The adventure of restoring a 170-year old home is full of challenges, frustrations, surprises and humbling presentations.
There are crooked walls, floors, ceilings and leaning windows that now slant into the wind. There are drafts where the wind will challenge a burning candle, and the source of the draft lies hidden in the wall, floors and ceilings that will never reveal their secrets. Upon close inspection during the cleaning of board by board, one finds a scratch, a carving that spells the name of a little girl that lived in the house over a hundred years ago and a rusted tin flap in the kitchen floor that provided a point of entry and exit for the house cat that kept mice, or worse, out of the precious grains that helped the family live through a cold winter during the Civil War...you close your eyes for a moment to think of that time and wish you had a looking glass into that world, if only for a moment...and realize you live in the looking glass.
The challenges are often in the obvious, a leaking roof, the rotted floor, or the infrastructure things that never had to worry about 'meeting code' decades and decades ago. The frustrations surface when you pull away an floor plank from 1843 or a heart pine board from 1870, only to find dry rot or skeletons of animals that found their final resting place in a warm wall behind the wood burning stove, Better yet, you realize that floors 170 years ago never needed to worry about the weight of a refrigerator, gas range, dishwasher, or refurbished cast iron tub with beautiful claw feet...forget about a washer and dryer. So you must strategically reinforce the floor to support the things that will carefully be integrated (or hidden) into this perfect place that you now call your home.
What you learn through this process is that each setback, each challenge becomes a new layer in the foundation you are building for the future, your future and the future of the home that will also outlive this generation. You know you need to work through the challenges and, just when you get discouraged, you realize that you have just laid another brick in that foundation. The stress makes way for a sense of accomplishment or a feeling that you are one step closer to breathing new life into a wonderful piece of history...a history in which you are now part of the story. That's why we do this; that's why we keep solving the next problem and trying to laugh as we work through the next restoration surprise. The other Ploughman and I now refer to these 'speed bumps' as 'bricks.' We've recently completed the installation of a shake roof like the one that would have graced the house in 1843; it's a fine hat. And the new restoration windows with 9 over 9 lights have been installed to mimic the one remaining window of the original 1843 construction. Through the windows the golden light shines outward to the pasture at dusk, but it looks much like brand new pair of 19th century spectacles through which the house sees the world around it.
Ploughman 2
