Much has happened to Paul Schaff and Brenda Rosin-Schaff’s New Berlin home since it was built in the 1890s.
It started out as a small four-bedroom farmhouse. Then it more than doubled in size when a former owner added a 10-car attached garage.
When Paul bought it about 10 years ago, the house was sound structurally, but it needed updating. So he gutted the kitchen and turned part of the garage into a bar and TV area with bedrooms above.
But the biggest changes happened 5 ½ years ago when Brenda moved in and the couple merged households.
She painted and redecorated the home’s five bedrooms, 4 ½ baths, kitchen, dining room, living room, large entryway, bar, TV area, laundry room and a common area on the second floor. At the same time she made extensive repairs to outbuildings on their 3-acre property, then furnished them mainly with pieces she repurposed.
“The barn and chicken coop were in poor condition,” Paul said. “The roof in the barn was riddled with holes, and rain would come in. The chicken coop was on the verge of collapse….We either had to pay money to renovate them or pay to have them torn down.”
Today their property — called Wildcat Creek Farm after the creek that runs alongside their property — is warm and comfortable, with distinctive pieces at every turn.
“Paul allowed me the freedom to decorate the house and outbuildings any way I wanted,” Brenda said. “He trusted my judgment.”
“She knows how to put things together, especially in reusing materials,” Paul said. “I had renovated the house, but she took it to a whole new level. And the barn and chicken coop, that really was her major undertaking.”
Repurposing pieces is something Brenda loves, in part because she was brought up not to waste things and to be creative.
“I have a lot of creative energy,” she said. “Every day I wake up and I’m excited because I always have a project to work on.”
These projects often include using pieces that have sentimental value, an interesting story or are given to her by friends. She also hunts for pieces at rummage sales and discount stores.
Two favorite pieces with sentimental value are an antique fishing lure and a mounted lake trout in the home’s TV area.
“Paul’s not a fisherman, but he caught that fish,” Brenda said. “The fishing lure is the first gift he gave me — not flowers. That hooked me. It was the fact that he listened to what I told him was important to me.” For Brenda, that was nature and conservation projects.
She said that after they met, Paul joined the Badger Fisherman’s League, the oldest non-profit conservation league in the state. She has been a member of the group since she was a child, and both are now on the board. Paul is a co-owner of Schaff Funeral Home in West Allis; Brenda does volunteer and community work.
No matter what area of the property she’s working on, Brenda does much of the work herself but gets help from professionals as needed.
Two helpers she counts on regularly are her grandmother, Bev Bolling, and Bev’s friend Maybelle “Toots” Pezewski, both of Sussex.
“They’re my cohorts in crime,” Brenda said. “My grandmother helps me with a lot of sewing things. She helped me make curtains in the silo, cornice boards in the kitchen and dining room and runners for our wedding. Paul and I were married here two years ago. I come up with the ideas; they help me execute them.”
During a late-fall visit, the couple talked about their home and how it has changed over the years.
Q. What are some of the home’s amenities?
Paul: The chicken coop and barn. We also have two gas fireplaces in the house, original beams in part of the kitchen and the dining area, and a field stone basement.
Q. How do you use the outbuildings?
Brenda: We use them for entertaining friends and family, and we’ve also hosted a few events in them for friends and family members. I’d like to use them to host charity events one day.
Q. What are examples of pieces you got from friends and repurposed?
Brenda: I’m using an old copper sink with a pump and an old farm table in the chicken coop. I reupholstered and painted four church pews for the barn, and I turned an old work bench into a buffet/bar with wheels for the barn.
Q.What’s your favorite room in the house?
Brenda: The yellow bedroom with the four-poster bed, because I just redid it. It has lots of light and good views of our courtyard. Also, the back bedroom, which is done in gray. From there I can see the wood bridge on our property and the barn. That room has the best views.
Paul: The pub. It reminds me of being in Europe in a pub. It’s where family and friends meet over a glass of beer. It’s homey to me.
Q. Your favorite spots in the outbuildings?
Brenda: I like to relax on the leather couch in the chicken coop. If the window is open, I can hear Wildcat Creek. I also like to sit on the couches in the barn’s lower level because I can look out the window and see nature.
Paul: The lower level of the barn, too, because I like looking out the windows. When I’m there I wonder what it was like when they actually used it as a barn in the early 1900s.
Q. Which of your five bedrooms do you use?
Brenda: We use all of them now. When we were first married, Paul’s daughter and son and my son lived here and used some of them.
Q. Who painted the bird motif in the first-floor bathroom?
Brenda: Paul’s mom, Sandy Schaff of West Allis. We call it the birdbath. I put a birdcage in there.
Q. How big is your home?
Paul: Just shy of 5,000 square feet, and we have a four-car garage. But we can only get two cars in there. Brenda stores pieces in there that she plans to repurpose one day.
Brenda: I’m not a hoarder, but I do save things I can use in some way down the road.
Q. What are the pluses and minuses of having such a big property?
Brenda: We have so many spots where we can entertain. The downside is there’s a lot to keep up.
Q.Any setbacks since you started making changes?
Brenda: Wildcat Creek has flooded the coop and the barn more than once. This year improvements were made to the creek, and it hasn’t flooded since. When we started remodeling the outbuildings, we were trying to save them from the flooding….We kept going to the next level.
Q. Did you make changes in the gardens?
Brenda: When I moved here, there was landscaping immediately around the house. I added more gardens, a number of waking paths and an allée on the north side of our house that runs from our courtyard to the backyard. Allée is a French word for a walkway lined with trees and shrubs. I got a lot of the flowers from friends; some I even found on the curb. I’m also a member of the Elmbrook and New Berlin Garden Clubs.
I also added a lot of mulch this year. When the creek would flood, I’d lose a lot of plants and mulch. This year I hauled 70 trailers of mulch from the recycling center.
Q. What’s in your court-yard?
Brenda: A hot tub, herb garden, arbors, decorative metal fencing and a fountain I found on Craigslist.
Q. Any more projects to do?
Brenda: We have two separate basements. I call one the creepy basement, and I’d like to turn it into a wine room. It has stone walls and was a natural cellar. It’s too cool of an area architecturally not to do something with it.
Do you, or does someone you know, have a cool, funky or exquisite living space that you’d like to see featured in At Home? Contact Entree home and garden editor Tina Maples at (414) 223-5500 or email tmaples@journalsentinel.com.
