This old house

[poppy]

I drive by my old birth place once in awhile and pass this old house that my dad always told us was the same basic design and builder of our farm house built around 1900.  The only differences being that this one is a mirror image of ours and has a tower over the entrance.



They appear to be rehabbing the house based on the awful looking new window in the front.  It has been in various stages of deconstruct/reconstruct for a couple of years now.



You can see the diagonal sheathing and the lath/plaster walls of the original house.  I'm not sure why they took off the tin roof.

It would be neat if they intend to make it look like the original, but probably not.  One of these days I'm going to stop by and ask them what they're doing. 

[Redoverfarm]

Poppy I think that Bob Villa would even walk away from that one.  But was probably a nice looking place in it's prime.

[JRR]

That tower adds a lot of roofing, water control, complexity.  Even  though such roofs look interesting, I would want to simplify it ... perhaps remove the tower altogether.  Probably a lot of good wood in that old relic.  Main roof lines look pretty straight.

[poppy]

John, you're probably right about Bob Villa walking away from this one.  It appears that it has a dry stacked sandstone foundation like our old house had.  And the stone was just laid on the ground so as you can imagine there was some settling issues. 

When my parents added a new kitchen in one of the main house rooms, the carpenders added a new floor on top of the old because of so much uneven settling.  Yes, we had a small step up into the room.

When I was a kid and we got our first rollerskates we could literally coast down the slope of the old parlor room floor. 

When we moved our parents out of that old farm house we discovered a big gap between the floor of the dining room and the wall.  We got a laugh out of being able to look down into the crawl space through that gap. 

JRR, I'm not sure if there is any good wood in that house or not.  There may be based on our old house which had nice wide oak woodwork and a really nice cherry staircase.  The floors were just old plank boards, which may or may not look good now.

If I were saving that house I would certainly keep the tower.  That's where the character is.  I don't remember for sure but again if this house is like our old house then those diamond windows would have had stained glass around the perimeter.

And as you can probably tell, the old front porch has been removed.  We did the same thing on our house before we added an addition on to the front.

I think it's a toss up on whether to salvage these old farm houses or not.  They are very difficult to update.  Ours had generous 9 ft. ceilings in the down stairs, but only 7 ft. in the upstairs.  There were no bathrooms, no plumbing, no central heat, no closets. 

This all makes me want to stop and talk to them all the more.