Three dumpsters later! December 2006

12/19/2006 (yes, nine months later!) – Where do I begin to play catch up? There are so many stories to tell. Unfortunately the Lombardy poplar we ordered never came. We did get 300 evergreens planted though. Can’t remember what they are – Norway spruce? We rented a tree planter from the county and borrowed Dan’s tractor. The girls (Caitlin and Madi) had a lot of fun sitting on the seat of the planter and dropping them in the ground. We planted a double row along most of the SE property line by the highway, and between us and the neighbor’s field.

We’ve spent a great deal of time ripping things up. Someday, I’m sure, we’ll actually start putting things back together. Upstairs, we’ve taken down every wall except the ones around the bathroom; I put my foot down on that one! We also took down the entire upstairs ceiling. So far we’ve filled three 20 yard dumpsters. The last one must have been incredibly heavy with all that old horsehair plaster. All the insulation in the attic was disgusting, and we discovered that the roof leaks (of course) so it’s a very good thing we took it down.

As it turns out, the layout upstairs will end up being quite similar to what it is now, expect it will become two bedrooms instead of four. The center landing closet will be divided to become my and Kevin’s closet plus one for linens. We’ll bump out the bathroom, too – it’s just too small.

Downstairs, the dance room is in pretty good shape. Kevin spent a lot of time patching the concrete floor, filling cracks in the foundation and insulating (lots of insulating). The new subfloor is down, and the heat runs are in.

The past week or so he’s moved to the breezeway (the former kitchen). Dan and Darren came out and helped with the floor beams. A couple of them were very rotted and Kevin replaced them with new wood. He’s also making a trap door in the event we ever need to get to the plumbing. I bet he’s taken a ton of dirt and rocks out of there to make the crawl space deep enough to accommodate the heat runs and plumbing. It’s been an amazing amount of hard work.

This room has probably been the toughest. It used to have half of a chimney – that’s a whole other long story! Unfortunately, the camera disk, which was full of some classic photos of a pile of bricks, fried as we were transferring the pictures to the computer. Think of that scene from the movie The Money Pit when their chimney came crashing down!

It seems like the list of things to get done is never ending. We need about 10 guys for a full week and we could really make headway. We’ve been fortunate to have help from friends and family, but it’s a slow process and everybody has their own lives!

Time for enjoying the outdoors

We actually have some gardening started, too. Caitlin, Madi and I dug up the garden by the back door. The Bushongs had planted a lot of cinnamon fern, which is wonderful, but also gout weed, which will take over everything. We dug all the plants out, and pulled gout weed root until we wanted to scream. We replanted many of the cinnamon fern, plus some hostas and astilbes we moved from the house in Battle Creek. Our little area looks terrific.

It’s been great fun to watch all the plants pop up. In early March the area around the outside basement door was loaded with snow drops. Across from the driveway is a patch of daffodils, grape hyacinths, peonies, lambs ears and tulips. At the back of the ell are Star of Bethlehem and a nice lancefolia hosta. There is also a beautiful twisty-leaved variegated hosta by the basement door, some sedum and lots of lily of the valley along the north wall.

Along the stone wall by the road are hundreds of “road-side lilies.” On the south side of the house under the old maple tree are lots of Virginia Blue Bells. They are very cute and very fragrant. The three forsythia bushes were surrounded by blue Siberian Scilla, which looked so pretty under the yellow forsythia.

The magnolia tree was just spectacular. It’s so old and huge and you have to duck under the branches to get up to the trunk. Now the huge petals have blanketed the ground around the tree, and it’s just magical to hide away underneath there.

There are also many, many lilac bushes. They need shaping and pruning since they’ve been unkempt for many years but they must be decades and decades old.

Tired already - April 2006

4/26/06 – At this point Kevin and I are quite sick of it all! Gee – is that a surprise?! We are on our second dumpster of deconstruction debris. Nearly every wall in the upstairs, except for studs, is gone. All of the flooring is up, except for the bathrooms both up and down. The kitchen cabinets are gone, and they look great in Jackie and Darren’s place – much better than in this house. Many of the walls downstairs are gone, too; between the two parlors, between the north parlor and laundry room, and between the dining room and south parlor.

