Establishing a Baseline

Short and sweet today.  I posted all of the historical docs and maps and photos in "Reference Pages" (see links at left).  Essentially, this is what we "know".  Everything else we've got is:

• Basically immovable landmarks and clues: foundations, stonewalls, well heads, relational references to other documented properties and landmarks, etc.
• Info from the local Historical Society (Wiggin Memorial)
• Resources from the local Library (also a Wiggin Memorial)
• Anecdotal "Evidence" and Oral History from locals re: the last of the Wiggins to live in this house around the turn of the last century.
• Observations from driving around town looking at the (many) other period homes, their architecture, their size, their scale and those little plaques provided by the local Historical Society (hint!)

Based on all of the above and a couple of hours perusing "A Field Guide to American Houses", we are pretty sure the house was built after 1767 and before 1790, and most likely in the pre-Revolutionary period of that window.  It's certainly a side-gabled Georgian.  It now has paired interior chimneys, but it may originally have had one central chimney (with very cold outlying bedrooms).  The major sticking points (I think):

The space between the top of the second floor windows and the roof overhang puts it later in common applications.  But there are notable exceptions (Brice House in Annapolis and Williams House in Deerfield).  Also, there are a couple of 1717 and 1723 houses around here with a good 14" between windows and roof.

The front door is the (potentially original) solidly Georgian (1700-1780) front door paired with the more commonly Adam (1780-1820) leaded elliptical fanlight and sidelights (also potentially original) on the front door. But, leaded glass elements and fixtures were commonly wedding gifts and Richard was unmarried when he was deeded the land in 1767.  Maybe the fancier front door was a wedding present?

Still pondering.  As always, input welcome!

Muscal Windows: Symmetry, Rythm & Balance

If the sincerest form of flattery is imitation, then it stands to reason that in order complement something, you must first understand the essential elements you wish to emulate.

As near as I can tell, there are three essential elements of 18th century architecture.  First, there is symmetry -- colonial homes are all basically symmetrical.  Post and beam structures were beholden to the span length/strength of locally available timber.  There wasn't too much creativity in design because, in a truly communitarian culture, where you learn from others trials and errors in relatively new surroundings, things settle at the base and the average.

Second, there is an energy and rhythm -- one that emulates the order and pace of the utilitarian life of the household.  This Old Purple House was, first and foremost, the homestead of a 50-acre dairy farm in a close-knit community of family and more family.  Although rural by today's standards, its location was convenient to the busy road between Portsmouth and Exeter and proximal to a busy ferry crossing.  One can imagine that this house saw a lot of comings and goings.

Third there is the balance of heat, light and draft.  Hearths and windows and doors.  Colonial homes were designed around chimneys as the hearth was truly the heart of a colonial home. Window glass was available (at a premium) so larger windows were strategically located to provide maximum usable light in daytime living areas, while smaller windows were placed in bedrooms to preserve warmth at night and in winter, plus permit airflow in the summertime.

Wood was readily available and cheap, so colonial homes had lots (and lots) of doors.  This Old Purple House is a great example.  It is literally a warren of interior halls and doors, which provide privacy, but also an intricate zone system for heat containment and strategic drafting.  I can almost imagine the ladies of the house moving in some habit-driven dance of opening and closing as the weather and seasons changed.

OK, so based on the symmetry, rhythm and balance we have observed in This Old Purple House so far, we have arrived at the first big decision we will make that effects the facade of the house itself.  The windows.

Last Winter, while we wrangled with the former owners to arrive at a contract price, a squirrel somehow got into the house but couldn't find a direct route out, so he tried to chew one through the mullions between the first course of window panes in just about every window of the house.  We could, of course, buy a gallon bucket of wood putty and start retooling them one-by-one.  But I personally have more important and less tedious things to do between now and 2016.

So, we are looking at replacing windows.  We looked at replacement windows (blek).  We considered new construction windows (and the related detours of retrimming or residing or resurfacing just about every interior and exterior vertical plane of the house in short order -- Cha-ching -- NOT).  And have now come around to the current thought leader: replacement sashes.

