I've always loved the process of peeling away successive layers of wallpaper, paint, and flooring, un-snaking old wiring and replacing cranky pipes, and restoring the finer points of a great old house. I find myself drawn to the mystery and romance of a home that has sheltered generations, with its inherent capacity to reveal secrets and tell stories of times past.

A few years ago, when my family happened upon a nineteenth century, mansard-roofed Victorian overlooking Stonington harbor and the islands beyond, I knew we'd found a treasure.Other potential buyers saw the cover-ups — dropped, acoustic-tile ceilings; room after room of faux wood-grained vinyl paneling; seventies-era carpets with shaggy pile and garish color combinations — and moved on. I contemplated these unappealing surfaces with the curiosity and excitement of an archaeologist preparing to excavate some ancient culture. Like him, I was ready to dig.

So, like a proper archaeologist, I approached our residential excavation first by studying our surroundings. Looking at our just-acquired house and walking around town, for instance, I spotted lots of mansard-roofed structures and wondered why so many had sprung up in this seaside location. Earle Shettleworth, director of the Maine Historic Preservation Commission and an expert on Maine architecture, helped provide some historical context. He notes that the proliferation of mansard roofs in Maine — an observant traveler will see them in almost every town — grew out of a bustling economy in the late nineteenth century. Examples of the mansard-roofed, Second Empire style started rising in Maine in the 1850s, and were built throughout the state until the late 1880s. Our house's construction coincided with this era and was one of the first to be built on the eastern side of the harbor.

A housewarming gift from a neighbor, a pre-1890 photograph, shows the house sitting high on a treeless mass of granite ledge. The town looks rough and rugged, its terraced hillsides having been logged off and still raw from quarrying, its boom years about to begin. It was a thrill to realize that our house had borne silent witness to the town's complete history, for the Green's Landing district of Deer Isle was not incorporated into Stonington until 1897.

Although mansards in larger towns were most often built three stories high, many Down East examples, including ours, have just two stories. Our contractor quickly dismissed my romantic notions about the similarities between a mansard's near-vertical swooping roofline and the ribs of a boat hull. "It's actually a very efficient way to add space to a house," he points out. "Instead of the floor-and-a-half that you get with an ordinary gabled roof, the second floor becomes almost full-sized." Common sense, perhaps more than fashion, figured in the form's appeal to rural Mainers.

Once we'd decided to dig into our new house, we set about finding a building crew who we trusted to judge the difference between trash and treasure within the layers of our home. We found what we sought in local contractor Todd Lawson and the men and women who comprise his capable team. (Lawson was recommended by our electrical contractor, Curt Haskell, who also happens to be our friend and next-door neighbor.)

Lawson, a native of Swans Island who moved to Stonington as a boy and grew up, literally, across the street from my new home, came to us with more than twenty years of experience renovating and restoring old island houses. But his track record was even more perfectly suited to our project: He had firsthand knowledge of our house and the family who lived in it before us, having attended to the house's maintenance during his early years as a carpenter. Since then he's moved on to build and renovate many beautiful homes around Deer Isle. Soon after our purchase, he'd helped us weatherproof and paint the windowed cupola that tops the mansard roof. He, too, had the vision to see beneath the outer layers of paneling, cracked plaster, and peeling wallpaper to the home's elegant bones. Any archaeologist would be lucky to have him and his assembly of specialists and subcontractors on a dig.

As soon as we'd hired Lawson's island crew, information about our home and its past seemed to pour forth. Everyone seemed to have positive memories of the house; its previous owners were fixtures in Stonington and had been benefactors of many local institutions. There were stories: the plays that the family's daughters put on in the hayloft of the house's attached horse barn; the streetlight-sized lamp their mother affixed to the barn so the children could play ball in the side yard past sundown; the church youth group meetings in the living room. The stories of the family's past wove the house into town life. And with that knowledge, we began to feel more a part of Stonington's fabric, too.

Shortly before work began in December 2005, Lawson was gathering estimates for the various specialized jobs that the renovation would require. When the plasterer arrived, so did the point of no return. We had to remove some of the vinyl paneling and displace a section of dropped ceiling so that the scope of the work could be assessed.

