Stairway Transformation

It may take a while, but the stairs will be undergoing a much deserved and hopefully breathtaking transformation in the next couple of months. The design of the staircase is a floating staircase because of the lack of support underneath the top half of the stairs.

Years of neglect have left it with peeling paint and chipped wood and not much of the original charm. Because of lead paint concerns, this will be a razor scrapper job done one rise and one run at a time. It originally had a walnut type finish, so that is what I will put back on. The woodwork underneath will also be scraped and finished so that it looks something like the newel post and I hope that by the end of the summer, the downstairs will be looking like it did 140 years ago.

This step has had the rise and run scraped. One down, 16 to go! Wish me luck!

We Make Heap Big Fire..

This litte building was in the field to the south of the house...where we found the brick foundation to the other house. It was very low and we are thinking that someone may have built it as a dog breeding place or maybe had a few pigs. In later years it was used as a dump...but we did find some neat old stuff in there...We were going to reuse the wood from it for the chicken coop, but as we started to tear it down, all we found was ant and termite damaged wood. So, we tore off most of the roof.

Here are the two runs on the back of the old structure. There are two small dog looking houses in there too.

Charles calls me a pyro...but he had fun setting this fire. We started it with a little boy scout juice...some soaked pieces of cloth and whatever was in the barn. (You should have seen Charles dancing when a family of mice started running out of some junk he picked up..tee-heee)

This fire got pretty impressive...so much so that we went ahead and pulled the garden hoses around from the other side of the house. A couple of nearby trees started burning just from the heat, there were actually no flames touching them. The leaves on the trees above looked like they had a wind blowing up at them...

And now it is over! There is just a pile of ashes and metal left to clean up...That was pretty cool!!

Another House

Bill came over to get the truck out of a mucky mess and stayed and pulled some trees. Every time he pulled a tree root out, we found more bricks! We have found the foundation walls for the front, back and the wall that went down the middle. We also found some old glass that appears warped, so we are thinking that this house, which had a footprint similar to ours but much smaller, probably burnt down in a fire. That explains the second storm cellar and the old barn. I wish we knew when the fire happened...but we may never be able to find that out.

The picture shows some of the foundation bricks exposed when one tree was pulled. We have decided to call our farmers market venture.....wait for it.....here it comes....."Red Brick Farms!"