Our Old House

I've mentioned previously that the prior owner did her own version of "This Old House" on this 1850's (or is it 1830's?) house back in 2005-2006. She was kind enough to provide us with copies of the pictures that she took while the renovation was in progress.

Her pictures weren't digital so I've scanned what she gave us and separated the pictures that were usually 2, 3 or 4 to a page.

Obviously, a before picture. I'm amazed that the trees were right up to the house, Now, there's a wide expanse of lawn between the house and the trees. The prior owner told us that a squatter was living in the house when she bought it and warned us that we might get some of his mail from time to time. 

That lower structure at the rear was completely demolished and rebuilt during the renovation.

View from the rear. Three chimneys. Only one now.

That entire righthand wing was replaced.

This is our mystery room. The attic in the front part of the house is largely unchanged - wide rough chestnut floorboards and stairs and hand hewn chestnut rafters. The oddity is that one end of he attic is finished in lathe and plaster and has a doorway. Except for the mess, it still looks exactly like this.

This is what the rest of the attic still looks like (except that it's clean. Well,OK, part of the forced air system is up here and some ducting is on the floor.

This must be the old kitchen in that demolished part of the building.

I have no idea of what this room might be.

Again, no idea

The spacing doesn't look right for this to be the living room. Maybe the old kitchen?

No idea.

The front stairs have been beautifully refinished.

That's the master bedroom beyond the stairs. There are walls now.

Looking at the upstairs landing from the turn in the stairs.

The front door.

The back wing demolished, the basement has been dug and the footing for the walls poured. The entrance to the part of the basement that is under the front part of the house is just barely visible here (under the tarp). It was also redone with new concrete walls an floor, It has a 4 foot ceiling so we think of it as a stoop space rather than a crawlspace.

Tarp covering the hole after the demolition of the back wing.

Basement walls have been poured.

Tyvek n the front part of the house. No walls in the back yet.

The far hole is where the fireplace is. The nearer hole is where he basement stairs go down and then turn to the right. The back stairs to the 2nd floor start at the lower right and stay directly above the basement stairs.

A different view of the new basement.

Not sure what this is but my guess would be looking up the hole where the back stairs will be. Stairs will turn and go up to the left. Chimney should be where that black hole is but maybe it hadn't been built yet.

Kitchen floor?

Upper landing for the front stairs. The steps in the foreground lead to the attic.

?????

Looking down the front stairs from the 2nd floor landing.

Starting the fireplace. Kitchen is in the background.

Kitchen downstairs. The room upstairs was enclosed but left unfinished. We'll be finishing it in soon.

The new wing is complete. Still no garage or farmers porch.

Lots of gravel near where the farmers porch will be. I suspect that it had something to do with the septic system.

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Bathtub in the Jack and Jill bath between the 2 upstairs bedrooms.

Making progress on the fireplace (fireplace on the right, firewood storage on the left).

Getting started on the garage. Who knew that a deep hole would be involved?

More fireplace.

Making progress on the garage.

Obviously out of sequence, the footings for the garage walls.

I'm amazed at how much concrete is underneath the entrances to the garage.

In the basement, the boiler, hot water tank and heater. Stairs are on the right. You can see back into the stoop space which is the size of the entire front of the house..

Tyvek on the garage and kitchen wings.

Approaching completion on the siding.

Not quite as far along on the siding. Who's been driving on my lawn?

The cherry cabinets are in and the silestone counters are on.

Another angle on the kitcen.

And another.

The final result - Winter (I've no idea why the coloring is so odd - theactual color of the vinyl siding is a pale olive with tan trim)

The final result - summer

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-JC-

Our stuff has arrived!!!

Maya has apparently  been entertaining people with her imitation of her Grandma saying "I want my stuff!". As of this afternoon, Grandma has her stuff back.

Our driver, Gary, was unwilling to risk bringing his cross country rig into the tiny streets of Oakham so he made arrangements with NorthAmerican in Leominster to borrow one of their smaller trucks. He and his crew managed to get all of our stuff into the smaller truck. They were so determined to get it all in one trip that they each filled their own cars and had things tied onto the back of the truck.

Not quite the Grapes of Wrath, but getting there.

More Grapes of Wrath.

Kristen, checking off tag numbers as items came off the truck.

That's me, supervising Gary. My job was to determine where everything went.

The truck in the driveway.

The kitchen.

The kitchen.

The living room.

The living room.

Master bedroom.

Master bedroom.

The garage and the unfinished future family room are staging areas while we decide what will be stored in the attic and what will be stored in the basement (or what will have to find a new home).

The garage.

The future family room.

The entry hall.

Guest room

The other guest room.

It was 6pm before the guys got out of here so we decided to go out to dinner. It was an exhausting day and we've decided to spend one more night in the trailer and get the bedroom made up tomorrow. I'm sure that we'll be going through boxes and finding homes for things for weeks.

The shocker today was that, with the exception of our large sectional couch, which we knew wouldn't fit, all of our furniture fit just fine (our dining room table is a squeeze, but it's workable). Oakham is going to have a town wide garage sale at the end of August so we'll set that as a deadline to see if anything else needs to go.

It's getting late and we're sitting on our (much more comfortable) patio furniture on or farmers porch. The fireflys are out as they have been for the past few nights.

