Laura Strickler admits that she enjoys being a do-it-yourselfer.
“I’m confident in my own decorating skills, and I like to paint,” she says. “But I knew I couldn’t do all this.”
“All this” refers to the improvements Strickler wanted to complete before April 26, 2022, when her house will be open to the public during Garden Club of Virginia’s Historic Garden Week. The Rothesay Circle tour is on Tuesday, April 26th.
Strickler says her needs were varied: a refresh on interior walls, repainted kitchen cabinets, and a full exterior paint job – plus accumulated carpentry fixes. Because she had worked with H.J. Holtz & Son on a smaller job years ago, she felt comfortable calling the company again.
“I knew they would do an awesome job,” she says. “I have used a lot of people in the past to do a lot of different things, but I knew Rick [Holtz, company president] could handle something of this magnitude in the timeframe we had.”
A decade ago, Strickler and her husband were ready to leave Richmond’s Fan district but didn’t want to go too far afield. They found a brick Georgian home on Rothesay Circle, tucked behind Windsor Farms and City Stadium. “It’s a big old house in a great spot,” she says.
Over the years, she’s managed smaller tasks herself, though she did bring in the H.J. Holtz & Son team to repair and repaint some plaster. “They did a great job,” she says.”
For this year’s Historic Garden Week, Strickler brought the Holtz team in again for a broader array of tasks: repainting the kitchen and its cabinets, the dining room, the front hallway, and an imposing stairway, as well as exterior painting. “It’s a house with not as much walls as there are windows and moldings and casements,” she says. “There’s a lot of fine detail work.”
Strickler had also noticed the company’s expanding carpentry services division and was thrilled to hand over items that had been languishing on her “to-do” list. “While I didn’t have anything exciting and new, like paneling, I had a laundry list of stuff that had been building up over the years,” she says. Those tasks included replacing several doors dating to the 1930s and fixing plinths of two-story columns at the rear of the house. “[Carpentry division manager] Jeff Nonnemacker facilitated all those tiny projects that have added up to one big carpentry project,” she says. “They’ve done great work.”
While there have been many moving parts, Strickler says work has gone smoothly.
“It’s been nice and seamless,” she says. “They’ve been popping in and out. When they finish a door, I know guys will come to paint it. I don’t have to coordinate six people, and I know they will do a good job.”
Strickler admits the company’s reputation for being more expensive than some other painting companies gave her pause before that first job, years ago. But after she saw the quality of the work the team provided then, she realized the cost reflected the quality of the work and after-care that Holtz & Son offers.
“It’s great to know that down the road, when my shutters look grumpy and my cabinets are scuffed up, I can call H.J. Holtz & Son,” she says. “It’s really nice to have confidence in a solid, respected company that will stand behind the work they do.”
H.J. Holtz & Son also provided Garden Week prep services at 4801 Pocahontas Ave., painting both the exterior and interior spaces. Garden Week ticket holders will be able to visit this home during the Olde Locke Lane and Westmoreland Place tour on Thursday, April 28.