GUILDERLAND — It’s a house full of spirits and stories, said Scott Frush recently of his home at 6130 Nott Road in Guilderland.

Built in about 1840, the home has been lovingly and painstakingly restored by Frush, who has also added custom vintage decorative elements everywhere. Many of these are reclaimed items that were “cast off or broken or bought for pennies on the dollar at an estate sale,” Frush said recently.

Many are given to him in disrepair by people who don’t have the inclination or ability to fix them. “People don’t bring me things of value that are new and shiny; they give me things because they know I enjoy bringing them back to life.”

He then either reuses them in some new way or restores them to their original use and luster. 

The home he shares with his wife, Mariella, contains a wealth of stories that they have discovered within its walls as well as many that they have introduced into the home in the form of rescued and recycled items.

One of the stories hidden within the house itself dates from 1888 and is literally written into the house’s original wavy glass windowpanes. This window, in what would then have been the kitchen and is now a mudroom, reads “Anna Cromme / and / Charlie Magill.”  

The story goes that the names were scratched by Anna into the glass with her mother’s diamond wedding ring during the great blizzard of 1888, when she would have been 15. Neighbor Charlie Magill, who lived “not a quarter mile from here” would have been 13.

“The romantic in me thinks that she knew, back then, that this boy was going to be hers,” Frush said.

Because he was. The two neighbors were married just five years later. They spent their whole lives together and are now buried side by side in Prospect Hill Cemetery, Frush said.

Another story is one that the Frushes added themselves. It’s in a Scrabble game, framed and covered with glass, that hangs on the hallway wall just outside the living room.

Scott Frush made it as a Christmas present for Mariella in 2006, six months after they first met. He had filled it with words like “cozy,” “warm,” and “naps” to describe their relationship and also hidden there the words “Please,” “marry,” and “me,” staggered over different lines. He gave it to her in the carriage house, where he was living at the time.

She soon began to cry, looking at it. “It’s so nice,” she kept saying. “But did you read it?” he had to ask. “Did you read this line, for instance: ‘Please.’ And this one?” He pointed to “marry” and to “me.” She said, “Wait a minute, what are you saying? Do that again!”

They were married the following June, a day short of a year from the time they met.

Frush originally thought that the house was built earlier, in the 1700s. He hired an architectural historian to assess the home’s age, who “pinned it down to between 1837 and 1842.” Frush believes that it was built by Dr. Charles D. Cooper, who played a role in the death of Alexander Hamilton.

Cooper owned a house on State Street in Albany and was the one who wrote the original article outlining Hamilton’s beef with his political rival Aaron Burr. The article was “reprinted in, I think, The Washington Post,” Frush said recently, where it was read by Burr, who promptly challenged Hamilton to their fateful duel.

The reason he thinks that Cooper had the house built?

Frush has a deed transferring property (“I believe it said that it was in Hamiltonville, which is an old name for Guilderland”) from Dr. Cooper to the Cromme family, dated 1843. And Frush says that old-timers in the area refer to his house as “the Cooper house.”

The house’s scale, he says, is grand for the period, suggesting that it would have been built by a person of means. “We know that the Crommes lived there,” so it makes sense, he says, to believe that it was Dr. Cooper who built the house, or rebuilt it on the site of an older, smaller house.

Dr. Cooper’s home in what is now Guilderland would have been, Frush says, a country home. “At that time, this was the wilds,” he adds.

Eunice and Harlan Milks bought the property in 1959, and all of their children grew up there. Frush is in contact with their son John Milks, who still lives in the area.

John Milks told Frush that he remembers an old woman coming to the house and introducing herself to his mother and asking if she might take a look around inside. She told the family she had been born and grown up in the house and wanted to see it one more time before she passed away.

She came inside and immediately went over to the window and exclaimed, “Oh, they’re still there!” Presumably she was happy to learn that the windows, with their embedded story, had not been replaced with modern glass.

She told the Milkses that her sister had scratched the names into the glass during the great blizzard of 1888.

The woman who visited the home could not have been Anna herself, Frush says, since she died in 1954, before the Milkses moved in. He says she must be one of Anna’s younger sisters, either Elizabeth, who was born in 1877 and died in 1969, or Aleda, who lived from 1883 through 1981. Elizabeth remained in Guilderland, Frush says, so it may well have been she who visited the Milkses. 

Frush was trained in traditional wooden boatbuilding in Maine and worked for furniture makers in Maine before taking on the Nott Road house. So he had some knowledge, he says, of wood and woodworking. But the learning curve was steep, and included finding out fast how to repair electrical systems, plumbing, venting, siding, flooring, and even foundations.

