How Was My House Decorated?
An inventory can give you an idea of when your house was wired for electricity (oil lamps were used both instead of gas and as task lighting in houses piped for gas, but they were not used in homes with electricity), how it was heated (look for the stove type), how recently it had been redecorated (look for furniture marked "old" or note the values), and how the rooms were used. We are fairly sure, just from the amount of furniture in Lillias Johnston's bed chamber, that she had the west bedroom in our row house rather than the smaller east bedroom. We're also fairly sure, from the presence of a washstand, commode, and toilet set among her belongings, that the house did not yet have a full indoor bathroom.
While you have the probate documents out, take a look at the final adjudication of costs in settling the estate. If there are major costs for repairs, the deceased owner may have lacked money for maintenance, which also suggests that there may not have been money for decorating "up to the minute."
General Sources
If your house was not very "important" and the heirs of its previous owners were not sentimental about keeping photos or passing on family stories, you can still turn to general sources that will tell you how a typical house of the era would have been decorated.
Be cautious in consulting books or articles written by housing reformers such as Charles Locke Eastlake, as reformers tended to be "voices crying out in the wilderness" of popular taste. Be equally cautious about coffee-table decorating books that call themselves "Victorian," as these tend to provide a romanticized view of styles available mostly to the wealthy (though Alison Kyle Leopold's Victorian Splendor starts with a handy guide to the major styles).
Probably the best book on how actual Victorians decorated is Victorian Interior Decoration: American Interiors 1830-1900 by Roger W. Moss and Gail Caskey Winkler. The authors are specialists in the history of design and did a great deal of digging in the wonderful collection at the Philadelphia Athenaeum.
You'll also get a good read out of The American Family Home: 1800-1960 by Clifford Edward Clark, Jr. While Clark tends to treat reformers' tracts as evidence of what people did, rather than of what social leaders wished they would do, he provides helpful background on Victorian ideals of home and family, as well as lots of old
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