U.S. post office becomes first-class home

Preserving the past

The sturdy Colonial Revival-style building was filled with memories for Belhasen. With its all-brick exterior, its thick concrete interior walls and its underlying steel skeleton, the old structure was, and still is, solid as a rock. When Belhasen was a student at the elementary school down the block, children were instructed to hunker down in the basement of Paintsville's post office in the event of an airborne attack.

Inside, though, the building she purchased for $162,000 was drab. Many of the rooms were painted top to bottom in post-office blue. Hideous linoleum or tough rubber padding was glued to most of the floors. But it retained enough period details — including terra-cotta floor tiles, marble baseboards and pink granite wall slabs — that Belhasen decided to take the rehab project on. She preserved many of these details in the former lobby, which now serves as an entry parlor and formal living area. The original 16-foot ceilings were lowered 2 feet to conceal pipes and conserve energy.

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Garden room

Belhasen's handy relatives worked demolition, scraping off faded blue paint, lifting decrepit flooring and blow-torching stubborn glue. Along the way, they found scraps of undelivered mail and a stack of chilling artifacts: Cold War-era "safety notification postcards," which people fleeing an air raid were supposed to mail to inform loved ones of their whereabouts. Those paled in comparison to the weirdest structural detail of all: secret passageways that let the postmaster scuttle unseen within the walls, spying on employees. The concrete entrances to these passageways were built into several closets, along with ladders leading to each floor. Belhasen's brother dismantled the concrete "observatories" with a jackhammer, but the ladders remained among the collectibles the building slowly offered up.

Shown: Geometric floor tiling and custom cabinets give the garden room a vintage look.

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Heart of the home

In its heyday, the ground floor was partitioned into public and private spaces by a wall of brass post-office boxes. Though the boxes were there when Belhasen first toured the premises, the feds had yanked them out and sold them to a salvage dealer by the time she bought the building, much to her dismay. She made the best of the loss, realizing that custom wood cabinetry and a double fireplace would make a gentler — and much more functional — barrier between the two living spaces. On one side of those cabinets is the former lobby, now entry parlor and formal living area. On the other side, the cavernous mail-sorting room was sectioned into zones housing the family great room and a new kitchen and butler's pantry.

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Kitchen assets

A massive island anchors the 20-by-20-foot kitchen, once a mail-sorting area. Glimpsed though the pastry case is a Sub-Zero refrigerator wrapped in cabinetry modeled after a vintage oak icebox. The Wolf range is tucked into a tiled, arched niche.

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Custom cabinets

Belhasen worked with Quality Custom Cabinetry in New Holland, Pa., to create a kitchen that could fit her large extended family as well as her antiques. Here, the additional cherry built-ins maximize kitchen storage without blocking the sunlight that streams through the old lobby's grille work.

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Dining room

The old money-order office became a dining room; its walk-in safe, still working, was outfitted with cherry cabinets to hold her silver collection.

Belhasen called on Michael Reber, a Mennonite craftsman from West Liberty, Ky., to construct the home's woodwork. Reber patiently drew sketches for his client, hoping to hit on motifs, trims and an overall design she would like. In this way, artisan and homeowner collaborated on winning designs, including tall wainscoting, display cabinets, moldings and a bookshelf-lined library modeled after Henry Higgins' retreat in the 1964 Warner Bros. musical "My Fair Lady."

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Leisure library

From the start, the project's success depended on the new owner's ability to establish a logical traffic pattern and inject warmth into the imposing commercial palace. She accomplished the job with fine wood details and antique lighting fixtures that leavened the overbearing effect of the building's massive stone walls. "I had the place laid out in my mind 15 minutes after I walked in the door," the doctor/design junkie recalls. "I knew where I'd put the kitchen, where the living room would go, and I knew I could run a library off the main staircase."

A new catwalk transformed an open area near the original staircase into a two-story library. The decorative molding was found elsewhere in the building, stripped, repainted and installed as trim; the pedestal table was salvaged from the lobby. The ceiling treatment hides unsightly old pipes.

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Great room

A new limestone fireplace took the place of the original stamp window, becoming the focal point of the current great room, an informal living area. The iron grilles designed to partition the lobby from office areas remain in place, allowing the sunlight that streams through the building's original oversize windows to reach adjoining living areas.

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Postmaster's office

The owner claimed the old postmaster's office as her own, keeping its stenciled, pebbled-glass door.

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Reinterpret and reuse

The upstairs men's lavatory — complete with janitor's sink, vintage toilet and an antique Kohler shower fixture — still functioned perfectly. Belhasen didn't have the heart to rip these out, so she kept much of the room, updating the sinks to create a modern vanity area.

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At home

Belhasen turned a part of the old loading dock into a veranda, and added French doors and a concrete balustrade.

Today, she and her husband, Clyde Woods II -- a former professional wrestler and Kentucky native whom she married after the renovation was complete -- make their home at the old post office, which now accommodates a spacious master bedroom suite, four spectacular bathrooms and a double fireplace that unites a lavish, wood-trimmed front parlor with a less formal great room.

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