This Old Farmhouse

This will allow you to watch as we start and eventually finish our renovation. Enjoy!

[thisoldfarmouse]

Central heat and a problem solving triumph…... 

For the first time in this homes 140+ history it has a comprehensive central heat and cooling system.  Just before Thanksgiving we got the boiler running.  So now the house has four independent zones for heat run by four thermostats.  In the process of hooking up the thermostat wires we discovered there was a dead short in the master bedroom, bathroom , and closet zone.  Basically somewhere in 35-45 ft of thermostat wire the was a place or places where the wire had been crushed or nicked enough to allow the conductors to make contact with each other. Simply put the thermostat is a switch.  When it calls for heat it closes and completes the circuit, that in turn starts the pump and the heat is circulated.  When it no longer wants heat it opens and ends the cycle.  So my job was to find the short or fish 35ft of new wire through framing and finishes that were for the most part inaccessible.  The path for the wire sent it up an interior kitchen wall, across the kitchen ceiling, then lastly up to its location on a wall in our master bedroom.  The good news it was “relatively inaccessible”.  I installed a vent in the kitchen ceiling above our woodstove that supplies heat (passive heat) to our master bedroom, as well as heating our shower seat.  My plan was simply to unhook the vent (pictured upper left), push it into the void under the shower seat and look for a way to fish a new thermostat wire.  When I removed the vent I found the thermostat wire and was getting ready to start  cutting up floor and all the other necessary stuff to fish the new wire to the basement……….then it hit me.

With the thermostat wire exposed I decided to cut the wire, expose and separate the conductors.  Because less than a third of the wire was above me it was a long shot, but if the short was in that section of wire I would save myself A WHOLE LOT OF TROUBLE.   I ran down stairs connected the splice in the basement…...and short was gone.  Somewhere above the cut I just made was where the problem was.  I had actually gone to my van to get the saws necessary to start taking flooring up, and was within seconds of starting the demo process when the idea hit me to check for the problem like I did.  I don’t normally get excited about problem solving, I do it every day in my job, but the sudden realization that I had figured it out and didn't have to start pulling floors and ceilings apart brought me MUCH JOY!  I think for the most part I was surprised because it’s not what I do every day.  It would have been one of the first steps in problem solving for an electrician, but I’m not an electrician  I've learned a lot renovating this old farmhouse, and some it has been learning look at things from different views……..like an electrician instead of a carpenter.    

[thisoldfarmouse]

I just won an award for this blog?

For the longest time…...almost two years I was writing fairly regularly with an average of two post per week.  I haven't so much made a conscious decision to back off, as much as we've had our foot to the pedal on life for the last six months….. at times I can't find time to catch my breath, much less write a blog post.  So imagine how surprised I was to see that my blog had placed 44th on feedspot.com’s Top 50 blogs about farmhouses on the web.  When I started this blog I had no idea that I would write over 150 post, much less make onto a top 50 list.  

http://blog.feedspot.com/farmhouse_blogs/

[thisoldfarmouse]

A little something for the mud room. (at Grey Beards Antiques and Collectibles of Jacobus)

[thisoldfarmouse]

Fancy Cut Shakes….Rich was right 

Okay…….this took a lot longer than I thought it would.  It took over two weeks for me to cut the patterns (darts and bobbed corners), install the shakes, and prime.  Every band around the bay has has 40 shakes in it, so every band of a pattern was 120 shakes I had to cut.  That’s two cuts per shake…….so 240 cuts on a chop saw to form one band of three around the bay.  Then add in the time it took to flash the corners, block plane the laps, level and lay out the courses, blah, blah, blah.  When I say two weeks I mean…… I took off work for two weeks and every good weather day, every Saturday, every Sunday that I could work on them I did…….it took a lot of time.  It’s all primed (with an oil based primer) and waiting for good weather so we can top coat it with two coats of paint.  

It’s a lot of detail for a feature on the back of the house.  As you walk down to our home it’s clearly part of the elevation (that you see), and it adds a lot of visual interest to it.  The patterns on the bay are identical to the gables and it pulls it all together…..just like we thought it would.  More than once I’ve questioned my sanity working on this house and the subject came up several times while working on this bump out bay.  

My friend Rich helped me frame some of the office in the beginning (over two years ago).  He looked over at the first floor of the bay that I already framed and said “ It’s going to look good.  Going to be a lot of work, but it’s going to look good”....he was right, but then again he always is.

[thisoldfarmouse]

How crazy do you want to get with the whole restoration idea………. 

