lucky because my contractor worked with me to reuse and recycle things.”

The exterior of Morice’s house features columns and dentils, teeth-like features on the trim.

She met with a painter last week to see about getting the exterior repainted.

“You just kind of pick a project a year and revolve around that,” she said. “When you get done, you’re ready to start the next round.”

Morice said she worries about people being “turned off” by old houses because of the amount of work that often needs to be put into them.

“Knowing the history of the place and everything it’s been through is so important,” she said. “This block without this house just wouldn’t have the same feel or the same character.”

Morice said though her house has been a lot of work, she knows everything she has done has been worth it.

“This is downtown Charleston, the old part of town,” she said. “I knew I was going to put a lot of work (into the house), but in the end, I know I have something unique.”

Robyn Dexter can be reached at 581-2812 or redexter@eiu.edu.