Starting this project was like being buckled into a big roller coaster, say the legendary Son of Beast just north of Cincinnati, or finding yourself pregnant, or so I’ll presume, either way resigning yourself to going along for the ride, wherever. Well, in either of those examples there is a destination, and we’re assuming there’s a fine outcome here, too.

I had no idea how much I didn’t know the morning Adam showed up with his tools.

Let me relate how relieved I was to learn that we could still live in our house during the renovations. Stories circulated of people who not only arranged for accommodations where their crew could live during big renovation projects but also had to clear out themselves for the duration.

Look, our financial pockets aren’t deep. We’re addressing my lifetime savings, unless my novels somehow turn out to become blockbuster bestsellers, even at this late date.

Taking more than a few deep breaths, then?

Adam hit the ground running.

At the end of Day One.

And Day Two.

Once we were underway, I was impressed by the measures that were taken to minimalize the spread of dust and debris and I would like to acknowledge those.

The zipper doorway to the second floor was the first step. And when working on the main floor, Adam erected clear-plastic envelopes he could work within. Made me think of the so-called “state rooms” on the historic schooner I sailed on last summer, where every inch was treasured. Adam’s power vac became a familiar sound.

It wasn’t the only place he was fastidious. I would never get my sawing accurate to 1/16 of an inch, especially not when dealing with an old beam underneath that was a half-inch shorter on one side.

Do note, a lot of unsung artistry goes on in projects like this. As well as a lot of weird shit, done by rank amateurs, those whose weird decisions you discover along the way. Long ago, on projects on our little city farm back in Dover, we realized there are many, many very good reasons for modern building codes and for the inspectors who ensure they’re followed.

Also appreciated were the health measures of venting the upstairs or wearing earplugs and a face mask. Our previous carpenter, back in Dover, discovered the hard way about the alternative, hearing loss, and maybe the lungs, too. I don’t know what to advise about plumber’s knees, either.

By being able to be present when all this was happening, I did get to follow the action. I’ll hope you, too, finding that entertaining.

With a sense of despair regarding the roof project and our lack of a contractor on the horizon, we went ahead and set about erecting raised garden beds for what would be my third summer of dwelling here. We would try to leave some space for a contractor to get at the house, should we ever, ever, find someone.

During one of the inevitable conversations with passers-by while installing the garden and its fencing, a trusted neighbor mentioned that she had just had some carpentry done by a former student, someone who had returned home after living and working away. She gave us his name and phone number, and an introductory conversation followed.

Yes, he could do the project, and he thought in could start at the end of August. I was startled when he said that was the upcoming August, not a year off. Could it truly be?

Naturally, there were delays while he wrapped up some other commitments, but we did find ourselves in a stunned state of disbelief when work finally began in earnest at the beginning of this past October. We finally had a contractor who not only showed up on the morning he promised, but also on the dot of the hour.

He hit the ground running, methodically, precisely.

At the heart of our big project is a new roof on the house. Not just the asphalt shingling, which itself has needed replacement – we could have found someone to do that – but the actual shape of the supporting rafters themselves. To gain much-needed interior space, the walls on the second floor are being raised. That structural work’s the complication. And how, as you’ll see.

When we were considering making an offer on the house, we were told to check out the rafters for signs of charring, a consequence of the 1886 fire that destroyed the canneries, wharves, and downtown. Sure enough, ours was one of the homes suffering damage though left standing.

A few weeks before starting on the renovation, our contractor stopped by with his mentor slash consultant for a closer look. More concerning, from their point of view, was the lack of a ridge beam. The rafters from each side were simply mitered together. In addition, they were further apart than current coding would permit.

Our project would be taking place in two phases – the back half of the roof last fall and the front half in the spring. Without a ridge pole, there was nothing to hold up the remaining half and nothing to support the new raised framing.

You’ll discover where that leads.

 

Our gloating over our timing of selling our previous house at the giddy peak of a hot market soon darkened when we realized two nationwide tides were running against us as we tried to move ahead in our current dwelling. One was the soaring price of construction materials. The other, as inflation kicked in, was the erosion of the purchasing power of our working nest egg.

