Tons and tons of poop!

In my last post I shared photos of our tenants Chip and TJ...In this post you get to see the byproducts of TJ and Chip.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that just behind our horse barn there are several tons of horse poop. It will not be around much longer as Todd will be taking it over to Arrowhead Farm where it will be used as part of their organic compost mix.

Our friends Lauren and Dave from Kennebunkport, organic gardeners extraordinaire, came down yesterday to pick up a van load of the very organic "fertilizer." They said it didn't smell but we haven't heard from them since the hour long drive home! No doubt we'll be beneficiaries of the TJ and Chip's #2 nutrients this summer when we gather tomatoes from the Tenny's garden. Check out Lauren's stylish shoveling duds...

Unfortunately there's not too much to report at the house because of the rain. We were away all of last week and found out yesterday that the crew only worked 3 out of 5 days so progress was slow. Now it's raining a bit and that certainly slows down progress.

Tomorrow morning, I am meeting Mark at the Newburyport Building Department to submit our full building permit. The only thing that has been holding us up is the Appendix J, which is an energy audit form. Apparently this is something that is fairly easy for an architect that uses auto cad to complete because it's just about plugging figures into a computer program. Our Architect, however, is old school and hand drafted all of the blueprints. This leaves Mark and his trusty calculator to work it all out. He's working on it today.

The photo above, shows TJ our 20 year old tenant. He and his pal, Chip live in our small horse barn and belong to a hay farmer named Todd from West Newbury. We're enjoying getting to know these guys. They'll be around until the end of construction when we are hoping to move the barn to our neighbors yard.

Chip, the other horse did not like having his photo taken -- every time the camera came out he turned his back to us! Oh well.

We've been away for the week and we stopped by the house this afternoon to see what kind of progress the guys have been making. The plan for the week was to get the front of the house framed so that we could begin siding early next week. While they didn't quite get there, they made good progress.

In a couple of photos you can see new windows on the left front of the house. These are the same kind of windows that are on right side - the only difference is that the sill is a bit smaller on the new windows. We'll have to fix that. It looks like a piece that can be easily changed out. We'll see.

So the new windows are only installed on the first floor. The guys spent quite a bit of time replacing two beams on the front middle of the house which was totally rotted by years of rain pouring into the house. The also framed the front wall so that the windows should be able to be installed on Monday. After that, we'll put the corner boards on and the footers and we'll be able to start siding. You can see a before and after shot here. In the first photo the new first floor windows are in - in the second photo you can see that the old windows are still in and there is still a large hole in the front of the house! Stay tuned...

A "before" tour

Leigh here... Since the excitement of knocking down walls every day is over, I thought I would keep things interesting by putting together a house tour of what it looked like before we started. Come on in...

This first photo is a view looking into the front door. Once inside the front door, to your right, was the parlor. This room will become our library/study. (photos below)

..On the first floor to the left could have been a living room or a kitchen... it will be our future living room. This room has the largest fireplace of the 4. There was an ell off of this side of the house to the back, which was removed well before we came on the scene. We believe it contained a kitchen and possibly a bedroom on the second floor. We'll definitely have to do some more research!

..Up the stairs to the right will become one of our extra bedrooms. At some point an additional wall was added which split off roughly the back 1/3 of the room. Some work has already been done to the front wall of this room (as well as the front wall of the parlor below) by John and Chrissy Skibbee, the owners of the house prior to us.

..Lastly, upstairs to the left will become our master bedroom.

We are enjoying reading "Arrowhead Farm: Three Hundred Years of New England Husbandry and Cooking" which was written by members of the Chase family for the 300th birthday of Arrowhead back in 1983. There is a lot of fascinating information about who lived on this land and what their lives were like, going back as far as the 1600's. We'll post some excerpts soon!

We'll we've been away from the house for a bit, mainly because there isn't so much for us to do now that the bulk of the demo has been done. Our two Russian carpenters have been pretty busy at work on the site. As you can see from these three photos today - we have a new floor system and the front wall of the living room has been re-framed.

Other big news is that Bill March has finished our architectural drawings and we'll be going in to see the Building Inspector on Monday morning to apply for our full building permit. This won't mean too much of a change in what's been going on because there is still quite a bit of work that needs to be done to get the front part of the house in stable shape. We'll hope for good progress next week.

In the top photo you can see the new floor system on the library side beginning to go in . Over the last couple of days this has been completed. We have chosen to use modern dimensional lumber as we re frame the house. This will ensure that we are able to stay within our budget and have a house that is structurally sound. In the photos at the bottom you will see that we were finishing off the removal of the siding to assess the rot in the sheathing. The big hole in the middle of the house, used to have a window but the roof above it was so damaged that water was virtually pouring in there for years, leading to quite a bit of rot.

Other things to note here - - we took the front entry off of the house and intend to re-install it but we needed to remove it so that we could repair the house behind it. Part of the preservation covenant on the house, requires us to ensure that that the exterior looks as similar to the 1790 facade as possible.

Finally, you'll note the little skeleton that we found inside one of the walls. Looks like a mouse to us...we found a couple of Mr. Mouse's cousins in the exterior walls in the form of flying squirrels. They've decided to move on! More soon...

The House has not consumed us...

So, some of our friends have called asking if we have disappeared into the abyss of our 1790 house...not so exciting. We took a bit of time off because we had to move out of our apartment in Salem and into a new place in West Newbury so that we could be closer to the construction site.

Over the last week, we've been able to make some significant progress. In a nutshell: we've finished most of the demo on the house, removed a sill on the right side of the house and replaced it with a new one, installed a new floor system in the library and in the entry, taken out the floorboards in the attic (as can be seen in the photo to the right), installed a mailbox and started to install a new sill on the front left of the house.

The work is going relatively slowly, which is somewhat frustrating. However, we recognize that a antique house restoration is more of an art than a science and art takes time. We'll add more specific blog entries with more photos including some photos of the very very wide pine boards that we've taken down from the attic that we hope to reuse as kitchen floors and an island counter top.

In our time away from the house, we've visited Home Depot and East Coat Lumber to layout the kitchen. We've also been doing tile research for the bathrooms and the kitchen back splash. Hopeful with some luck, we'll have our full building permit by Friday or early next week and then we can start in earnest.