Unfortunately, the floors aren’t exactly what we hoped for. Since the house was “abused” for so many years, there is a lot of replacement flooring and it’s hard to tell what’s original and what’s 1920’s. More abuse came from the termites. Old paperwork from Terminix shows it was treated in the 1970s. They had quite a feast between the floor and subfloor in a couple of good sized areas in both the south parlor and north parlor.

Kevin’s sister Kathy and her husband Cory have been out a few times to help tear down walls and their help has been greatly appreciated. Kevin’s dad and a friend from church also came out one day to help. We really need man power, because there is so much to do. I’ve hurt my shoulder with all this ripping and tearing, and the doctor says “enough.”

More floors!

2/19/2006 – Oh the joys of rehab! I spent a lot of time ripping up the underlayment in the upstairs landing. Kevin bought a new tool to try since the roofing shovel didn’t work like we hoped. It’s a short, thin pry bar with the flat end for pounding. I wedge the thin end between the wood floor and the underlayment, hammer it in, then lift up the underlayment. It’s very slow going.

This picture really shows a lot. Notice the roll of carpet, then under that was a carpet pad. Next, the gray and pink linoleum squares, followed by a paper underlayment! Finally we have the plywood, which was just a bear to remove. I'll give them credit for securely attaching it to the floor!

2/27/2006 – There’s been a whole lot of ripping and tearing during the past week, and a whole lot more to be done. Getting up the floor has been a nightmare. We have the landing and NW bedroom completed done, and the NE bedroom started. The special roofer’s shovel, along with the regular crowbar and the thin pry bar have been the tools of choice for Kevin and his dad, who came out to help earlier in the week. After they pry off the underlayment, someone has to go in and pull nails. The two bedrooms on the north side, plus the SW bedroom have what appear to be the original wood floors. The landing and SE bedroom have tongue and groove underlayment for flooring.

We have officially knocked down our first wall! We took out the dividing wall between the hallway closet and the NW bedroom. It was a double wall of tongue and groove boards. It has been up for a long time, because it had the old square-headed nails, but we’re not sure it was always there. We found a very small piece of wallpaper, with a narrow border, up near the ceiling under the wall. It’s probably the very first paper on the house so we’ll try and pull it off and save it. It’s very dark brown with an orange line running through it. The plaster is a real mess.

I reserved the dumpster for another week because we clearly have a lot more “deconstructing” to do.

Ripping up floors

2/16/2006 – Every muscle hurts! So far we’ve pulled up all the carpeting upstairs. The carpet in the landing was just black powder underneath. I’m guessing it’s some type of adhesive that turned to dust. Under the carpet is 8” square linoleum tiles in a softly striped grey and pink. They were probably very happy with it when it was new! Under the tiles is some kind of underlayment of a fibrous board material. It’s a real chore to pull up as they have nailed it down every six inches. Kevin bought a special shovel that’s used to remove roofing to try and lift it up but he said it really doesn’t help that much. It’s just going to take a lot of time and muscle. All four of the bedrooms are the same way. Sigh!

While I’ve been working on the upstairs, Kevin has been busy tearing out the ceiling in the laundry room downstairs. They put in a drop ceiling to hide the plumbing from the bathroom above it. We still aren’t sure if the stairs are where they have always been. It’s going to take more ripping and tearing. He did discover that there was probably a doorway leading from the hallway in front of the laundry room going into the north parlor. We can also tell, based on the change in the height of the mopboard plus patching on the plaster where there used to be walls, that the dining room was much smaller than it is now.

Decisions, decisions!

1/24/2006 – Kevin drew out a floor plan which moved the kitchen to the space now occupied by the steps and laundry room. The kitchen would then become a mudroom/laundry room with lockers for coats and boots. The steps would move to the south parlor, and would run north-south instead of east-west as they do now.

The current office area in the ell will become Caitlin’s dance room. Upstairs in the main stone section of the house, we will convert the hodge-podge of rooms and closets into two big bedrooms, two baths, and walk-in closets with a nice sitting area/hallway.

The next step was to actually try to budget such an adventure. It wasn’t pretty! I priced out wall sconces, and knew in a hurry it was going to be costly. The ones I want are $179 each, hand-forged of course, in Vermont. If sconces cost this much, we’re in trouble!

