A Little More History

About 5 miles from the house is the Pisgah church and cemetary. We found out that Dr. Lockridge was buried at that cemetary. So, we went for a little graveyard tour and found his tombstone...here it is!

Sorry! Seth found actual tombstone.

How cool is that...to be able to see where he is buried. We found out that his wife remarried, but she is buried next to him.

We also found out this week that Dr. Lockridge doctored for a man that had been hit by a train in 1871. He was a witness to a murder trial in 1875. He came out in opposition to Missouri succession from the union in 1860. He was approached and declined to be a democratic representative. He planned a 4th of July celebration in Columbia. When Major John Rucker returned from the Civil War, he helped Dr. Lockridge complete the house (another indication that it was built about 10 years earlier than we were first told). Dr Lockridge owned brick yard with Major Rucker and he had an interest in a store called Goin and Lockridge. The last line in his obituary says..."and in his death the town sutains a loss hard to replace."

Memorial Day Weekend

Dad came in on Friday night and went up to the house early to try to beat the storm we could see coming. He had his lawn tractor with him. He got the yard and the corral mowed before and after the storm. Then he got busy with his apprentices for the day fixing the south kitchen wall.

The completed wall...

The upstairs bathroom was totally taken out and this weekend, Christopher, Dad and Charles had fun with big Bertha taking out the first three joists. The remaining joists had to be scabbed on to, covering some very bad past plumbing decisions...especially since I have a whirlpool tub going into the master bathroom!

The old joists come down. Even though they were in rough shape, it still shook the house when they were beating them down.

To hang the joists, Christopher stood on one side holding it up with a rope...

While Charles came up from below on the big ladder and got it into the pocket in the wall with guidance from Dad.

Then the subfloor went down in the space for the bathrooms and we really started taking some steps forward...




Then the upstairs hall went up along with the linen closet and Teddy doorway and closet.



End of day 1...

By the end of the weekend, we had the hallway done, the door to the bathroom framed in, our closet done, Teddy's closet done and Charles started to fir out the bathroom...It was exciting to see our visions for our home start to take shape.

May 17th and 18th

Standing in the kitchen doorway, surveying her mom's work...isn't she cute! She finally got better after her surgery. What is fun is how tired,filthy and happy she comes home every time we go to the house.

Yes, she will tackle any task...The interior wall in the kitchen is quite a mess and they are going to start pouring posts this week. I didn't get much done today, but a phone call to Dad let me know what I need to do. Lesson for the day....old bricks must be wet before they are messed with or they will suck up all the mosture from the motar as soon as it touches them, making them impossible to work with!!! The next masonary session should go much better! The underneath digout was completed Saturday. They are going to start digging the holes for the concrete piers this week. Baby steps forward! We found our auctioneer today too. The auction will be June 14th! So we should be able to clear everything out and up for Charles birthday. We had the drywall, floor sheathing, concrete board, studs, joists....delivered Saturday and we are ready to take more steps forward!

This must be a city crew...check them out...sitting on the job! Nancy pulled nails out of trim for a good part of the day. We have discovered that square nails are quite hard to remove without significant damage to old woodwork...but if we want to save the trim, out they go. Nan and Chris were a huge help on Saturday!

Ben has the important task of de-mortaring the old bricks. Hopefully we will able to save enough bricks to do the face layer of bricks since these were made on sight, they would be really hard to match.

Chris, standing on the kitchen floor and Charles talking to him from the bathroom floor....eeeeewwwwww what a mess. And by the way, how do you remove that much cast iron??

This is one of the getting worse before it gets better. Torn out kitchen, now the bathroom floor is down too. No ducts, dirt piles everywhere...unstable floor and still a pile of antiques to get rid of...Hopefully, next weekend it will start to get better.

Small Changes....Large Results

Can you tell what has changed to make such a big diffeence in the appearance of the house??? All we needed was a ladder and a screwdriver to remove the broken, nasty plastic shutters. The house already looks happier! We have to wait until the electrical is moved until we take down that deck and then...I can't wait!!!

The Before Picture

It has been pointed out to me that I have not yet added a picture of what the house looks like now, so here is the before picture. Hopefully there will be a dramatic difference between this and the after picture. Especially once we can remove the porches and the plastic shutters and bring the front back to the 1894 picture look, fix the rotted wood and paint the old girl.

The Creature Under The House...

When the workers pulled this skull out, they were a little confused. It doesn't look like a normal creature they had seen alot. We are thinking it is some sort of rat creature....like a muskrat to have fangs like that. Other than this guy, they have found a lot of pieces of glass, coon bones, a big stake, a big round hole that they couldn't reach the bottom of, pieces of dishes...normal stuff. We will keep it all in a bag some where to pull out when we talk about the renovation.

Mother's Day-Destruction Day

It is time to tear down walls and get ready to add a bathroom! Yesterday, we spent the day in the barn cleaning and organizing. We made a lot of progress even with the rain. We found a nice teacher style desk and several old windows. We cleaned out one more stall and made a good dent in the middle. There were several chairs and tables and a large antiques sign too. Then Danny came by to go over the plans again. We are trying to get everything finalized on the drawings so we get the walls in the right place. We have to get the tubs ready to set in before next weekend when Chris is going to try to come again and help put up the walls.

Danny (contractor) is awesome! He showed up yesterday and, after spending a couple of hours going over final details, he asked if he could unload the ZTR mower he had on a trailer and mow the yard for us...Of course we said we didn't mind. When we left, he was mowing the front yard. He mowed the whole area around the house, including the backyard and the corral in front of the barn!!! That saved me a few worries for the next couple of weeks!! THANK YOU Danny!

