Three and a half years after President Clinton declared Abraham Lincoln’s “summer White House” to be a national monument, the place is still filled with avocado green carpet, linoleum flooring and fluorescent lights — relics of the home’s most recent use as a governmental public affairs office.

Squirrels have gotten into the walls and eaten away at historic window panes. Wooden rafters supporting the roof are rotten. Termites have destroyed one-third of the foundation supporting the home’s library.

But the time has come for the restoration of the President Lincoln and Soldiers’ Home National Monument, which sits on the grounds of the Armed Forces Retirement Home three miles north of the White House.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation has raised more than $5.5 million since Clinton’s declaration in 2000. Work officially began in January to restore the exterior to the way it looked between 1862 and 1864.

The interior plans remain uncertain. The Trust needs at least $6 million more to convert the two main floors into a museum with exhibits and Civil War-era decor. Yet those involved are optimistic about the future of this Gothic Revival-style cottage.

“We want to make this a synthetic part of his presidency,” said Sophia Lynn, the National Trust’s project manager for the restoration.

In his new book, “Lincoln’s Sanctuary,” historian Matthew Pinsker describes the cottage as an integral backdrop to Lincoln’s actions in wartime Washington. Lincoln commuted daily during the summers between there and the Executive Mansion.

“Along the way he connects with the people,” writes Pinsker. “We see him trotting along a row of ambulances, talking with the wounded soldiers. We see him with escaped slaves in their contraband camps.”

The cottage, moreover, stood only a few yards away from the Soldier’s Home, where “crippled veterans regularly filled the nearby paths.” Also on site was the first national military cemetery, which was quickly filling with bodies.

“Thus even while attempting to escape from their private grief and the national crisis, the Lincolns still found themselves surrounded by the somber echoes of war,” Pinsker writes.

Pinsker and others argue that Lincoln’s cottage experiences strongly influenced his greatest works, including the Emancipation Proclamation, drafted during Lincoln’s first summer at the cottage in 1862; and the Gettysburg Address, delivered in November 1863.

One of the goals of the President Lincoln and Soldier's Home project is to restore the exterior to how it looked during Abraham Lincoln's presidency. The national monument is three miles north of the White House in Washington.

Diaries and letters from presidential military guards and visitors to the cottage reveal a personal side of Lincoln. On the night before he called 300,000 more men into battle in the second year of the war, Lincoln sat on the cottage steps, reciting poetry “and brooding over the fate of the Union armies,” Pinsker writes.

Future exhibits at the President Lincoln and Soldiers’ Home National Monument will feature the cottage as a vehicle for understanding Lincoln during his tumultuous presidency.

Unlike house museums that feature tangible artifacts from the period they represent, Lynn and other project managers say the cottage will focus on ideas and events and less on architecture or popular furniture of the day.

Restorers struggle to decorate interior

Work officially began on President Lincoln’s “summer White House” in January, more than three years and $5.5 million after the property was designated a national monument.

It’s easier for restorers to bring the cottage’s exterior back to how it looked during the Civil War because many photographs survive. But no writings or pictures of the interior exist.

“It’s always a real detective story,” said David Overholt, the cottage’s preservation projects director.

Restorers found several layers of flooring within the home. Their next step is discovering which layer President Lincoln actually walked on.

More than 400 samples were taken throughout the interior to determine the paint or paper that might have covered its walls. Lincoln’s wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, is known to have redecorated the home during that time, but no details of her project survive.

But based on several outside photographs, the asphalt-shingle roof is being replaced with slate on one part and copper on another, to reflect the two phases of the home’s construction in 1842. The roof’s wooden structure also is being replaced.

The decorative porch that graces most modern photographs of the cottage was taken down and is being replaced with a smaller version similar to the one that existed in Lincoln’s time. The home’s stucco coating is also being replaced with a new stucco mixture that would have been used during the home’s construction. But it won’t be painted, because original stucco uncovered at the home’s foundation revealed that it was left bare in the 19th century.

Home & Garden Television donated $75,000 to the effort.