Short answers, pulled from the story.
John Adams was the first president to occupy the White House, moving in on Saturday, the 1st of November 1800. He wrote to his wife Abigail the following day with the blessing that Franklin D. Roosevelt later had carved into the State Dining Room mantel.
The White House was designed by Irish-born architect James Hoban, who was chosen by President Washington after a design competition in July 1792. Hoban modeled the building primarily on Dublin's Leinster House and drew on the architectural principles of the Roman writer Vitruvius and the Venetian architect Andrea Palladio.
British forces burned the White House on the 24th of August 1814, during the War of 1812, in retaliation for American troops' destruction of buildings in the Canadas. Before the fire, employees and enslaved workers rescued a copy of the Lansdowne portrait. Of the many objects taken during the raid, only three have ever been recovered, including a jewelry box returned in 1939 and a medicine chest belonging to President Madison.
By 1948, the White House was declared to be in imminent danger of collapse due to decades of poor maintenance, the addition of a fourth-story attic during the Coolidge administration, and the construction of a second-floor balcony for Truman. The entire interior was dismantled, a new load-bearing steel frame was installed inside the original walls, and the rooms were rebuilt at a total cost of about $5.7 million. Truman lived at Blair House from 1949 to 1951 during the work.
Jacqueline Kennedy directed a major restoration of the White House beginning in 1961, working with Henry Francis du Pont of the Winterthur Museum and Paris designer Stéphane Boudin of the House of Jansen. She assigned each room a distinct historical period as its decorating theme and installed an antique "Vue de l'Amérique Nord" wallpaper designed by Zuber & Cie in 1834. She presented the restored White House to the public in a televised tour on Valentine's Day in 1962.
The White House complex covers just over 18 acres and includes the Executive Residence, the West Wing, the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, and Blair House. The Executive Residence alone has 132 rooms, 35 bathrooms, 412 doors, 147 windows, 28 fireplaces, eight staircases, and three elevators, across 55,000 square feet of floor space.