All along while working on this house our goal has been to restore it using common sense as our guide.  The top picture shows the north porch roof as it was built and trimmed in 1943.  The bottom picture shows what I came up with for our bump out bay door roof.  It’s not a full blown restoration copy, it’s built and trimmed with materials that were readily available to me.  An exact replica could have cost twice as much, and would have taken longer to build…..and to what end?  The new roof captures the charm of the roof built in 1943 and is in keeping with the rest of the details found on the house.  Over the next couple of weeks {if not longer) I will be working on a restoration job where they want everything to look (and be) period correct.  I'll be working on a Victorian home built around 1900, and the owners have been restoring it for the last 20 years right down to the smallest of small details.  What's important in that statement is TWENTY YEARS of restoration. I like this couple and am happy to do the work for them, but we don’t share the same philosophy.  My wife and I want a serviceable home that meets our needs, and doesn't consume all our time……. and money.  Two and a half years (of evenings and weekends) is enough time to spend on a house remodel.  That being said, there are projects for me that will push into next year, like the gable on the front porch over the stairs, and the retaining wall with sidewalk.  I should finish the majority of the interior before Christmas…...as in merry to us.  Lastly with the steps we've taken in remodeling/restoring this old house; I can sleep at night.  I feel like we've done as good a job at restoring it to a time period that fits it, without leaving us bankrupt…..financially, mentally, and physically.

[thisoldfarmouse]

Building one last roof........

Two and a half years ago I started these renovations by pulling a little roof off of the house. Yesterday I built a small roof for our bump out bay door.  The pictures show how I built it on our back porch, then loaded it on the skid loader. Once I had it on the skid loader I lifted it up and secured it to the house.  Today I’ll trim it out and shingle it. There's a fair amount of detail work left to do on the roof.  If things go well I'll get started on the shakes again.  

[thisoldfarmouse]

If at first you don't succeed………. 

The top picture shows the way the medallions were cut in on the left versus the larger version on the right.  No matter how many times you draw things out sometimes it doesn’t work out.  I didn't want them to become too big, but after I had a chance to look at them in scale on the front of the house I saw they were to small.  So I left the original medallion and added two more courses to the bottom of it.  Now it looks much better.  The bottom picture shows how they act as a pair to balance the larger medallion on the right of the house.  

[thisoldfarmouse]

24 & 25………. 

I finally installed the last two windows (the 24th and 25th).  It's been two years and four months since we started our renovation, and as I’m getting near the end it feels good to walk away from jobs and say “done”.  I don’t have to install anymore windows in this house. Kaya now has two windows that don’t leak air and let the light in…..how novel.

[thisoldfarmouse]

The storm…...and the clean up 

Well with a heat index of close to 110 degrees the house didn't let me down.  It kicked my tail up, down, and sideways in all directions.  The upper left is a picture that shows the filth and saw dust on my arm almost ¼ of an inch thick.  I had to run a circular saw over my head to cut out parts of the old wooden ceiling (painted green in the bottom picture) to allow me to fish electric.  Any time you make this type of cut you are guaranteed to get covered in sawdust,,,,,it was that kind of day, all day long.  I did everything I could to contain the dust and for the most part it went well.  Very little if any dust made it into the kitchen and I only found one small rip in the plastic at the stairwell.  I covered all the floor with paper so clean up went well.  I've got a plan for getting this room drywalled by the end of August.  That should allow me to trim it out and have it painted by the end of September.    

[thisoldfarmouse]

The calm before the storm.... Just a few pictures of the first floor of the original log section of the house. More than once over the two plus years I've been working on this house it's whispered in my ear "I'm going to kick your tail tomorrow" .....it sounded more like yelling while I was taking these pictures.

[thisoldfarmouse]

Shakes, shakes, shakes, and more shakes….and my friend Joe, not young Joe….. just Joe

I don’t know how many hand cut and fastened shakes it took to cover our north gable but it’s all done.  I can honestly say I enjoyed doing it.  It was a challenge on several different levels but I enjoyed all of it.   From hoisting all the materials up to the top and all of the tools necessary to cut and fasten them.  The time spent with my friend Joe painting them was rewarding as well.

I know nothing last forever and most likely in my lifetime I will have to set the scaffold up again, to repaint all of them…. and I almost look forward to that.  Painting such detailed work forces you to slow down and study it.  All of the different angles and how the light casts shadows on them creates a beauty and depth that vinyl shakes can’t capture.   With hand cut shakes they aren’t perfect in shape.  Small variations create an authentic looking finish…..they just look old.  Add to that that they are installed individually by hand they look like they were original to the house…..I couldn’t ask for more.

[thisoldfarmouse]

When was this old house built?