No matter which we choose, we will get some significant energy savings (and rebates, we hope) and some  modern conveniences like tilt-to-clean and two movable sashes.  Yay!

So now we are back to the symmetry, rhythm and balance thing.  The windows that are in the house now are not original.   Most in the main house are circa 1950.  Some are double hung (6-over-6).  Some are cottage-style (6-over-9 or 9-over-6). There is little-to-no rhyme or reason to the pain size and proportion.  Pictures we have from the 1920s show enormous 2-over-2-pane style windows on the whole main house.  We know those weren't original, for sure.

This Old Purple House circa 1920

This Old Purple House was in
the same family from 1767
(and the land before that),
until the early 1900s when it
was sold to the Odde Family.

It was called Greenacres then.

Then we took a closer look at those pics.  Colonial folk were thrifty, right?  Reduce, reuse, recycle?  Who had windows in their barn? Ah!  People who had leftover windows from their house, that's who!  So, there were 12-over-8 cottage-style windows with basically square panes... Wait, haven't I seen those somewhere?  Yes.  The "tavern" was a barn then too.  And it got some leftover windows.  Lookie, lookie.  We have old warbly, bubbly glass!  So, now we know (generally) what they had originally.

OK, so here's where we throw it out to you guys for thoughts and opinions.  On the main house, the windows on the first floor are 10-12 inches taller than the windows on the second floor.  So, we can either try to match pane size and proportion (my pick) or we can match pane count and layout (hubby's pick).

Essentially, my way would end up with same-same pane sizes, but 12-over-8 cottage windows downstairs and 8-over-8 double-hungs upstairs.  Hubby's way would be double or cottage in both applications, but the panes would be larger and taller downstairs and essentially square upstairs.  What say you, blog-follower-folk?

Four Floors & A Ceiling

NOTE: This one is a long one.  Hubby suggested I get your opinions on some things (since you're here and all), and I figured you need at least enough info to give educated guesses/advice, so here goes.

I am an impulsive planner. I am sure there is some psychological pigeon hole for people like me, but I'm OK without a label. Clearly, I'm embracing it, whatever it is.

Every once in a great while I get a bee in my bonnet and I draw up a grand plan for whatever it is I'm planning to do. And I'm very proud of myself.

When I was in the "professional" world, things like status reports and benchmark surveys and quarterly analyses kept me honest. I was good at planning and forecasting, sticking to them and making them happen. But now I'm a mom and my full-time job is "homemaking" in every sense of the word, and then some.

Although there is a certain routine and rhythm to our days here, four year-old children have a way of turning plans into puddles. And our quarter-millenarian (my term -- all the options on Wiki for 250 years were wrong, long or nonsensical) house has a way of arbitrarily (and quickly) changing your priorities.

The other thing that happens with both young kids and old houses is absolute stalemates when best laid plans suddenly require a detour, which itself necessitates several intermediary steps, and so on.

Case in point. We're thinking we would like a room in which to sit and read and watch TV, and maybe entertain some friends and neighbors. I believe it's called a living room. Yep, that's it. But we don't have one. Yet. This house has a tavern. And it needs help.

Let me take you back a month or so...

We decided we could live with a living room (great room, whatever) that was dark and wood-bound. Of course eventually (very common word around here) it will have bigger windows and window seats and a wall of bookcases with a rolling ladder and... Cha-ching.

So, all we needed to turn the "tavern" into our living room was a refinished floor and a couple of grounded (not cloth-wired) outlets.  (We were planning to get this all done before our furniture arrived.) So, I started sanding with a boatyard favorite: a "vintage" Porter-Cable Random Orbital 6" Vacuum Sander (no link for that one!)  Love that tool.  Worked beautifully, but it took several days of trial and error and prowling the industrial parks of Portsmouth and find the right sanding discs and figure out what grit would actually remove "vintage" sap-wax without heating it to a shiny glaze or irreparably marring the soft "vintage" pine.  Very fine line there.  So several days in, and we had gotten about 1/8 of the 800 sq. ft. room done.

