One night last summer, Dr. Robert Hamblin and his wife, Kaye, parked their car in front of the deteriorating brick mansion at 313 Themis St. before walking to Courthouse Park to hear a concert. Seeing the "For sale" sign in the yard, he told her he'd been thinking they should buy an old house downtown to restore.

"That totally was news to me," Kaye said, still sounding shell-shocked.

The Hamblins closed on the house in mid-October and started moving in that weekend. "We're still living out of boxes," Kaye said.

The five fireplaces don't function. Neither does the doorbell. The front door doesn't always work. Outside, paint is peeling everywhere. Some of the scroll work on the porch columns are broken. The Hamblins' contractor estimates that 15 percent of the exterior wood needs to be replaced because of water damage.

"It's a day-by-day pilgrimage, learning about the house and ourselves," Hamblin said.

"We gave ourselves 10 years," Kaye said.

Eventually, they intend to put the house on the National Register of Historic Places and to turn it into a place to be used for community, church and Southeast Missouri State University activities.

St. Louis architect Jerome B. Legg designed the house. Legg also was the architect for a number of buildings at Southeast, including Academic Hall, the science building and the art building. He also remodeled Common Pleas Courthouse.

Hamblin directs the Center for Faulkner Studies at Southeast Missouri State University; Kaye is a former elementary school teacher who now does volunteer work. They are at the age when people are at least starting to think about their retirement. Now they know how they'll spend at least part of it.

They never would have undertaken such a project without knowing they could count on their son, Stephen, and their daughter, Laurie. Stephen has a Cape Girardeau contracting business. Laurie is a teacher in Columbia who is a woodworker. The family project has their grandchildren, Kaleigh and Abbie, already doing some painting.

But plans change. Stephen is a National Guardsman who has been ordered to ship out Jan. 3.

A fine mansion

The mansion once was one of the finest houses in Cape Girardeau. William Harrison, who became known for his timber business and investments, including the H&H Building on Broadway, bought the house in 1990, three years after its completion. It remained in the Harrison family until the mid-1980s, when Mayor Al Spradling III's family sold it to Dr. Jesse Ramsey. Spradling's wife, Pam, is a Harrison descendent.

The house sat vacant for a few years at the end of the 1990s.

The house has four second-story rooms and an attic that has been turned into a bedroom and sunroom. The first floor has six rooms, including a modern kitchen. In a separate building behind the house is a garage and an apartment. Beyond the garage is a wooded area.

Mounds, Ill., contractor Jerry Casper's crew is putting primer on the exterior wood to keep it from deteriorating more during the winter. They already have power washed the bricks.

Much more needs to be done inside, including refinishing the floors.

The Hamblins have old photographs of the house and have written some of the Harrison family descendants for information about how the house used to look. They plan to make the upstairs their living quarters and to restore the downstairs to reflect the period in which it was built.

Casper recently did restoration work on the historic Victorian mansion the Glenn House in Cape Girardeau. He asked the Hamblins to be able to work on their house.

They have decided to rent, not sell, the house they used to live in, just in case.

sblackwell@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 182