Off came a couple of rows of paneling in the dining room, revealing many layers of wallpaper. This foretold hours of steaming and scraping ahead. Then down came some ceiling tile in the living room. Heads disappeared into the space. Good news. The ceilings were ten feet high, instead of the current eight, and pronounced "not too rough." And there was more. Lawson motioned for me to have a look.

I climbed the ladder and peeked inside. Above my head hung not one, but two old brass chandeliers, still in place. Later, when the whole ceiling came down, the fixtures revealed themselves as beautiful relics that our lighting pros rewired and reinstalled in the renovated room.

From that point on, unexpected discoveries seemed to come to us almost as regularly as our contractor's bills. On one check-in trip, I brought pieces of poster board that I had painted in colors that I hoped might be replicated in the renovated rooms. By that time, the walls had been stripped of paneling and paper, revealing old paint on the plaster. To my surprise, the living room's original paint was nearly identical to the shade I had agonized over for months. I like to think that, just perhaps, I was channeling the taste of the original owners.

Underneath the worn and faded carpeting was more good news; after many hours of scraping the carpet, the adhesive that glued it to a layer of old linoleum, and the mastic that secured the linoleum, the crew found restorable hardwood floors everywhere. Slowly and methodically our floor experts sanded and polished them, carefully replacing missing or damaged wood strips with new, matching stock.

Other surprises required minor course corrections as we worked our way through the renovation. Higher ceilings required more substantial moldings; the crew designed a beautiful but simple crown molding that matched the room's new volume. A fireplace installed in the mid-twentieth century — a rarity in Stonington, as most in-town houses had stoves rather than hearths — now looked awkward, with its 1950s brick face and brass-and-glass screen. Lawson and one of his men, a ship's carpenter by training, built a perfect, period-appropriate mantel using a sketch the two men drew on a scrap of lumber.

With its grimy layers gone, the home's original interior proportions and dignity emerged. The rooms seemed to glow, even in the dim light of late afternoon. "Your house is smiling," said one friend who stopped in for a look.

As with any dig, there were unexpected finds hidden in the walls where the electricians snaked in and out replacing old cable with code-worthy wire. Remnants of other eras and other families surfaced: a sword and sheath of indeterminate origin, a riding crop with a carved handle, a handmade peace sign medallion on a leather thong. As the crew crawled over, under, around, and through the many nooks and recesses of the house, one puzzle went unsolved. What was the purpose of the door in the cemented-over barn floor? Since it wasn't in the scope of our current renovations, this mystery remained.

As the project wound down, neighbors and friends, and friends of friends, trooped through the nearly finished rooms. In Stonington, as in most other small Maine towns, change piques local curiosity, and the bustle around our usually winter-quiet house had raised local antennae. So we decided that the best response was an open-door policy. Besides, we thought, we might learn something. And we did.

The previous owner's daughter, who had sold us her mother's house, is also a close friend of our new neighbors, the Haskells. When she visited them one Sunday, we invited her over for a look at our renovations. She was charmed by the careful work we'd accomplished and solved the mystery of the door in the floor. This one was a Cold War relic: a fallout shelter, perhaps built inside one of the two granite cisterns that our home inspector had found beneath the house before we bought it. Our source told us that the canned goods her parents stored there have probably remained untouched since the sixties.

Perhaps someday I'll have the courage to take a peek inside that door. Who knows — that shelter may just make a nice wine cellar.

A Web Site for Wallpaper Sleuths

If you want to pursue period wallpaper for your restored home, Historic New England now offers a database for finding paper designs from every era of American architecture. Funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the site allows browsers to search the organization's enormous collection of samples (only the Smithsonian's is larger). In addition, you will find rare photographs of nineteenth-century interiors that may assist with your decorating plans, as well as a lengthy list of sources for reproductions of old and historic paper patterns. You can conduct your search with a large range of criteria; I found that entering specific dates (e.g., 1890-1900) provides the widest view of period patterns. Check it out at www.historicnewengland.org/wallpaper/