Category: Holiday House Tour

PHW will be temporarily suspending our daily image captions on Flickr starting next week so we can concentrate on the Bough & Dough Shop and Holiday House Tour. We hope you enjoyed the inaugural year of the caption project and some of our random image selections sparked your curiosity and interest. If you have any images that you would like to know more about, just drop us a note with the image link at phwinc.org@gmail.com and we’ll get it in our queue for 2022!

We’ve been hard at work preparing multiple mailings for PHW this week. Before it hits your snail mail box, you can read the latest issue of the PHW newsletter online. You should also be receiving your Holiday House Tour invitational postcards soon. If you’d like to grab a few extra postcards for friends, extras will be available at the back door of the Hexagon House.

Keep an eye on our Instagram account for the Bough & Dough Shop to see things taking shape and alerts for new products. Although we hope the shop will be held early enough this year not to have to close for snow, any weather or illness-related closings at the Shop will be posted here as well.

Holiday House Tour tickets will go on sale November 15 at Kimberly’s, Winchester Book Gallery, Winchester-Frederick County Visitors Center, and the Bough & Dough Shop at the Hexagon House. Tickets will also be available online through Eventbrite. Program booklets may be slightly delayed, but you can find a digital copy at PHW’s website.

The Google Map for Holiday House Tour has also been updated for 2021. Use it to plan your travel route and parking during the event. We anticipate because the locations are spread out, carpooling may be very popular this year. Remember, you can visit the House Tour sites in any order during the event window.

Last, if you are looking for something different to do next week, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington National Cemetery will be hosting a 100th anniversary event November 9 and 10. For the first time since 1948, visitors will be allowed to approach the memorial and place flowers on the tomb. Read a history of the tomb at the New York Times, and register for the event through Eventbrite.

It’s been a busy week at PHW, including our earlier announcement of our support of the Godfrey Miller Home and Fellowship Center’s exterior preservation and wrapping up our printing for the 2021 Holiday House Tour and Bough & Dough Shop. The printed items are beginning to arrive at PHW, so expect Holiday House Tour postcards to hit your mailboxes soon!

Our kitchen and library in the Hexagon House is undergoing its seasonal transformation into our Bough & Dough Shop, and some sale items have been trickling in, with more expected to arrive next week. Keep an eye on our Instagram for Shop updates and teasers when we get closer to opening day on Nov. 15!

We are so grateful for all the paper bag donations this year for the Shop. If you are feeling a bit more generous, PHW is also happy to accept packages of insulated cups with lids and hot chocolate, coffee, teabags, or cider mixes for the hot drink station during the tour. Thank you for continuing to support us with your in-kind donations to enrich the Holiday House Tour experience for everyone!

For a bit of Halloween fun mixed with an interior renovation, may we invite you to experience a Gothic-themed bathroom makeover this weekend? While the finished product might not be for you, it’s still an honest exploration of making a very tiny space reflect your aesthetic. (And when could we ever share a makeover project like this if not for Halloween?)

We seem to be drawing to the end of our interior yellow jacket swarm saga at the Hexagon House. Things that have been learned from this experience include:

1. Yellow jackets will burrow into your houseplants’ soil, cling to your radiators for warmth, find past holes in the interior woodwork, and settle in.
2. Closing off the room of entry from the rest of the house mostly contained the wasps to one room while pest control methods did their work.
3. In sufficient numbers, the swarm will set off the motion sensors in the alarm system.
4. Yellow jackets will leave behind excrement on your walls. Luckily, the excrement is reportedly nontoxic, and cleaned up easily enough with a bit of light scrubbing.
5. Dead yellow jackets in concentrated numbers have an overwhelming stink similar to dried fish food flakes.
6. Even though the yellow jackets were contained primarily to one room, the cleanup took longer than expected, even with multiple cleanups during each die-off wave. Leave yourself plenty of time and have a vacuum with a good crevice tool on hand to get all the bits and pieces.

We ask you to still exercise caution around the Hexagon House exterior, as the yellow jackets are still in the area around the front porch. They have been well-behaved outdoor neighbors, but we do not recommend long-term indoor cohabitation.