Yesterday morning after I finished writing about James I started to do a little more research on Cross Roads and Hopewell Township and this is what I found.  The picture on the right is map of Hopewell Township that was published in 1876.  The picture on the left shows our house on Google maps.  If you follow Crossroads Ave north from the five way on the old map and compare it to the new map our house is in the same location as a house owned by W S Gemmill.  Given the time it took to publish anything in 1876 I think it's reasonable to say this house was here in 1875. With this discovery that makes the house over 140 years old.  

[thisoldfarmouse]

James Bisker

The top picture shows where James Bisker signed his name…...I just wish he had left a date.  The second picture shows where I found his signature on a log that had been whitewashed to the right of the north door on our front porch.  So we started looking for James and we found out he was born November 6th 1862, he was the third of five children.  He died in 1913 from Meningitis at 51 years of age.  I still think this old house could go back to the 1870”s or maybe older.  Another surprise (besides discovering his name) was that the logs were whitewashed.  When I took off some of the siding on the north wall I discovered that the logs had never been whitewashed.  The logs on the back of the house were whitewashed.  This made me think that when the cabin was first built they only had enough money to side the three sides that faced the road.  This was not uncommon, you would cover the logs as fast as you could with siding.  Whitewash was a temporary solution to help protect the logs as well as make the house look more presentable. So with finding the whitewash on the logs up front, that leads me to believe they sided the north elevation as soon as it was built.   Then they sided the three remaining elevations as soon as they had enough money or time to do so.  That leads to another question….how long did the house sit with a whitewashed exterior before they sided the front porch?  It could have been years.  All of the siding is fastened with square head nails, and the chinking was knocked out of the way as necessary to attach the strips the siding is nailed to.  I would think that has to be no later than the 1890’s.  Back to James (remember James Bisker) he shows up as a farmer in the documentation we found.  It's possible that he was the owner and signed his name to the house before it was covered up with siding, but this is something carpenters do all the time.  So I wonder was this James place, or was he a carpenter in his late 20’s to early 30’s working on it?   We have not researched the deed on our place yet, hopefully that will tell us one way or the other.  Either way I know he saw this old house on the day or days prior to it getting its siding on the front porch.  With his death in 1913 I know even if he saw it the day before he died it sat there for over  hundred years waiting for me to find it…….and I'm glad I did.

[thisoldfarmouse]

A surprise…….and Doug

A friend came over to help me on a Saturday when Deidrah had to work, I told her we would be working on painting the new windows I had just installed in the north wall of the house.  All along it was my plan for us to instal the nine sections of railing on our walkable deck.  I know almost anyone who views this post will see it on a handheld device but in real life it makes a dramatic difference to see it in person. Since I frammed the office addition on the soutern exposure it has seemed out of ballance.in scale and proportion.  We didn’t have much of a choice, we needed the square footage and what the addition provides us in terms of a floor plan.  Now with the railing installed on top it helps add the height to the frame of the addition, that in turn helps it appear more in scale to the rest of the house.  This can best be demonstrated by the before picture upper right and the finished picture on the bottom row. Needless to say my wife was surprised…….as well as almost anyone else who has looked at the addition recently. 

And then there was Doug…….  Doug is the friend who helped me install the railing.  After working with several people in carpentry over the last twenty five years I’ve become skeptical of people and their skill level.  We had had dinner at Doug's home with his family and I had seen the professional level of his finish work.  However this doesn't mean that he would naturally be easy to work with…..it just means I knew, he knew what he was doing.  Some people just aren't easy to work with; not Doug.  He was very easy to work with.  Right away as if we had worked together for ten years we were moving in sync. After installing the first section of rail he was constantly ahead of me, laying out materials, tools, blocking…...whatever was needed to streamline the process and make us more efficient.  I had allowed an eight hour day for the rail and we basically finished in just under six hours.  That left us time to get the first coat on all the trim that I had told my wife we were going to paint.

[thisoldfarmouse]

New life for an old friend....... I've used this dresser since we were married (23 years ago), my wife's parents bought it for her new in the early 80's. It's found its final resting place in our master closet. With three cans of spray paint and new hardware it looks like it was custom made for the space. Best of all I don't have to learn a new routine, my clothes will be in the same place they've been since 1993.

[thisoldfarmouse]

I guess late spring is here……. 

Over a long winter of looking at the house with no leaves on our trees and not much daylight….I almost forgot how fantastic the yellow looks framed by the green leaves of our maple trees set against a blue sky.  I know it was a lot of work to side the gables with cement shakes, but I’m really glad I did it.  It adds an authentic look that I couldn’t have pulled off with vinyl siding.   

[thisoldfarmouse]

Stroll with the fam #mothersday #gooddaysunshine (at Cross Roads, Pennsylvania)