The House

When we first found the property, we knew the house was old. In fact the real estate listing stated the house was built in the 1700’s. After speaking to someone familiar with the house, they mentioned the house was built back in the 1690’s. After doing some investigating ourselves we came across the year 1692. With the house being over 300 years old, there’s no doubt it was constructed very well to have survived this long. As we began the restoration, we found this to be very true. As dated as the kitchen, bath and the rest of the house were, it is super solid. However as you can imagine, there were many challenges we would face in tackling a restoration of this magnitude. While this is just one house, don’t forget this was originally a 195 acre working dairy farm up until the 1990’s. So restoring a house, barn and re-starting a farm that hasn’t operated in almost 30 years is gonna be a huge undertaking. Luckily I’m not scared and up for the challenge.

Our original thought was to go room by room restoring the house starting with the most important room first, like the bathroom. However since services such as wiring, HVAC, plumbing and so forth will travel though one room to another, we realized that we’d have to kinda do it all at the same time. Oh did I mention we are living in the house during this phase? Yes that’s right. The house is/was totally livable but just very dated and now a construction site 24/7/365. It takes a very strong, very understanding and patient family to live in a working restoration that has constant sawdust, noise and aroma of paint or stain.

Since this was our one and only time we were going to do this, we wanted to make sure we took our time and respected the house by adding to it and not taking away from what it is. We want this house to last another 300 years, but with modern amenities such as electricity or coax or Cat5 in rooms that have never had it before. All at the same time keeping the house looking traditional.

While it’s now December 2023 we still have a long way to go. We have accomplished so much (as one would hope in almost 5 years) it has been slow going for a lot of reasons. Being a full time husband and father while working a full time job are big commitments just as is. Then add on a house restoration, re-starting a farm that hasn’t run in over 2 decades and whoa…yeah there goes some time. When working around here, I try to stop and remember to setup a video camera and take photos of the progress because this all has an impact on Our Farm Our Food. We are doing this, and it’s the first step before we can really begin farming on a market garden level.

As we compile episodes of the show, we will put them up on our youtube channel.