-JC-

We finally have internet!

We closed on the new house on the morning of the 23rd and immediately moved our trailer from Briar and Gus' driveway into our own driveway. Briar and the kids came out that afternoon and, while the kids went nuts exploring the house and property, Briar shot one of her videos tours.

We've been very busy ever since. The house doesn't have a lot of carpet (the master bedroom and a couple of closets upstairs) but one of the first things that we noticed was that the carpet wasn't quite as pristine as it appeared when the house was furnished. Our furniture hasn't arrived so what better time to replace carpet. New carpet will be installed tomorrow morning.

As long as we're replacing carpet, how about paint? The master bedroom paint looked to be about 9 years old so we decided to repaint before the carpet gets here, We're planning to continue the new color (kind of a coffee ice cream color) throughout the house. One wall, in the kitchen area, will have the grandfather clock and china cabinet so we're going to make sure that it gets painted before the furniture arrives.

Speaking of the furniture, it left Riverside, CA on 7/22. The driver called a couple of days ago and he expects to be here o 7/31 or 8/1.

My new lawn tractor arrived today. I'd include a picture but I kind of have it in pieces right now. I want to install a mulching kit so I've removed the blade housing. I haven't quite managed to remove the blades just yet. I'm expecting to encounter some difficulties. The holes on some of Sears blades have 5 points while others have 6 points. It wasn't clear which was right for this lawn tractor. Sears gave me the part number for a 5 point hole mulching kit (which I ordered). Looking at the parts list for the new tractor, it says that the blade has a 6 point hole. I guess that I'll see when I manage to get the blade off.

Sears is batting 1000. They sent me a note yesterday that the snow blower that I'd ordered was out of stock. They were encouraging me to call and cancel my order, I got a really good price on that snow blower and, since snow isn't eminent, I called and told them that I'd be happy to wait. I got an email today that thanked me for my patience and said that the snow blower would be ready for pickup on 8/5. That was the original date.

I was kind of busy today so I didn't get around to connecting our new laser printer / scanner / copier to the network. Once I do that, I'll be scanning some pictures that the prior owner provided of the renovation that took place back in 2005-2006. I'll be posting those pictures here.

Briar is trying to get the digital copies of those pictures. In the meantime, here's a few pictures that Briar scanned.

These stairs have been reinforced and refinished and are still a part of the house.

This room at the end of the attic is still there (the mess is gone).

This has to be the kitchen (this entire wing was demolished and rebuilt from the basement up).

Side view. Note that there are 3 chimneys (only 1 remains and the fireplace that supplies it was completely rebuilt). The wing at the right was demolished and now sports an unfinished second story (which we will be finishing shortly). The house now features a garage off the end of that wing.

-jc-

Closing in on our close

It's been a long wait but it's almost over. We drove down to Wells Fargo in Hartford, CN on Monday to wire the money to pay for the house. Tonight at 5:00 PM, we'll have the final walk through and then, tomorrow morning at 10:00 AM, we'll meet at our attorney's office for the close.

So what have we been doing with ourselves all this time? Our reservation at the RV resort in Oakham was for a month so, on July 1, we had to move on. The trailer has been in Briar and Gus' driveway since then while we stayed in the guestroom. Our hosts were in California for 10 days of that so we weren't underfoot the entire time. They even got some cat / chicken / parrot / fish / egg (Yes, Gus is hatching some chickens in his incubator) sitting out of it. I'm sure that they'll be glad to see us go.

We've been using the time to do everything that we can possibly do to prepare for the move.

A first step made it possible to do many others. We were afraid that some of our actions might generate mail to the new address before we were there to receive it. We talked to the people at the Oakham PO and were able to arrange for them to hold any mail that came for us.

That done, we were able to open a local bank account (the closest Wells Fargo is in Hartford, CN) and get all new insurance policies. With a MA proof of automobile insurance, we were able to head over to the RMV to register the truck and trailer and get our Massachusetts plates. We won't be able to change our drivers licenses until we have some documents that will be generated by our home purchase.

We've arranged to have the utilities transferred or turned on when we move in (since we're on well water and septic tank, that really just amounted to power, internet and trash).

Then there's medical insurance, which has been a real experience. We had Kaiser in California and they don't exist here. We couldn' really do much about changing our coverage until very recently. We changed our address and then had to wait several days for it to flow through to the benefits website. That done, we could change our coverage. Now we're waiting for cards that are supposed to come by 8/1. With cards, well be able to schedule physicals and eventually get our prescriptions rewritten. I don't want to get into prescriptions. We made every effort to prepare Kaiser for what was happening but getting them to approve refills of our prescriptions has been painful.

Then there were countless address changes to make. That was kind of interesting. Before we left, we filed a change of address with the PO so that our mail would forward to Briar and Gus' house. Apparently, that triggered address changes with the credit agencies and with nearly everyplace that has our address. Most of the address changes that I've made have been from Rutland, MA to Oakham, MA. Weird and kind of irritating.

We had some purchases that we knew that we'd need to make so we've got some of those underway. Our new riding lawn mower will be delivered next Monday and a mulching kit for it will come on Wednesday. My snow blower will arrive in mid-August (great time of year for deals on snow blowers).

That's about it for now. More after we get into the house (and have internet - that would be next Monday).

-JC-