Change of plan.  Not going to happen before furniture arrives.  Put on hold until movers go away and relative baseline living returns.

So, the movers stacked all things "great room" unceremoniously into the now unusable northeast facing "sun room".  All I can say is, we suspect Buck was "involved" in our floor sanding frustration and delay, because...

The day after the movers left, Clem the Plumber was back to turn on and test the new boiler and bleed the system.  The water went into the system.  And the water came out of the system.  Through the tavern ceiling.  (We had anticipated a whole house of exorcistic plumbing, but had yet to find any major leaks or failures.  Found it!)


The pipes ran straight down the middle of the very large, beam-spanned ceiling to feed the radiators at either end of the bunk room upstairs.  The only access to said pipes was either through the level and lasting oak floor in the bunk room or the already spotted, now sagging and sodden, ceiling in the tavern.  No contest.

Clearly, before we could continue with the "just refinish the floor" project, we had to get at the pipes and make repairs in the ceiling, right?  (And, thanks to Buck, our furniture and electronics were out of harm's way when the deluge came!)

So we spent an entire day tearing down the mystery-fiber panels between the beams of the ceiling.  (Thank God for the Shop-Vac!)  We found ourselves in a steady shower of debris that had been sitting on top of said panels.  Contents included 93 cubic feet (I calculated it.) of mouse poop, corn cobs, walnut shells, and tiny four-legged skeletons; sawdust, wood scraps and nails (from the 1953 bunk room floor project); and, paper dolls, postcards, purposefully diced-up parental correspondence, toy parts, doll parts and a well-worn Brownie beenie.

So, after all that, we could fix the pipes, right?  Not so much.

No pipes yet visible.  It turned out the mystery-fiber ceiling panels were attached to a tic-tac-toe of 2x4s and 2x6s, which were in-turn nailed (generously) up to the underside of one of two layers of very old, unfinished plank-pine, loft-type floor.  Hunh.

Over that there was a void of 8" or so and then the more modern diagonal-sheathing-type sub-floor for the oak floors in the bunk room above.  Did you follow all that?

OK, so in the "void" was the biggest surprise we've found in the house so far.  Steel I-beams (shadowimg above the cedar hand-hewn beams of the ceiling) and a modern-ish 2x6 structure supporting the floor upstairs.  Hunh.

OK, so now here's where the "plan" completely derails.  We can't "just refinish the floor" anymore.

Hubby wants to open up just enough of the tic-tac-toe and layered loft floor (reminder: these are strata of the ceiling) to get to the pipes down the middle.  And then leave the rest (with the remainders of mouse meals, mice and feces sifting down on us from above), finish the floor and furnish/live happily, temporarily after... until we get back to it.

I, on the other hand, acknowledge that a whole-hog remodel of the space is way outside the realm of time, money or mental capacity at present.  However, taking out all of the ugly, not-even-rustic-looking tic-tac-toe and layered loft floor would leave the ceiling at tabula rasa: beams and a view of the underside of the diagonal sheathing from the floor upstairs.  I can live with that!  And, over time, before putting in a "real" ceiling back in-between the beams (circa three years from now), we could rewire/replace the ceiling fixtures (enormous wagon-wheel and jelly-jar affairs), play with recessed lighting, run piping for radiant heat for the later-to-be master bedroom in the bunk room, rough-in plumbing for the later-to-be master bath up there...  The possibilities are endless, but the the interim would be aesthetically-pleasing enough.

So,  there you have it.  Hubby wanted me to "engage" the audience.  So, should we open up only as much as we need to get to the pipes, or should we get it over with and open the whole thing up?  Or, perhaps you all have some other idea we are missing (due to mouse-poop-induced brain fog)?  Either way, we'd get back to the "just sanding the floors" part within a month and furnish/live in our living room (under Buck's watchful gaze) within six weeks.

Comments, questions and counseling welcome.  Really.