When John Council bought his 1929 French eclectic house on Gaston Avenue, the inside was trashed. The hedges in the front yard were so tall you couldn't see the residence from the street. It smelled like "dirty diapers" inside, he says, but none of that mattered. "Ever since I was a teenager," says Mr. Council, "I've loved taking objects that are ugly and making them beautiful."

After looking at "100 houses," Mr. Council and his fiancée, Karen Greene, a state district judge, walked in and knew it was perfect. They closed on the house in April 2003 and married in October.

"If there's one thing you need to know about this house, it's this: A lot of people buy houses as some sort of status symbol; for others, it's a financial investment. But we bought this house because we loved it, and we loved each other in it. And in the most important time in our lives, this house loved us back," says Mr. Council. "I mean, Karen came here to die."

Mr. Council, 40, a history buff and home restorer moonlighting as a senior reporter for Texas Lawyer, embarked on this restoration project with gusto. He already had a track record rehabbing his previous house, a Craftsman bungalow on nearby Tremont Street. For direction, he relied on A Field Guide to American Houses by Dallasites Virginia and Lee McAlester and a 1927 Sears Roebuck home kit catalog.

He found the original vintage fireplace tiles and bought a working O'Keefe and Merritt stove at a garage sale for $100. An appraiser recently confirmed the house's stained glass is a Rennie Mackintosh rose pattern.

Mr. Council learned everything he could about the house. He pulled the permits from the structure's remodel in 1942, found news clippings about previous owners, from influential Dallas doctors to the revolving door of "long-haired, chanting, spiritually centered counter-culture types" who christened the house Shepherd's Bush from 1970 until 1993. He even determined the house's original wall color by peeling back shoe molding to examine paint drippings from eras gone by.

But what he didn't know about his historic Gaston Avenue redo, what Mr. Council never could have known, is how his home's long history would be woven so significantly into the fabric of his own life.

After seven years in remission from stage 3B breast cancer and only four years into their marriage, Judge Greene was diagnosed with a cancer that attacked her nerves and diaphragm. Three months after the diagnosis, Mr. Council brought his wife back to their Gaston Avenue home to die, never leaving her side.

"The second most important thing I've ever done in my life was restore this house," says Mr. Council. "The first most important thing was to love Karen Greene."

Giving a tour, Mr. Council will point out the plaster molding and the original pine floors, but he'll also stop in a corner and tell you an anecdote about his wife, a night owl who spent so much time in her office they nicknamed it "Karen's chambers." He knows the exact spot in the kitchen where they took the funny picture of each other after they both had shaved their heads – Karen because of the chemo and John in solidarity.

"Karen was so proud of this place," he remembers. "She would have dinner parties here and invite her friends over. She shined when she showed it off to her friends."

When Judge Greene started having severe pain in her arm in August 2006, the couple chalked it up to nerve damage from the radiation; after all, nothing was showing up on the MRIs. Six months later, in January, the cancer did show up, and though she fought it there was just nothing she or the doctors could do.

"She was strong. Karen was so strong it was deceptive. I thought until six days before she died she was going to beat it," Mr. Council says.

It was during these last days that the house, which had sheltered so many characters for almost three-quarters of a century, became so important to Mr. Council. Every ounce of history within the walls pointed him toward the biggest moment in his life, to date.

"When we decided to go home for hospice care, I knew I had to get things ready. I didn't break down because I had a job to do and I worried about stupid [stuff], like I wanted to make sure the yard was mowed and that the house looked good for her," he remembers. "And when I pulled up, [next-door neighbors] Rick and Mike had mowed the front yard and planted flowers half way up the stairs. And I lost it. I just lost it.

"To this day I figure it was at that point that I realized how many people cared for us. You find out what people are made of."

On April 25, 2007, the night before she died, Mr. Council asked the hospice nurse how much time his wife had left. "She said, 'I think she'll go tonight.' And I was so terrified. I was so terrified of what it was going to be like to live in this house without my wife."

During happier times – before cancer, before hospice, after the renovations were complete and the couple basked in their renovated home – they had dreamed of being featured on HGTV's If Walls Could Talk. But the show was never filming in Texas. In January of this year, Mr. Council pitched the show's producers again, and this time they selected the house. The HGTV crew filmed the segment on Feb. 13, but no air date has been announced.

"Karen would be beside herself. God, I wish she could be here for this," he says.

In a way, he knows she is.

"Karen is still in this house, and I have to leave it," he says.

After a year of being alone in the house, Mr. Council is thinking about moving on. He'll find another historic fixer-upper or two in a neglected part of town, "the ones that need love to make them whole again."

"A house used to be a place I lived," he says. "Now I see it as a place where I make a life."