the story so far...

... It was the late fall of 2001, and we were just finishing up our latest renovation project, a truly lovely 1960's vintage colonial in a great neighborhood. The days were growing colder, and we were looking forward to festooning said renovation project with fragrant pine garlands for a holiday season filled with good food, family and friends, and lots of eggnog to celebrate the oh-so-close finish of a long, sawdust-filled three years, when we stumbled upon this real estate listing (click listing sheet for larger image):

(*** Ahhh, quit'cher bi***ching about all the grey areas-- we had to protect the guilty, didn't we?)

Anyway the property sounds pretty incredible, huh? Grand historic home on three acres, with a stable, pool, sauna and a pasture. Honey, move us in now, because we ain't leavin' this patch o'land until we git carried out feet first ...

Well. We soon found out why Saint Peter had passed on this particular annexation application to the Pearly Gates, and why this "grand historic home" had been on the market for four years during the hottest real estate market in decades. As you may have seen from the gallery photos, when we went to look at the house, we discovered that it certainly was a, umm..."rare" ... "offering indeed." Despite the dismal condition of the property, old house dementia reared its head, and after long negotiations, we had a contract on her in January 2002.

We closed the deal on the property on Thursday, March 28, 2002. The movers left on Thursday evening at 5:30pm.

On Friday morning, March 29, 2002, at 8:30am, a 40-cubic-yard dumpster was delivered to the front door:

And so it began...

You know, most people move in to a house, and set up the television and couch in the family room. In our family room, we tore out the floor (it was no great loss, really, as you can see here) and set up our tools:

Hey, priorities, right? Besides, we did actually set up a couch in there. Otherwise, we'd have no place to sit and review the paint chips.

We knew all the carpet, upstairs and down, was the first thing that had to go, but we had no idea what was under it. Turns out, about six layers of flooring! We finally dug down, with a roofing shovel, to uncover the original heart pine floors. And boy, are they tough-- that serrated roofing shovel didn't do a lick of damage beyond surface scratches.

We sanded and refinished just about all of the hardwoods in the house, upstairs and down. The vast majority are in the 1860's portion of the house-- the parlor, dining room, hallways upstairs and down, and three of the four bedrooms. We haven't yet uncovered the flooring in the kitchen (the original 1840 part of the house), and the later additions are either subfloor or cement slab. The hardwoods got a good sanding, and three coats of satin polyurethane. They look great, clean up beautifully, and so far have been just about indestructible. For photos, please visit the gallery.

Next we stripped the panelling off the walls, got rid of all the dark skinny molding around the doors and windows, and patched walls till we dropped so that we could paint. Just getting the interior liveable occupied most of April and May. In the process, though, we had the rare experience of sleeping in just about every room in our house. We just dragged our mattress from one room to another while we patched, painted and refinished the floors in the room we had just left. Finally, we completed our circuit through the house and ended up in the dining room. We were glad to be done, because after the end of a hard day of work in the house, we looked at our tangle of bedding on top of our mattress, sitting on the floor in our bare dining room, and thought my heavens... we're living in a crack house. The house had the nicest hardwood floors and the prettiest mouldings we'd ever seen in a crack house, but still. We think the mattress was about as happy as we were to find a permanent home in the master bedroom, cozily ensconced in a bedframe with a headboard and footboard.

The month of June found the weather reliably warmer, and found us focusing our attention, finally, on the outside of the property.

The summer flew by as we cleared nine tons (yes, nine!) of overgrown brush from the property, including the Great Garage Liberation (Che Guevara, eat your heart out), and we still have probably another nine to go. The guys that drop off and pick up the endless stream of dumpsters have become our new best friends. Of course, summer also brought us our first look at our newly-acquired pool, which we discovered, not surprisingly, needs about as much work as the rest of the house. But hey, if you can plumb a bathroom you can plumb a pool, right? Huh. So we thought...

What we didn't consider was that plumbing a bathroom doesn't involve digging four feet down to find the leak, and then another four feet to find the other leak, and then another four feet for the next one... After four digging sessions and four leaks with no end in sight, we called the pool guy, who did a terrific job on the leaks and may soon supplant the dumpster guy as our new best friend, especially when we schedule our liner replacement and plumbing upgrades for Spring 2003.

As summer rolled into fall, we decided we just couldn't stand the back entry anymore. We'd been using it constantly, not only as the main entrance to the house from the driveway, but also as the entrance to the pool area, and we were thoroughly depressed-- it was dark, dingy, depressing and just all around godawful. That project, which started as a two or three weekend deal, stretched into a two or three month deal, and we didn't finish the bulk of the project until the end of October. For the whole story with pictures, check out the back entry section of the gallery.

We knew that once we'd finished the entryway, we'd want to renovate the studio that was connected to it via french doors. The "studio" is simply a one-car attached garage that the prior owners converted, that we had been using for our tools (after they'd been evicted from the family room) and other storage. Problem was, once we evicted the tools from the studio, they'd have no place to go. And that was no way to treat objects that are the closest that inanimate objects will ever get to being family, right?

So we decided the studio project had to wait until we could make the basement habitable for our tools, and create a decent workspace since winter was fast approaching. We were a bit more realistic about the basement project, and only ran two weeks over our four week time frame for the project, finishing up just in time for Thanksgiving. For photos of the basement project, go to the basement section of the gallery. Though the basement still needs a new exterior door and new windows, the space is much improved and our tools are no longer threatening to walk off the job for unsatisfactory working conditions.

The holidays this year found us, not in a spit-shiny perfect vintage colonial, but in yet another of our our sawdust and grime laden diamonds in the rough. But some pine garlands, white lights, and a whole bunch of family and friends gathered round the table went a long way towards making it a perfect house, even if it wasn't perfect looking. And hey, after enough egg nog, the house didn't look so bad, either.

For a gander at our project for the new year, click here.

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