A historic house in Provo is getting a new lease on life as the latest project from Habitat for Humanity. The non-profit group recently finished renovating the nearly 130-year-old house and will now donate the property. According to Kena Jo Mathews, the organization’s Executive Director in Utah County, local housing officials owned the house at the time the project began.
“It was an idea that I had. I knew that the Provo Housing Authority owned it and I knew that they were interested in doing something with it,” she said. “So, I talked to the Provo Housing Authority director [with] the idea that maybe we could do it and that’s kind of how it all was born.”
George Taylor Jr. built the house, one of the oldest in Provo, in 1885. The family’s business ventures produced a couple of important firsts for the city, Mathews said.
“It belonged to George Taylor Jr. George Taylor was the son of George Taylor Sr. who founded the Taylor Furniture Store, which was the first furniture store in Provo,” she said. “The Taylor Brothers Company became the first big department store in Provo.”
After years of neglect, the old home was deteriorated when Habitat for Humanity took over the property. Its status as a registered historic building required the renovation team to stay true to the house’s original design, Mathews said.
“We’ve done renovation homes in the past. We’ve also have restored one other historic property but definitely the [National Historic] Register issues came to life,” she said. “We had to do certain things a certain way. So, we couldn’t replace the windows with vinyl windows, we had to replace them with wood windows and other things like that. It brought an additional element to renovation.”
Now that the renovations are complete, the house will be donated to a family in need. The project will help spur other opportunities to help the less fortunate, Mathews said.
“The home will be sold to a family of seven in our community. We’ll be providing that family with a mortgage. Their mortgage payments will be used to build other homes in the community,” she said.
A ribbon cutting ceremony at the house is scheduled for Thursday, Nov. 20.
