They decorated the original home in a style from the time period between 1885 and 1912. The Shenks also added some rooms to the house, in the rear where the 1890 addition had been. The new addition holds a modern kitchen and family room and bedroom, as well as a wheelchair-accessible bathroom.

If you were to visit them on a Sunday, you'd find Warren is the one who jumps right in, giving details of the renovation. It seems Warren Shenk is a history teacher, and in this house he lives out his passion for the past.

"I wish I could be a carpenter," he says. He's not — but he knows how to research every historic detail.

As he pulls out photos or talks about the light fixtures or rhapsodizes about how many coats of paint were necessary for the faux grain finish on the sills, it occurs to the visitor that he may be as much in love with this house as his wife is. No matter that she has spent more years in it than he has.

Occasionally, during the conversation, Warren will try to stifle his enthusiasm and invite his wife to explain how some detail in the restoration came about. Cheerfully, Mary Elen will tell him to explain it and she'll wander out into the garden to pick a few flowers.

But she'll come back in when the visitors reach the kitchen. There, she opens the sideboard, the one that her great-great grandmother used — and her grandmother, and her mother. At this point, Mary Elen's memories begin to take center stage. She invites a visitor to smell the wood, the place where spices have been stored for more than a century.

She loves this cupboard for the memories it brings as well as for its simple design. When she was planning her new kitchen she bought knobs that look like the ones on her antique cupboard. She had the cupboard's molding replicated as well, in the molding above her new kitchen cabinets.

Warren is the one who wrote the application for the Utah Heritage Foundation's Preservation Award (which the Shenks won in 2003). He wrote of the renovation of the Bringhurst house, saying, "It became apparent that each generation had made its contribution to the house. The first generation had the house built. The second generation put an addition on at 'the turn of the century.' The third generation installed electricity and plumbing. And Mary Elen's parents, the fourth generation, had been preserving the house in various fashions for over 60 years.

"We, Mary Elen and I, the fifth generation, decided that our project would be a complete historical renovation, interior and structurally."

What he didn't say in the application is that he and Mary Elen were thinking about the seventh generation when they did their remodeling. And sure enough, their daughter and son-in-law, Marye Jane and Tony Kiser, have twins who just turned 1.