Casper Couple Giving 115-Year-Old Mercer House A Complete Makeover

An early 1900s Edwardian photo hiding in a closet isn’t the only surprise the Victorian-style Mercer house in Casper had for its new owners, a couple who fled Florida’s heat for the cooler mountain climate in Wyoming.

“I had just assumed that it was Mr. and Mrs. Mercer, because I had not seen a photo of them,” Chanelle Rodriguez told Cowboy State Daily. “But I had asked the (Mercer) family (descendants) about it, and they said, ‘No we don’t know them at all.’ So, there’s kind of like a grand mystery surrounding this portrait that I have of them.”

The photo has a publishing date of 1924 printed on it, though that doesn’t necessarily mean that’s the same year that the photo was taken.

“I looked up the company and apparently they had done door-to-door services for a long time,” Rodriguez said. “So if I had to take a wild guess, just between the type of photo that it is and the clothing, I would say the Edwardian age.”

Sometimes referred to as the Belle Époque, the Edwardian age begins with the death of Queen Victoria in 1901 and continues until the first World War in 1914. The style, however, persisted well after the age was over.

“It was a leisurely time when women wore picture hats and did not vote,” wrote American author Samuel Hynes of the time period. “When the rich were not ashamed to live conspicuously, and the sun really never set on the British flag.”

In America, newfound wealth, as well as fantastic cuisine, fashion, entertainment, and travel, occupied the time of a growing middle class. This is also when the Titanic set sail, the largest, most luxurious passenger ship of its day — a doomed ship of dreams.

The photo has Rodriguez intrigued, to say the least.

“I’m wondering if it’s the original owner, the architect and his wife, but I don’t know,” she said. “I wouldn’t even know where to even start (figuring that out).”

Such mysteries of the home’s history will have to wait for now. Rodriguez is focused on more pressing matters, like the restoration of this 1911 home.

“You’ve got to do everything in stride as you can,” she said. “Financially, these projects are big.”

The project she’s working on right now is replacing the floor, as the old one turned out to be too thin to refinish. It’s only a quarter-inch thick — too thin to bring in a belt sander.

“I thought I could go in and replace some of the white oak flooring and I had marked the parts that needed it,” she said. “But it turns out I don’t think they even make planks that small anymore, that thin.”

That means installing a whole, brand-new floor instead, a much more expensive option. She’s estimating the cost of that will be around $2,000 all told.

“I wanted to avoid that, because I want to keep as much of the original things as I can,” she said. “I’m no stranger to hard work and doing things like this, so I’m not doing it willy-nilly, and just making it a toss-up, but I’m trying to do things once the right way and have it be done.”

Rodriguez has a jewelry business on the side, which she’s hoping will help support the ongoing project.

It’s A Cute House But …

The Mercer home’s Victorian lines immediately appealed to Rodriguez when she saw it for the very first time.

“I was utterly blown away by it, just by all the character,” she said. “So I was like, ‘You know what, let me be realistic,’” she said. “‘An old home like that? I know it’s going to come with like a boatload of problems. And things are going to need updating.’”

So, she and her fiancé, Levi Douglas, decided to pass on the house.

“We did our due diligence, and we really did look around in the price range for where we were trying to budget,” Rodriguez said. “And I have to be quite frank with you. We walked into some of these places, turned on our heel, and turned right around. The price range that we were looking in, as you know, the housing market has gone up astronomically.”

Given the challenging nature of the real estate market, the couple realized that to get the kind of home they wanted, they were looking at a fixer-upper, and the best fixer-upper they’d looked at turned out to be the Victorian-style home they’d passed on.

“The thing I kept asking myself was why was it even in our price range or close to it,” Rodriguez said.

But the more she thought about that, the more she realized that the home was not set up for the typical buyer.

“It’s not really set up that it’s ideal for families,” she said. “My fiancé and I, we don’t have any children. But we do have very large American Akitas. So we finally made up our minds. This house was the one.”

Enter A Boatload of Problems, Stage Left

Rodriguez’ mother and her husband came to visit the couple for a few weeks not long after the purchase.

“There’s only one bathroom, and it is upstairs, right above my kitchen,” Rodriguez said. “And it had been maybe a day after they had left, when my fiancé woke me up and he said, ‘Honey, I need you to call the plumber. There’s a huge leak coming from the ceiling.’”

The plumber, when he arrived, had to cut a large hole in the ceiling underneath the problem area to figure out what was going on.

“As he’s cutting away, he starts pulling out plastic tarps and not, like insulation, not anything that really should even be there,” Rodriguez said. “It was plastic tarps, and then, eventually a Tupperware container that was fitted to a very poorly done DIY welding job to the bathtub.”

All of which suggests to Rodriguez that someone knew about this problem but failed to disclose it prior to the sale.

“Unfortunately, that’s shady,” she said. “And I was getting so much advice about going to a real estate attorney and doing XYZ.”

In that timeframe, Rodriguez also had larger issues going on in her life, though. Her dad had been diagnosed with stage four cancer, so there was no way she was diving into any “legal muck.”

“Thousands of dollars later, we fixed the plumbing issues,” she said. “And then I had to speed off to New Jersey for several months to go take care of my dad.”

For now, Rodriguez and her fiancé have decided to ignore the large square hole cut into their ceiling and focus on other, more pressing aspects of the restoration.

“It’s a cosmetic issue right now,” she said. “We’re going to need to gut that entire bathroom up there.”

She fears it’s likely she’ll find bigger problems when they do that, like black mold hiding behind the tiles. For that reason, it doesn’t make sense to fix the ceiling yet, because they could have to just cut into it again.

In fact, Rodriguez believes they may end up moving the bathroom altogether.

“I was talking with someone from the Mercer family the other day, and that’s not the original floor plan upstairs,” she said. “Things have been moved around quite a bit.”

Back To Original

Rodriguez would like to eventually return the floor plan to its original layout.

“I want to keep as much of the original things as I can,” Rodriguez said. “I’m no stranger to hard work and doing things like this. So I’m not doing it willy-nilly and just making it a toss-up. I’m trying to do things once, the right way, and have it be done.”

Her next plan, once she’s finished the floor and some painting, is to finish working on the stairs. She’s given them a harlequin pattern, with two tones of stain, as well as a bit of gold foiling for a finishing touch.

“I have some filigree molds picked out that I want to fill with plaster and kind of arrange them on each riser, so that it’s kind of like an ornate maximalist design,” she said.

So far, Rodriguez has no regrets about buying this ancient Victorian house to restore, although it has so far been a labyrinth of surprises — some good, like the Edwardian photo, and some not so good, like the leaky plumbing.

She expects there will be more surprises along the way, too, given the age of the home.

“This house is older than the high school across the street, it’s older than the roads,” she said. “I mean this home has been standing here probably even longer than half the city, which is insane to me.”

But that’s also part of what makes the home worth the journey.

In fact, since buying the home, Rodriguez has had several people tell her they almost bought the Mercer house, which just tells her what her heart told her the first time she saw the house. It’s a place with good bones, wearing its character well, and will be well worth all the restoration trials and tribulations in the end.

Rodriguez said she and her fiancé believe they’ve found their forever home in the Mercer house. Given that, they have no worries about what some future homeowner might think of their ideas for the perfect home. That means the bathroom can become a sensory deprivation tank and the office a dual metal-smithing workshop and audio-studio space.

“It’s just going to be us,” Rodriguez said. “And unless the apocalypse happens, we’re not selling this house. This is our house and we’re going to live in it as such.”

That means anything goes as long as it makes them both happy. Unless, of course, the zombies of the apocalypse show up. Then all bets are off, and they’ll need a new plan.

Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.