Before and after: Houstonians restore Galveston home to its 1914 glory

The house had been painted white, the kitchen and bathroom stripped, and the siding was rotted near the ground. But when Lamar Mathews and David Douglas saw this 1914 bungalow in Galveston, they knew they'd found a gem of a home to restore.

The Houston couple bought the Craftsman-style home - two bedrooms, one bath, 1,100 square feet - in 2013. They spent about a year restoring the place, and they've just started renting it out to vacationers on VRBO.com.

It's been a labor of love for a couple hooked on restoration.

"Everything we've done to this house has been as true to its origin as possible," Douglas says.

The Kempner Park home is just east of the Silk Stocking district, on a street that mingles homes from several decades - some of them barely touched, others remodeled beyond recognition. This one fell into the "barely touched" category.

Still, says Douglas, "it's so hard to find a house that has all of its architectural elements still in place. The house was complete in every way."

He and Mathews wanted to restore it as accurately as they could, and they started with the exterior. The couple consulted with Galveston paint conservator Jhonny Langer, who peeled back the layers of old paint - and peered a century into the past - to determine the original colors.

"We see a lot of pictures - not even very good pictures, black and white - and we don't get a sense of the vibrancy of the colors that people lived in," Langer says. In 1914, he determined, the front of the home was a vivid combination of rose and bluish-green. Langer matched the century-old colors with Sherwin-Williams paints, and the couple replicated the original look.

"We painted everything exactly as he told us," Mathews says, and the house - washed-out and white for decades - suddenly blossomed.

The couple brought that shade inside too, using it in the home's bedrooms and central rooms. They continued to work with Langer, who's an expert in the field of restoration.

"This was a well taken-care-of house, and probably pretty fancy for the time," Langer says. "It wasn't your average house for the period - this was middle, upper-middle class."

The house's interior is all beautiful wood and architectural details. The floor is heart pine. The woodwork, including built-in shelves and battered columns that separate the living room from the dining room, had been painted white, but the couple restored its original dark wood finish.

All the doorknobs and hinges are original to the house, and Douglas restored each one by hand. The couple replaced the transoms above doors in the kitchen and bathroom; they'd been removed or covered over in the '50s or '60s, most likely to keep heating and cooling bills low.

"If there was a broken window, we went and bought old, wavy glass to replace it," Mathews says. "If we have to replace something that's broken, we try to use not just a reproduction but something that's actually from the period."

That includes two light fixtures in the living room and dining room; they aren't original to the house, but they date back to the 1910s. And to replace the rotten siding, Douglas reclaimed some cypress from an old house that was being torn down.

The kitchen was stripped when they bought the house, so Douglas and Mathews updated it with appliances and an island - but they opted to leave the big windows and keep the beadboard that covers walls and ceiling. To put in modern cabinetry and counter space would have required moving windows, Mathews says, and that didn't feel right. "We feel like it compromises the integrity of the structure," she says. "We want to keep it the same."

The couple's primary home is in the Heights, an old house they've remodeled and partially restored. They own another home in the Heights and three in Galveston, including one - just a couple of blocks over - they use as a weekend home.

That's the house that turned them into restoration fanatics. When Mathews and Douglas came to Galveston for the Historic Homes Tour in 2010, some friends took them by to see the place, which was up for sale.

"We didn't come down to Galveston expecting to buy a house, or even looking for one," Mathews says, but "we put an offer on it that day." The Craftsman-style home was too well-designed - and the deal too good - to pass up.

The couple - she's an entrepreneur, he's CEO of an oilfield equipment company - figure they'll buy and restore a few more old homes, especially the ones built in Galveston in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

"The thing that has really captured our imagination is how well they're built," Mathews says. "It's unbelievable - for the length of time, the age of the house, the condition they continue to stay in. They're better right this minute than any new house you could be building - the materials, the craftsmanship, the architecture. It's so thought-through."