In Lexington, the couple first dipped their toes — or perhaps dove headfirst — into old-home ownership and all that comes with it. They purchased a 1924 fixer-upper that “needed a lot of work.” On top of that, they got married and adopted Eddie, a gentle, old hound dog who turns 14 this month.

Sights set on starting their own family and first renovation behind them, Catherine and Jed decided to relocate to Greensboro in 2018. Catherine joined the family business and Jed found a position with a local distributor in commercial and sports turf irrigation services. His role has him often traveling to Southern university campuses and professional stadiums. “I was at Wake Forest [University] today,” he says.

With two new jobs and Catherine’s desire to revamp Greensboro Kitchen and Bath a bit, they decided to purchase a home that, while still old, didn’t need work. Their plates were full enough as it was. They zeroed in on Lindley Park and Fisher Park, seeking “an older, historic neighborhood that’s walkable with sidewalks.” On New Year’s Eve that year, the couple closed on a 1935 Lindley Park charmer that had already been renovated by Frye Build + Design.

“It was a good house,” says Catherine. But, she adds, “We just never felt fully comfortable because there was nothing for us to do.” That itch to “put our stamp on it” crept back in and, after a few years, they began looking for something that needed the love they had to give.

Their realtors, Maggie Marston and Joanna Harris, showed them a few contenders before they stepped foot inside what is now their Florence Street home (@florencestreetrevival on Instagram). Jed wandered upstairs with Joanna.

“I remember being in what is now our primary bedroom,” he says. “It was late afternoon.”

“Oh, it was when that light’s perfect,” says Catherine, a dreamy look in her eyes. “That room just glows.”

That golden-hour moment sealed the deal. Jed recalls knowing right then, “Yeah, this is it.”

The glass-cased sunporch, where gutters had backed up above, was in a state of rot and ruin. No one had lived in the house for over a decade. In the kitchen, the ceiling had collapsed due to an upstairs bathroom leak. Far from perfect, the 1915 house was ideal for them: It was structurally sound, they liked the layout and it was in a location they loved.

Built originally as a spec house for the Brooks Lumber Company — “I never thought I would buy a spec house,” jokes Catherine — the plans were designed by architect Raleigh James Hughes. But when Brooks Lumber completed construction, they veered from the blueprints’ square columns, opting for classic instead, leaving Hughes fuming. The home’s very first owner is listed as B.B. Tatum, who, with C.L. Stafford, and Ruth and W. C. Boren Jr., founded Tatum’s Inc., the entity that constructed Fisher Park’s pre-war apartments known as Cannon Court.

Listed in August 2022, the house became officially theirs two-and-a-half weeks later, though it wouldn’t be until March 2025 that they moved in. But before it was theirs, it had been owned by generations of the same family for over 70 years. Although Cora Sawyer Scott, who purchased the house with her husband in 1951, renovated in the early 1950s. It was largely untouched after that.

They got to work right away, first addressing the layout by opening one wall to add a doorway between the kitchen and the central room. What they found behind that wall surprised them. “We discovered that it had always been open,” says Catherine. Turns out, they had restored the original flow. Opening the wall allowed them to turn a former pantry into a powder room, accessible through an old, paneled door found at Preservation Greensboro’s Architectural Salvage. A black-and-gold, oval sign that hangs on it reads “WC” for wash closet.

Most of the original pine flooring throughout was in good shape — yet hidden underneath thin oak planks. Today, nail holes are visible, but, as Catherine says in an Instagram post from early 2025, “I just love how the lines tell the story of the oak floor that had been placed on top.” The kitchen and the library needed entirely new flooring, but the couple knew the kitchen would be one of the biggest undertakings.

A letter the seller presented to the Birches reads, “The mystery of the third chimney!” Standing on the street, three chimneys are visible on the roofline, one seemingly leading into the kitchen. The letter went on to say that she’d heard her grandparents possibly plastered over it.

With that in mind, the couple removed plaster, exposing brick and revealing — drumroll, please —  “holes for a stove, like a stove pipe hole,” says Catherine. “Yep.”

The exposed brick meant their renovation no longer met the Standards for Rehabilitation and, thus, the Birches could no longer apply for historic tax credits. Exposing the brick, it turned out, was “not in keeping with the historic character of the kitchen.”

“One wall,” Jed says with a sigh. “One wall.”

“I really like it,” says Catherine, ever the aesthete, who pushed for keeping the brick.

“You know what I’d rather have?” quips Jed. In the end, Catherine won and continued leaning into utilitarian touches “because in a 1915 and 16 house, the kitchen would have been a very industrial space.”

A freestanding island anchors the space, surrounded by custom oak cabinetry from the family business — where all new cabinetry in the home came from — topped with black soapstone. Upper cabinets with ribbed-glass doors and interior lighting keep the space bright and functional. “My design sense,” says Catherine, “is [using] things that would have been here, but in a more modern way.”

A glass-doored, stainless-steel refrigerator sits on another exposed-brick wall. Catherine spied the Wolf subzero beauty at a trade-show — “one other problem with the job,” she quips. She showed Jed, thinking he’d talk her out of it, but he was all in.

“We are a food-centered family,” he says, noting that they both like to cook.

The walls are Catherine’s go-to white — White Flour by Sherwin-Williams, the same paint used in the central room and on the exterior — while the ceiling is coated in Farrow & Ball’s Dix Blue, “a relaxed green blue,” according to the brand’s website.

On a small, wall-mounted shelf, an original piece by Winston-Salem artist Anna Jarrell adds a rainbow of color, though it’s been covered in glass to protect it from kitchen grease. Catherine purchased the painting off of Instagram during COVID. When everyone else was backyard farming and sourdough baking, Catherine says, “I bought more art than I’ve ever bought before.”

Just off the kitchen is the once-formal dining room, though the space has morphed more into a casual hangout area. When the Birches purchased the home, its walls were covered in a red tonal-stripe, velvet-flocked wallpaper from the 1800s. In the 1940s, Cora scored rolls upon unused rolls, already nearly a century old, from a Hudson River mansion’s estate sale in Upstate New York. When she purchased the Florence Street home, up it went. Today, Catherine has the remaining unused rolls.