If it were only me here, I could pretty much survive quite nicely in two rooms. One of them was what I came to call my dorm, the quarters where I slept in one half and wrote in the other. The second chamber was the kitchen. That left our north parlor, with the video screen and two sofas, and the south parlor, as a guest room and storage.

When it’s been two of us, the space situation became more problematic, especially with just one small bathroom.

We still didn’t need the upstairs for much, except when others visited. We certainly didn’t want to pack in too much storage until the new roofing and reframing were done. Everybody we approached about the overhead project was booked out a year or two ahead, and most of them declined to commit to another. One who promised to the job then backed off for a season, so we waited, only to be ghosted in the end.

Whether it was just me here or maybe four of us fulltime, the overhead work and much more needed to be done. It couldn’t be put off forever.

In the absence of a dependable contractor, we did inch ahead on a few fronts.

One was a large garden shed that cost us half-again as much as it would have a few months earlier. I can joke that it’s my new barn, though it’s not red and is much, much smaller than the namesake for this blog. Still, it’s surprising what a difference it makes – almost like a garage without parking for a vehicle or two.

Another concern was a classic wood-burning cookstove that occupied the heart of the kitchen and was an inefficient supplemental heat source. Besides being a major weight on our sinking floors, it had a stovepipe feeding downward into our surviving chimney, which was also used by the furnace, a violation of current building codes. I saw the stove as a both fire and health hazard. It had to go. Distinctive it was, both as a liquor cabinet/bar and as a fun place to stash junk food and other treats for visiting family to raid, I’m glad it did find a new home, as I explained in Chief Doe-Wah-Jack’s Pride and Joy, June 10, 2022.

And then, as you may have followed here last year, we went ahead with some raised garden beds. I do wish you could have tasted some of the harvest, and I’m happy to repeat that the ravenous deer around here did not penetrate our improvised barriers, unlike the previous summer at the community garden.

Living in these conditions has carried a sense of camping. You know, as in not quite permanent. I haven’t even described our makeshift kitchen setup or the rain dripping inside windows or the cramped, windowless bathroom.

All the same, I can say I’ve never felt as much at home as I have here. Maybe that has something to do with the abundant natural light in the first-floor rooms. Or maybe with my life in general. Or maybe the lingering good vibes of Anna M. Baskerville. Or more likely, all three.

But that couldn’t go on forever. Repairs and renovation needed to be done, if only we could find an available superman. I mean, this is my fourth winter in this place and I wasn’t the only one aging. I could sense it in the walls, too.

Hope I’m not sounding whiny.

 

Back in New Hampshire, our veteran carpenter/electrician had proclaimed how fascinating he found the underpinnings of an old house – what people usually call a basement, though in New England, it’s more likely to be a cellar. I’ll explain the difference someday, if I haven’t already in an early blog post. Rick said probing around the underbelly gave him insights into the soul of the residence.

He would have been impressed by our new residence at the other end of Maine, a post-and-beam full Cape with a mostly stone foundation up to 18 inches thick.

From our previous homebuying experience, which landed us in an 1890s three-story New Englander, we knew we’d face some immediate issues. At our new address, the ones that we able to address all involved the cellar.

• First was the removal of a chimney that had lost half of its supportive brick arch in the cellar. The rest looked ready to go at any moment. Many of its bricks above had already collapsed into the Franklin fireplace, presenting a puzzling serpentine pattern. We insisted the chimney be removed before we closed on the house transaction. A temporary patch in the roof then covered the chimney hole.
• Next was a rusty fuel oil tank. One of its four legs was missing. The tank was replaced.
• Third was a bulkhead door. The previous cover had rotted away and, in its absence, the entry was blocked by stuffed green trash bags, which were removed before we signed off on the deal. When we moved in, that entry was a gaping hole with no cover at all. We couldn’t leave an opening like that. We’re still surprised we didn’t have raccoons or, worse, rats living down below. A strong metal bulkhead door now secures that portal.

 

The major issue needing to be addressed was the condition of the roof, as the insurance company insisted.

Complicating the situation was our intention of raising the rafters themselves and changing the two dormers to gain more usable and much needed space on the second floor.

The big problem was finding a contractor to take on the project. You’ll hear more on that in later installments of this series.

