- Thad and Robin Krasnesky bought a 140-year-old Victorian mansion in Kansas in 2021.
- They document their explorations on their Facebook page, Krasnesky Manor For Wayward Cats.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Thad Krasnesky, 53, about his experience buying and living in a 140-year-old mansion in Leavenworth, Kansas. He and his wife Robin, 49, document their adventures at the house on their Facebook page, Krasnesky Manor For Wayward Cats. They currently have seven cats. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
We moved to Leavenworth, Kansas, in 2011.
I was active-duty military at the time. Initially, we thought we'd be in Kansas for a year and then move on. We really fell in love with the place and decided we would stay.
As we were driving around and getting to know the town, we turned down Broadway. It has these absolutely amazing homes. This one really stood out. My wife absolutely fell in love with it. Sometimes we would drive down Broadway just to look at it and go, "Wow, what is it like inside? Who are the people that lived there?"
A.J. Angell was the owner that originally built it. He was a lumber baron at the turn of the century. He built the house in 1883 and completed it in 1885.
I left the military in 2018 and opened up a financial office. Around then, Robin got a message from her friend, whose aunt follows the For The Love Of Old Houses Facebook page, and they had posted the real-estate listing for the Angell mansion.
It was originally listed for $750,000. We made an offer that was pretty close to my top dollar, but it turned out there were other families that were interested. We got into a bidding thing.
I'm a financial advisor. I tell people not to make stupid, emotional decisions with their money. When you're the person involved, it's a little bit harder to do. After we made our top-dollar bid, we made four or five more bids. Common sense flew out the window.
We outlasted the other people. Maybe they took cold showers and came to their senses. We closed on December 20, 2021.
I could go out at any point in the day and find something hidden
The house had been vacant for about four years. There was dust on everything. I was in the library dusting and there's 14 foot ceilings, so I was up on the six-foot ladder. I was a bit stretched to get up on top of the bookshelves and when I looked up, there was stuff just laying there — a box, a gold pocket watch, and a cane.
I took all the stuff down and found out that the cane was a presentation cane that was given to a Union officer, probably after the Civil War, and it had his regiments on the gold cap on the cane. The box was full of ribbons from 1930s equestrian events. We found the descendant of the person who owned the cane.
We haven't looked through it all yet. People ask, "Why haven't you looked in that box?" And I say, "Because it's a 9,000-square-foot house," and because, at any given time, there's probably 30 of these things. There's also seven acres of property here.
One day, we were having some issues with the HVAC. The raccoons in the attic had been particularly rowdy the night before. I was just in a mood. I went up there and was talking to the raccoons, which you tend to do when you're slightly insane from trying to fix a 140-year-old house. As I was up there, I stepped on one of these floorboards that I noticed a dozen times but never messed with. I can't control the HVAC or the raccoons, but I can control looking under this board. So I did.
I saw something under the insulation, and I reached in and pulled out two jars full of silver coins. The whole house was worth it right there. I found the hidden treasure.
I was telling the kids about it when they were visiting for Thanksgiving. They wanted to see, so I took them up to the attic. One of my kids was like, "What about this loose floorboard right next to it?" And I pulled it out and started poking down into the insulation and there was an interesting sound. It was a little paper bag of old copper coins.
When we were having Christmas dinner, my daughter was asking about a video in the attic we recently posted on Facebook. She thought she saw a ring.
I went through the video and I didn't see a ring. So we kept on eating, and she was over there on her phone and she freeze framed one of the images and then blew it up. And she was like, "Right there, that's a ring." And then I looked at it, and I'm like, "By golly, that looks like a ring."
We got up from the dinner table, went up the stairs, went up the other stairs to the ballroom, pulled the access panel off, climbed back there, and what do you know, there was a turquoise and silver ring back there. I might have never found it if she hadn't been looking at the video. And then, as I was climbing out, I found a little piece of gold jewelry on the floor. It's just everywhere.
I'm most excited about the connections we've made
Robin started the Facebook page as a way to keep people updated, instead of sending pictures and emails to a dozen people 10 times a week. It started with 40 or 50 friends but quickly grew into a couple of thousand people that we don't even know.
Having traveled around a lot, having been in the military and not really having a place to plant roots before, it's difficult to build social bases. This house was a social base. This house has been a part of the community, and we instantly became a part of the community when we bought it. We could have lived in town for 20 years and never had the foundation that this house gives us by proxy.
We've got 14,000 people on our Facebook page now. We went to England last August for vacation and met people over there that follow our page. We've had people that traveled here from 12 hours away in Texas. They wanted to meet us and the cats because they followed us for the last six months. We have somebody whose mother's having their 88th birthday and they're traveling to us as her birthday present. You don't turn down an 88-year-old mom.
There's something about the house. It just draws people.