A group of interns with the Bald
Head Island Conservancy inventory
one of numerous sea turtle nests
that hatched this summer.
“I knew if I had a nest that
I could come home to, I
could set the world on fire”
during the long Pennsylvania winters before
moving to Wilmington in 2004.
Searching the southern Atlantic coast with
a couple of friends, Howes-Graham says she
fell in love with Wilmington.
“At that time there were lots of houses for sale
in the historic district,” Howes-Graham says.
Wanting a house with three bedrooms and
three bathrooms, she looked at 25 or 30 —
most with tiny rooms — before she found
the floorplan she wanted.
“This one had three floors and absolutely
basic rectangular rooms,” she explains.
When she purchased the Parsley House
in 2000, the front hall was painted forest
green, the living room a deep cherry red and
white
the floors were a horrible mess, she says. She
waited for four years to sell her Pennsylvania
home. In the meantime she hired a contrac-tor
to begin work on her new house.
“I told him I wanted everything white,”
she says. “First time I came back down after I
bought the house, they had taken a spray gun
and just sprayed. The windows were sprayed.
Everything was sprayed. It was half sprayed
and half not.”
Starting over, she told them, “I want white,
white, white, white. I don’t want cream.
White Is White is Benjamin Moore, a really
cool white, not a hot white. The floors had
all this paint sprayed all over everything. I
was sleeping in the upstairs bedroom and it
was so awful. I put a sheet down. I just had
a mattress. It was a white sheet. It looked so
nice. That’s when I thought, ‘the heck with
it. I’ll just paint the floors white.’”
The house has a front porch that overlooks
Third Street facing east and a side porch on
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WBM october 2012