Thank you all for your patience while we waited to announce our 2021 Holiday House Tour lineup. We are easing our way back into the holiday tradition with three homes this year, 25 West Piccadilly Street, 321 South Stewart Street, and 814 South Washington Street. None of the buildings have been opened to the Holiday House Tour before, and we are excited to share them and their renovation stories with you this year. We are also looking forward to renewing our partnership with Winchester Little Theatre to provide costumed carolers during the tour, and free hot drinks will be served on Sunday at the Bough & Dough Shop at the Hexagon House.

The tour will be held on Sunday, December 5 between noon and 4 PM. We ask that visitors come prepared with face masks and be understanding that they may need to wait in line outside the homes (so dress for the weather and wear comfortable, low-heeled shoes). We expect the group sizes going through the homes may be more limited in the size this year than some other years, and please remember to keep up your social distancing while you wait.

Ticket prices are set at $20 per adult in advance, and $25 at the door. This year we will not be offering single-site admission tickets. Advance tickets will be available for purchase in person at Kimberly’s, Winchester Book Gallery, the Winchester-Frederick County Visitors Center, and the Bough & Dough Shop at the Hexagon House, as well as online and by mail. We plan to have tickets available for purchase starting November 15; the program booklets may be slightly delayed, but online versions will be made available by November 15.

As you may know, the Holiday House Tour is PHW’s major fundraising event of the year, and we are indebted to our major sponsor the Bank of Clarke County, and our supporting advertisers The Shenandoah Group of Wells Fargo Advisors, Lisa T. McCoig, CPA, PC, Colony Realty, Belle Grove Plantation, Summit Community Bank, Frederick Block, Brick & Stone, and Angel’s Roost Quilts. Their financial support helps us to produce our program booklets, tickets, postcard mailers, and other costs associated with providing this fun and educational event. Be sure to say thanks to our sponsors for helping us host the 45th annual Holiday House Tour and Bough & Dough Shop!

Thanks for your patience as we hold the announcement of the house line up for the Holiday House Tour. We can confirm tickets will be available for purchase starting November 15 at the Bough & Dough Shop at the Hexagon House, Kimberly’s, Winchester Book Gallery, and the Winchester-Frederick County Visitors Center. An online purchase option will also be available, along with a digital version of the program booklet.

To tide you over until we have more updates on the tour side, we’ve prepared a visual guide for our Bough and Dough Shop. The schedule for 2021 is going to be a little different than our past years’, so to help you plan what days the shop will be open, we have created a calendar below. Be sure to visit the Hexagon House on the days highlighted in yellow to do some local shopping between 10 AM and 5 PM. Please note we are reducing the shop floor space to just the kitchen and the greenery on the back porch this year.

We will most likely be in need of evergreen cuttings for the “bough” side of the shop. If you have plans to trim or remove cedar, pine, juniper, boxwood, magnolia, holly, or other greenery in late November, we will be grateful to accept your clippings at the Hexagon House during the Shop. We recommend making large drop offs prior to 10 AM, after 5 PM, or on our closed days to prevent congestion in the parking lot with shoppers. Volunteers may be able to trim and haul smaller plants for you. If you have questions about greenery donations, please contact us at phwinc.org@gmail.com or 540-667-3577.

PreserveCast has an interview up with Merrill Hoopengardner to talk about the historic tax credit. From the podcast description: “In mid-September, House Democratic-led committees approved a more detailed $3.5 trillion package of bills with HTC enhancements similar to the HTC-GO (H.R. 2294). Next in the legislative process, the bill must move to the House floor, pass the House, pass the Senate, and be signed into law. Washington insiders believe that a final bill will be negotiated with the Senate before it goes to the House floor and is likely to be significantly reduced in both size and scope. If passed, the infrastructure bill would include the most substantial enhancements to the Historic Tax Credit in a generation. To support the efforts in getting these provisions across the finish line, please reach out to all Democratic Senators and ask them to support the HTC enhancement provisions included in the House infrastructure bill. To learn more about how you can contact your representative, click here.“