Historic Denver's offices have moved.
We are now in the Tattered Cover Building
1628 16th Street, Suite 200
Denver, CO 80202
303-534-5288
Fax: 303-534-5296

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Ten Simple Rules for Restoring Your Home

The Ten Rules have been carefully formulated to help you avoid embarrassing mistakes and to protect your historic building from well- meaning but misguided efforts. Refer to them and obey them whenever you need to make a decision about your renovation project.

1. Repair damaged materials whenever possible.When not possible, replace them with materials that match the original as
   closely as possible. Vinyl siding, aluminum windows, and mass-produced doors with fan lights do not belong on historic homes.
2. Honor the scale and proportion of your building, maintaining the heights of windows and doors, the number of panes of glass in the windows and the dimensions of columns. Do not even consider replacing existing windows with smaller ones and removing the transoms over exterior doors.
3. Replace architectural elements such as brackets or turned wood balustrades that have been lost with matching material to the original. Do not place iron columns on a porch that had wood columns or otherwise apply stylistically inappropriate elements to your historic house.
4. Do not remove brick columns from Bungalows, but honor these signature elements that express a particular building
   type and architectural style.
5. Do not convert your single family residence to an eight-plex, enclosing porches to accommodate extra kitchens,or otherwise convert your historic building to a new use that requires dramatic changes to the building ’s defining characteristics.
6. Do not “tart up ” a plain-Jane Bungalow house with EIFS or stucco, or otherwise embellish your house with conjectural
   features.
7. Do not inflict harsh physical or chemical treatments on your historic house, but employ the gentlest methods available for the surface cleaning of your structure. Sandblasting pits soft red bricks and using it will shorten the life of your house.
8. Do not cut in driveways through the front yard and original landscaping.
9. Do not erect enormous dormers, gargantuan rear wings or other plus-sized additions that dwarf the original building, or otherwise construct additions that are not compatible with the original building in terms of massing, size, scale and architectural features.
10. Do not alter the slope of the roof of your building or otherwise impair the essential form and integrity of your historic property so that the additions and new construction cannot be removed in future years.

Adapted from The Preservation Resource Center of New Orleans, www.prcno.org