Homecoming!

   Tonight is our favorite sort of evening because a little before eight we'll pick our daughter up at the train station and she'll spend the weekend with us. One of the most satisfying aspects of doing all these projects is seeing Sudie James' reaction each time she comes home. Tonight we celebrate our fourth month in the house and we will celebrate her fourth visit with a delicious dinner made by Pete.
   It's a lovely change of pace for her here since this is quite rural compared to her life in NYC.

125th

The green in our town

    When she is here with me we take walks in the woods, sip hot cider, visit used book stores and dream that one day it may warm up enough to return to the beach or sit out by the fire under the many stars.
    But when she arrives tonight we will whisk her back to the house and she will walk through the rooms and point out the changes that she sees. I've purposely held onto the next post since it is her latest surprise, and as she sits on the train that is hurtling towards us, I hope she is filled with as much anticipation as we feel about her imminent arrival.
   Welcome home, my love.

Art by our friend Jon Oldham 

The Power of Little

   Numerous smallish but, for us, huge projects ensued. They were done primarily by Pete since I simply come up behind him and clean, then clean some more, then paint. Let me take this moment to present the kudos he so well deserves. Pete has two power tools - a circular saw and a drill. With only those he  finished the archway between the kitchen and dining area

    he produced the frames of both the front and back doors,

framed in and moulded five windows,

              

then put up the moulding in the front hall.

   By the end of those bouts, he decided it was time to buy a mitre kit. No power involved.

   When I now watch 'This Old House' I fail to see the challenge. With a plethora of professional help, state-of-the-art tools and a seemingly limitless budget, how does that help those of us at home watching? Aren't there people out there who buy old homes and don't have seven figure salaries? Oh wait, I know the answer to that.
   In the first three months of living and working in our little house, we spent about $150 on primer and paint, sheetrock and sheetrock accoutrement cost around $200, $50 or so on wall and pipe insulation, less than $50 on lighting fixtures, $25 on the all important caulk and $400 worth of wood.
   But what we are doing is absolutely nothing compared to those who originally built the place. The nails in our floors are home made. When this house was built the wood had to be felled, hewn and finished on property. Metal melted down for nails. Plaster made and mixed with well water. No Ace Hardware or Home Depot. To those before us, we may as well all be on 'This Old House'.
 

Changing Mantras

   For over a year we searched for a house with our divinely appointed realtor Shelly, and our mantra was always "what's wrong with this one?" We were pragmatic enough to realize we could never afford a place advertised as "move in condition". Nor did we want that. We preferred a home that needed us. It remains baffling however that we could fall in love with a place that needed so very much attention. I have no idea what we were thinking.
   If the previous owners liked their lighting fixtures which I noted disappeared with them, they must have been passionate about their doors. They left us only three. The cellar doorway was a dark gaping maw into the living room, and it was but one of many.

Cellar doorway on left- door elsewhere

 Around the remaining front and back doors there blew exposed insulation and sundry wall stuffing. The same could be said of  many of the windows. So our work was literally cut out for us and, as I have mentioned,  we had never done such things. Sometimes our solutions weren't perfect - nay, our solutions were never perfect. And it was out of those imperfections that the new mantra was born - "it's better than it used to be". One can get a lot of mileage out of that mantra. Simple things like a nicely painted door began to make a great deal of difference.

   And a good story goes with that door. I introduced myself to a neighbor whom I thought had a fine looking chicken house in his back yard. He laughed at the idea that chickens live there when, in effect, he does during cider season. Beside the cider house stands a garden enclosed with chicken wire, and on the north side of the fence is a lovely old door painted a pale mossy green. I told him the story of our missing cellar door and some days later he called to say he had found a good door for us.  It was indeed a beauty, and when I offered him money he told me it was his house warming gift. As was a parting bottle of cider. And a loaf of banana bread from his dear wife Louise. 

Let The Work Begin

On October 13th we closed on the house in the morning and then took a picnic lunch and went directly to our new home. The night before we had purchased compound, tape and paint to begin work on a raw kitchen. Pete immediately got down to taping and his first round of compound, tasks he had never done before, and I primed the  wall opposite to the kitchen. Since there was so much to do in the house, our initial strategy was to work on the main front room which included the living, dining and kitchen areas all in one open space. The kitchen posed the most problems.

The day after purchase and the second compound application

We needed to finish the walls off because they had been left as mismatched scraps of sheetrock. The windows were just that - windows with no frames.  Wires were protruding from the walls in several places because it seemed that the previous owners liked their fixtures so much that they took them when they left. After Pete had worked on the walls for some time he realized that they would never be the smooth surfaces he had hoped for. Rather than starting over with new sheetrock, we chose to camouflage the problem with shelves. Those posed their own set of problems but we are quite pleased with the outcome.

Our kitchen two months later

Love Before First Sight

In the middle of last October, almost four months ago now,  Peter and I found ourselves the owners of a house we had been looking for all of our lives. Though we had been happily living in apartments for as long as we could remember, one autumn afternoon we stumbled upon a place so lovely that we seemed to almost fall into the process of buying it. Perhaps the most fitting illustration of what I mean - I don't remember seeing or even looking for the bathroom. And better yet, before we even walked through the back door, Peter stood with arms outstretched in the backyard and said, "I think we're home." We simply fell in love.

Our first photos on a September afternoon

"I think we're home"

The pièce de résistance - the shed also built in 1850