He had help from general contractor and restorer of old homes Charlie Stewart Jr., whose family is from Altamont. Stewart was one of the first people Frush met after moving to Albany, and he eventually became a close friend. Frush says he is now “like a brother.”

Early on, Frush sometimes helped out on Stewart’s projects, and he in turn often consulted Stewart when he was “snookered by something.” Once, when Frush received an insurance check for the damage to his roof from the big hail storm about five years ago, he just “handed the check over” to Stewart and asked him to fix it rather than try to teach himself how to put on a roof.

Layered stories and history are everywhere.

As just one example, a bathroom just off the mudroom was added, he says, in 1923, when Margaret Nott owned the house. Frush knows when it was added because he found newspapers inside the wall; they had been placed there as insulation when the room was added onto what had been the exterior of the house.

Another bathroom started out life in the 1908s or 1990s as a room that featured a huge Jacuzzi and wall-to-wall mirrors. Frush’s sister took those out years ago, and then the room became a laundry and storage room until Frush gutted it and turned it into a vintage showpiece.

He put in a chandelier that was being sold “as secondhand junk” in a shop on Central Avenue in Albany and added a tongue-and-groove Douglas fir ceiling. The couple’s washer and dryer are still housed there, and an artist friend gave him a vintage wooden expandable clothes-drying rack that he has cleaned up and affixed to the wall. The couple uses it now when their clothes come out of the dryer not quite done.

A small barn on the property is filled with all manner of vintage material. Scott Frush said that his wife calls it the Magic Barn because she will suggest, for instance, that it would be great if they had a round coffee table to place in front of a particular couch. Then he will disappear for the day and come back at dinnertime, rolling in a coffee table that he has put together from wood he found in the barn.

Once she said that they needed something big to place over a couch and he came in with a huge enameled steel “Theatre” sign — that had once been double-sided and lit with neon — from one of Albany’s original vaudeville theaters.

A shelf in a hallway is actually the mantel from one of the original fireplaces; it also emerged from the barn. “Every time I find original pieces of the house, I like to use them again,” he said.         

Mariella has a “tremendous eye,” Frush said, “for decorating, color, furnishings, taking a space and making it comfortable.”

She doesn’t like him to spend money on gifts for her, he said, so he has to use his imagination at birthdays or Christmas. One such gift hangs on the kitchen wall.

“Mariella loves pigs,” Frush explained, and, when he saw a broken-off cigar box top lying on the basement floor at an estate sale, he was drawn by its graphics and the illustration it bore of a pig. He asked the price and the man running the sale looked at him like he was crazy and said, “Take it.”

Frush cut up a yardstick from an old Albany furniture store and framed the illustration with that and with some original window trim “from when I was redoing the bathroom.” Soon he had an anniversary gift that cost him nothing to make and that now hangs over their kitchen stove.

The couple first met on a blind date in 2006, at the Miss Albany Diner, “down on Broadway,” for a cup of coffee and breakfast. He calls it a “double blind date,” since he did not know Mariella’s friend who introduced them, and she did not know his friend. “I think we both felt very strongly by the end of breakfast that we would, one way or another, know one another our entire lives. And here we are.”

The Frushes, who have no children, might sell the house at some point. There are obvious practical reasons to think about that idea. It is a lot of house for just the two of them to maintain, Scott Frush says, and they have a lot of capital tied up in the property.

They put it on the market briefly, a year ago, through Sotheby’s International Realty. They had thought that it would be smart to try to sell it while both of them are still young and healthy, and downsize to something smaller.

But they quickly realized that they didn’t have the heart to go through with it. Frush explained, “When it actually came down to the reality of selling it, we couldn’t.” They were, he said, much too emotionally attached.

“One day somebody else will own it,” he reflected. “I’ve put my mark on it. Just the way people have put their mark on it before, and somebody will come along after me and put their mark on it. It’s a continuing story.”

The house is filled with “continuing sagas, and I just feel like ours isn’t done here,” he said. He doesn’t feel so much like the “owner” of the house, he said, as the steward.

For now, he and his wife will continue to add their own history to the home that Scott Frush says has a “tremendously good energy to it.”

Sure, he says, his house has honed his skills as a restorer. But mainly, he says, it has forced him to develop greater reserves of ”patience and creativity.”

“When you open a wall in a new house, he says, you know what you are going to find. But, as anyone who owns an old house can attest, when you open a wall there, you have to put on your thinking cap and figure out what to do next.” It’s a challenge that he doesn’t want to give up just yet.