Autobiography of Nettie Covey Sharpe

Luckily, my husband had a work colleague from the Standard Photo
Engraving Co. who lived in St-Lambert. One day the man phoned my
husband: “The stone house on Riverside is for sale. They put up a
For Sale sign today.” So we met with the agent. I said to him: “You know,
Mr. Copeland, if I’m interested, and if I want it, I’ll pay cash.” I thought it would be between $8,000 and $9,000, in that price range, and I was right. In fact, the house itself was just being given away; it was the large plot of land which was expensive. It was huge, and was right along the river.

When we went inside, we couldn’t see a blessed thing. Luckily, I had brought a flashlight. The windows were dirty — everything was so dirty. An electrical wire had shorted out, which was why the woman who lived there had to leave. She couldn’t stay there any longer. And it was full of water. The lace curtains were so stiff and so black that we couldn’t make out anything.

As soon as I entered and shone my flashlight on the large built-in cupboards, I said to my husband, “We’re buying it!” [Laughing] I saw the built-in doors, nice Louis XV-style doors, and then the entry door nearby, in the same style. On the other hand, the foundation was completely rotten and we couldn’t even get into the basement. My husband knew nothing about this sort of thing, and neither did I. To make matters worse, the cellar had only been excavated to a depth of about five feet.

We had to get an architect. There was so much work to be done on the house. And that was another whole story. It’s awful when someone in your own family just wants to jam a stick in the spokes! You have to fight for what you want, sometimes nearly coming to blows with them. It was like that over this house. They all thought I’d lost my mind.

The renovations of the house lasted more than a year. A year!

We finally moved in on April 30, 1951. But all the work had not yet been completed. The exterior wasn’t done; the garage wasn’t finished, and the doors inside the house hadn’t been hung. But we could still move in and live there. And at least the essentials, such as heating, had been installed. It took us all summer to clean the stone and repoint the joints. And removing the dust: it was dirty everywhere, inside as well as out. But it didn’t matter to me, we had just moved!

Take a virtual tour of the Nettie Covey Sharpe home as it was in 2002 at https://www.historymuseum.ca/cmc/exhibitions/arts/sharpe/sharpe_e.html.