I'm in Southwest Connecticut. The town lists the house as built 1870; the original deed is dated 1876. The house was sold by a company that operated a big factory in town to an employee of the factory, for $1. In the deed it stipulates that the company will take the house back if the owner sells liquor on the premises!
The factory also built a number of other houses in the area and on the same street. The house next door is very similar in layout and was built at the same time, but slightly smaller and with original finishes that are not quite as nice. (That house has been updated and restored beautifully, and is currently much nicer than ours. However, comparing the original features in ours to the original features in their's, ours was built with slightly nicer doors, hardware, foundation, etc).
The original owner was an employee of the company, and subsequent owners have also been workers in the factory. Comparing census records and deeds for nearby houses, the entire area was basically populated by factory employees. There are also a few older farmhouses mixed in that date from before the factory. I think that this house was kind of mid-grade. It's nicer than some, has some nicer touches here and there, but not as nice as a lot of others! Up through the 50s, every owner I can find (and there is a period from 1880-1930 that I'm missing-will be visiting town to look at their paper records but just too busy working on the house atm) was an employee of the factory. One was a shipping clerk, others were listed as just "employee at x company" so don't know their title unfortunately.
Going off town records, I believe the house was in pretty poor shape when the most recent owners bought it in 1992. They fixed it up and used it as a rental from 1993/4-ish until now. The town still has their permit records, so I know that over the period of a year or so they replaced the window sashes, did big layout changes in the downstairs and completely reconfigured the upstairs. They replaced the staircase and I believe changed the footprint of it as well. They dug a new well, added new insulation, drywall, plumbing, and electrical. They added two baths to the house (added one upstairs where the was none, and moved the other from off the kitchen to more in the center of the house). They removed the front door of the house, which we are still trying to figure out how to cover up the empty hole (visually, not literally!) that's left there. Our current thinking is to extend the porch out a bit to kind of hide it, but that's for way down the road.
So, here are some pictures of the house! I'm having trouble identifying what style the house is! The listing listed it as "colonial revival" but I don't know that they had anything to base that off of other than the listing agent's opinion. Any help in identifying the style would be really appreciated as I would like to try to keep our changes/renovations to fit with the house.
We have a lot planned, so I'm sure I'll be here asking for help over and over again. Already just reading through previous posts has been so helpful!
Link to the album: https://photos.app.goo.gl/512vMZbAPq8DTqG96
Please excuse the furniture/things in the fall pictures at the beginning, the old tenants were still living there. The pictures are in various stages of the work we've done so far.