Today was destruction day. Thankfully Danny told us that while you can't butt the drywall up to the lathe and plaster walls, you can leave a gap and fill it in with a piece of trim. We also learned that we don't have to take down all the walls! We can put the studs over the plaster and insulate between them and away we go! So demo was a lot less then what we were thinking. I stayed home with the two little ones since I couldn't go in the house with all that dust flying, but here are a few pictures from demo today. These rooms are what was the master closet, the bathroom and the upstairs study. They will become a hall into the kids bath, Teddy's room, the kid's bathroom and our bathroom. We found a buffet dated 1948 that we are going to make into a dual vanity for the kids. It will be at the end of the hall. The kids will be able to have one or two at the sinks and one through the door in the bathroom, so hopefully it will be user friendly!

May 7th

I just have to include a few pictures of the mess in the barn. It really is unimaginable unless you see it. This picture is taken from one end of the barn with Charles standing at the other end with his hands up. We had an autioneer come today. He is going to send his son and another guy out one night next week and we will mark what they want to send to the burn pile so we can start to organize what we want to keep and sell.

This picture is taken looking into one of the stalls...believe it or not, the one that I have gone through...

Here is Charles, up on the back deck. This deck is totally rotted and Charles is trying to figure out how to get it down without having it hit the windows below. He can't stand on it because it is so rotted...it is quite the dilema. We have to get it down so we can do the upstairs demo since this is the easiest access to the dumpster...

Finally, we have the latest hole on the north side of the house. It is, of course, still raining so another sump has been added. I am not seeing the 2 week hopeful deadline happening for under the house. Hopefully the three week one will still happen! Then we are going to try to have the demo done and stud walls up by Memorial Day Weekend so plumbing and electrical can happen the first part of June...Still trying to make a huge difference by Charles' birthday party and be able to move in by the end of July! I think we might make it!

May 4,2008

Is there anything cuter than a little boy with his bucket hat and a little red wagon? He just loves to pull this thing around. On this trip he had a stake for the concrete form to bring to daddy.

Nancy and Christopher came down today to help with this task. Christopher has worked with concrete before and showed Charles how to build a form, reinforce it etc. Nancy helped with kp (kid patrol) and tried to tackle the endless supply of sticks and stuff in the yard. Now we have one capped cistern with a pipe for a pump and one filled cistern. We will have to tackle the storm cellars in the next few weeks...

This one was not really a surprise...we didn't think we would be able save the plaster in the front bedroom and after I spent some time scraping the 7 (I think) layers of wallpaper off, I found two big spots where the plaster is just crumbling....so down it comes! This room will be gutted and redone too, but we kind of knew this one was coming. In this picture, you can see some of the water damage. The plaster here was still actually pretty firm, but the wall in back of where I am standing was peeling off with the wallpaper. I will save some of the paper I pulled off. It is realy interesting.

And here we have the properly labeled cap for cistern number 2! We will add the electric pump later....for now, it is not an essential item.

I spent the rest of my day in that barn. I will have to take a few pics next weekend to post. You wouldn't believe it unless you saw it...I did get one stall cleaned out. One down...10 to go. Treasures??? 3 church pews, a huge steamer trunk with the hangers and drawers still intact and a small humidor.

May 3, 2008

We have had our first surprise of the demo...

We were not expecting to have the big holes in the cold air returns under the house...I am thinking that they would make actually returning the cold air a problem...

They did put in a sump pump to help dry things out under there. The gutters are all down on the house, most of them are in the back yard for some reason, but it has left the ground rather wet.

From what we understand, this pile represents about 20% of the dirt that will be pulled out.

Time to clean out some stuff and get it out for bulky pickup on Friday.

Have we mentioned that there is a coon problem on the property?? Here we are getting ur new coon protection package ready for use.

This is one of the cases where is gets worse before it gets better...the workers are tearing up the kitchen floor rather than making another hole in the foundaton. We are planning to replace the damaged floor in the kitchen with a new sub-floor and porcelin tile. We asked the workers to keep the floor boards they pulled out so we can use them as patches when we need them.

It is amazing really. Brick wall with a 4 x 4 and studs. And it held for probably 125-130 years before there started falling? The joists in here are still solid. We are trying to figure out how we can reuse them.

You can see where the joists were put into the bricks. This end of the boards were rotted out. The kitchen and the dining room had the largest gap between the floor and the base board. It is hard to imagine what the kitchen will look like at this point?

April 30th

DESTRUCTION!!!!! Kids Love IT!!!!!


Teddy gets in a few swings. He wants to do everything his brothers are doing!


Ben's turn. He took a few swings until he missed and hit the shin guard he still had on from soccer practice....He had fun until then!

Seth went to town! I was wondering what he was mad at! He was really ready for that nasty island to come down!

Here are a couple of pics from under the house. The mole team is under there digging it out. You have got to love how they pull the dirt out. When the guy under the house says "ready" the other guy pulls on the rope and out comes the load of dirt...

There they are under the house! Notice the wooden I-beam sitting on stacks of bricks...amazing really. The joists show some signs of previous termite damage, but it doesn't really matter since all of the wood under the house is going to be replaced. There is also very little dry rot, except at the ends of the boards where they meet the brick. That wooden beam running on the right of the picture is going to be replaced by steel and the stacks of bricks are going to be replaced by concrete piers. We can't wait to see if the rumor that there is an old slave tunnel leading from the house to an old barn is real. We have been assured that if they find evidence of something like that, they will stop and we will get a call. So far they have pulled out a turtle shell, a couple of small bones, an animal skull, 2 pieces of white dishes and an old tuna can...