We simply couldn’t afford to replace the existing roof cover only to rip it off in a year or two. So we were in an anxious limbo, one that intensified with every blustering nor’easter.

In the absence of someone willing to tackle the roof and its restructuring, we did eventually find a carpenter to address the serious floor sloping on the main floor. I do joke about being able to tell through my bare feet that I’m in an old New England house even if I’m blindfolded, so I’m not surprised our floors weren’t dead level. But structural sinking is another concern, and raising portions of the downstairs floor 5½ inches did cost us surgeon’s rates – or “away” pricing, as others told us later. It’s still not perfectly flat, but ours is an old house. For a view of that work, see Now Leveling Our Cape, posted March 8 of last year.

One benefit was that we can now use the washing machine without having it walk during its spin cycles into the cavity where the chimney had been and then crash into the cellar.

Maybe you remember the definition of a sailboat as a hole in the water into which your pour endless amounts of money.

An old house is a hole in the ground into which … as perhaps you already know.

 

Two dozen years ago, in our previous homebuying round, I created a list of 20 definitive items we could rank on a scale of one-to-five, only to discover that the particularly hot sellers’ market and our price cap rendered the exercise useless. The harsh reality simply didn’t present us choices to evaluate. The best we could do was simply check off Yes or No. If a place passed, we then had to beat other bidders to the punch. Forget quality and personal style. Was it habitable in its current condition? Did it fit our needs?

For the record, we were not, then or now, seeking an idealized suburban house with a white picket fence and an immaculately manicured yard. As you can imagine from this blog, we were open to something funky or organic, what some would even define as “character,” a place that could breathe and grow with our lives.

In the end, we simply lucked out, as you see in the Red Barn postings from New Hampshire.

In our recent downsizing to the other end of Maine, we had a less pressured, more leisurely pace in the market. High on my checklist was walking distance of downtown, the health center, and the arts center, plus a view the ocean, even only a glimpse between neighboring houses, and a workspace for my writing and related projects, though that could be much smaller than before, now that I’ve largely moved away from paper.

Other participants had their own priorities, including a large garden with full sunlight. As for a kitchen? Let’s just say that potential can be a checklist item of its own.

Neighbors and security are largely a wild card.

And, three years later, after several false starts, we made a bid that was accepted.

What we knew was that the place needed a lot of remedial work. And, oh yes, it had lots of potential.

In our recent homebuying round, a right property hadn’t popped up to a consensual acclaim. Some dwellings were closer to demolition than restoration. Others had been renovated in ways that were simply puzzling – a prime memory was the placement of the only bathroom behind a master bedroom. One modest house had four, maybe five, stairwells, enough to leave me lost indoors – I’m still intrigued by the quirkiness though I can’t pick out the place now from the exterior. Let me also admit that passing on an 1820s’ residence I really liked was ultimately the smart decision. The last one had been owned by the publisher of an early newspaper here, though that wasn’t the only thing I liked; once the kitchen deficiencies were made obvious, I understood why I was in the minority in that case.

As for the winner of our quest, I must admit the house didn’t grab my attention, not until the larger vision was shared with me.

The listing had been on the market for the previous three years or more. It needed work, serious work, but it felt good inside, as others have told me afterward, even though the house is cold through much of the year, as I’ve even read in the archives of the local newspaper. A strong attraction is the natural light throughout the rooms. Our house inspector was impressed that the bones were good, especially the foundation – up to 18 inches thick in places. Were we up to the challenge of reviving the place? Life’s an adventure. I expected our low bid to meet rejection.

Instead, the seller accepted, clearing out most of our cash savings.

So here we with a classic cedar-shake siding full Cape dating from around 1830, although the real estate blurb placed it in the 1860s.

What has amazed me is the other participants’ envisioning of the renovations for this new venture. Not just the big, bold actions that inhibited my own thinking, but also many details that deliver a pleasurable, significant impact.

And that’s the beginning of this old house renovation story. As it unfolds, I hope you’ll pipe up with ways you’ve made your own dwelling a home a sweet home. Or, for that matter, of how your own projects required three times as much time and money than your best estimates presented.

Whatever the case, please enjoy the upcoming posts over the year. Not that it will be the only series here at the Barn this round.