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St. Elmo pastor, wife fill home with ‘finds,’ family heirlooms

By: Clint Cooper
(Contact)

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Susan Boroughs

Susan Boroughs describes the decorating style of the St. Elmo home she shares with her husband, Cal, as “finds and family.”

However, she and her pastor husband have accentuated that style with the interior and exterior work to make the house their own.

Their 1920 Craftsman bungalow is one of nine homes and churches available for viewing on today’s St. Elmo Tour of Homes.

The Boroughses moved into the house 18 years ago, when it was the manse of St. Elmo Presbyterian Church, and bought it in 2004. It had been the home of the church’s pastor since 1928.

The four-bedroom, two-bath home on Tennessee Avenue is painted a pale green on the outside with white and red accents.

The story-and-a-half design, wide porch, low-pitched roof and built-ins are features that mark it as a Craftsman bungalow.

“We have always lived in old houses,” Mrs. Boroughs said. “They just have a charm to them.”

Period finds she made over the years and furniture she and her husband inherited from their grandparents have added to the charm.

Among the more unusual pieces are a blue painted Hoosier cabinet in the kitchen, a dining-room table with five leaves and a dining-room chandelier brought from the couple’s previous home in Greenville, S.C.

There are also a living-room mantel clock built by Mr. Boroughs’ grandfather, the framed medical-school diploma awarded to Mr. Boroughs’ great-grandfather by U.S. Grant University (now the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga), an occasional table Mr. Boroughs’ grandfather made by adding a top to a piano stool, and an elongated green gradient painting by the couple’s daughter, Abigail, that graces a wall above the stairs to the second floor.

The only new piece of furniture in the house, Mrs. Boroughs said, is a leather recliner in a downstairs room the couple uses as a den.

As is the case for many houses, theirs is a work in progress.

During the past year, the couple had most of the downstairs plaster walls and ceilings skim-coated to hide cracks and transformed a second-floor storage space into an exercise/sitting room.

In the living room, renovator Gary Schorr added detail to the wall above the fireplace with decorative trim, including frame trim that surrounds a painting of St. Elmo Presbyterian Church.

Mrs. Boroughs added to the period look in the room by sanding down and staining the wood trim atop the bookcases on either side of the fireplace, the mantel atop the fireplace and the trim that separates the living and dining rooms.

The work, she said, took at least 40 hours.

Mrs. Boroughs also did most of the painting throughout the house — she counted 106 panes of glass in the living room alone — recovered several chairs and a couch, and made all of its flattering window treatments.

Among those are matching checkered blue, green and white curtains in the living and dining rooms, floral drapes with an accent checkered curtain rod in the master bedroom, toile curtains in an unusual two-color pattern in an upstairs bedroom and Roman shades in red, green and gold in the second-floor sitting room.

The upstairs two-bedroom, one-bath suite, once occupied by the couple’s now-married daughters, also has been given somewhat of a sprucing up, Mrs. Boroughs said. A central heating and air conditioning unit was added, and the second-floor hall, where their daughters once watched TV, has been repainted and hung with family pictures.

“We’ve done quite a bit since we’ve owned the house,” she said. “We’ve got a lot of sweat equity in it.”

Outside, Mr. Boroughs has planted flowers and shrubs and reclaimed the yard from being largely overgrown. A pine tree planted by one of the home’s early pastor residents still towers between the house and the street.

“It’s endless work,” Mrs. Boroughs said of the home, “but I can’t see living anywhere else.”

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