Since there were often servants quarters on the third floor, natural light is nice.

As for painting the trim white: if your house has old looking, black baseboards and trim, it's more than likely mahogany. Most houses built in the teens and twenties had mahogany as an option, kit houses included, and usually added $200 to the original price tag, [[so the house cost $1100 instead of $900). Oak and southern yellow pine....well, that's firewood, or most often, flooring, although southern yellow pine usually cost more than oak [[they had to get it from down-south).

I've been in plenty of houses where that red trim was painted white, only to strip it and find, tada, cherry, but these were usually Boston Edison, Indian Village, or University District where someone didn't know better, or care, in the 50, 60, 70's and painted.

Finally, and there's not alot of it left in these parts, but there's a house I work on regularly in Woodbridge that features American Chestnut pocket doors and stairway, including the treads and landings and balustrades. Often mistaken for pine and oak, raw chestnut has the same "yellow" look and tan graining as pine, but the tightness of oak. White oak grain in its raw form has no color, until you wipe thinner accross it to expose it. There are very few houses left in Detroit from that era, as there was a huge Chestnut blight beginning around 1910 that wiped out all the American Chestnut by the late 30's. Houses built before 1920, especially in Woodbridge, [[not much left in Brush Park), are the likely suspects to have Chestnut, but that "pine" you might be looking at on the first floor built-ins of a BE walk-thru is probably chestnut.