2/13/2006 – After a frustrating month with our first lender, we ended up switching to the Credit Union, and we closed with ease. At last we are homeowners! Actually, we are the owners of two homes, two mortgages, and two equity loans. We closed on Friday and everything went extremely smoothly.

Jan 2006 - Visiting friends with another Greek Revival

1/2/2006 – There are myriad decisions to be made, and it’s so overwhelming. I use the analogy that we’re like a kid with a $10 gift card for Toys R Us. So much to pick from, so little money! I don’t want to go to the $10 aisle!

Kevin has a pretty solid floor plan drawn out now that involves re-doing everything. All I want is a couple new bathrooms, get rid of the carpet, scrape off wallpaper, make Cait a dance room, re-do the kitchen, etc., etc.! Hopefully once we identify the support walls we’ll know if his floor plan will work.

On Thursday 12/29 we went to visit Ken and Linda Wirtz. Ken’s mother, Helen, was a cousin to Rachel Bushong, the previous owner of our house. Rachel passed away in 2003, and we bought the house from her grandson Eric.

The Wirtz home was on the 2004 Marshall home tour. It’s a wood frame Greek Revival, built about the same time as ours. Ken’s father completely re-did the house in the 1970s. It was in really rough shape, having been abandoned for many years. Vandals had stripped out things and someone had actually started a small fire upstairs. Fortunately the place didn’t burn down. Ken and Lyne redid the kitchen not too long ago. He is very handy and has made many pieces in the house out of salvaged wood, doors and decorative hinges.

The “sitting room” is wonderful. It has a working fireplace and the walls are paneled with wood wainscoting. A door to the left of the fireplace reveals a bread oven. The steps leading upstairs are to the left of the fireplace and wrap around behind it. Like our house, the steps are very steep. There are two small rooms upstairs; one they use mostly for storage and the second one is set up as a bedroom with wonderful old rope beds. The picture here is from our house, and the Wirtz's steps are similar.

In the sitting room they’ve taken down the plaster from the ceiling to expose the wood beams. It’s one of our favorite features in the house. In the kitchen, which was totally rebuilt, including the floor, they raised the ceiling to cathedral style. Ken made several cabinets; most everything he and his father built from salvaged doors, hinges and old wood. They also have a fabulous collection of graniteware and iron grates.

Rehab journal - Late 2005

Back at the beginning of this adventure, I started a paper journal to record our progress, so I'm posting it here now. You'll see huge gaps in time, particulary from March 2006 to December 2006, then from December 2006 to March 2009. Yep - a total blank. It's not that we weren't working, but journaling did not get top priority.

Here is a sketch of the floor plan of the first floor when we bought it. The rooms at the top half of the drawing comprise the main, stone part of the house, and the two rooms at the bottom are in the wood frame addition.

Here's a recap of the notes from 2006. More to follow.

12/29/2005 – First of all, this whole thing is Kevin’s idea! We had been looking for a place with more acreage since there’s no room (at our current home) for alpacas. Well that, plus we rushed into buying this awful, boring, plain-Jane 1960’s ranch style house. Aha! That would definitely be my idea (heh, great schools, location and 5 1/2 acres)! OK, it’s unanimous then; we all had a hand in it! But – Kevin gets the credit for finding the ad in the Home Buyer’s Guide. “National Historic Landmark with Country Charm” and “14 acres” had us more than curious.

12/30/2005 – We did a couple of “drive bys” then called our realtor to see the house on 12/2/05. Honestly, the interior was not what we were expecting or hoping for. All of the floors except the kitchen (linoleum) and dining room (replacement wood) have been carpeted. All the walls have been papered, and it’s all very aged. The windows are really neat nine pane over six. The widow ledges are very deep – about 18” – due to the thickness of the stone walls. The cats are going to love them!

Each room in the house will have to be re-done. We’re thinking of the main, stone part of the house as one big rectangle and we’ll redesign each existing space to be more usable for the way we live.

The downstairs has a combination bath and laundry area, and that will probably be the last thing we tackle just so we have a working bathroom during the rehab.

I’m getting ahead of myself! But actually, these are rehab thoughts that started formulating that first night we “met” the house. After a lot of back-and-forth we finally settled on a price. Yikes! What have we gotten ourselves into?!

Early

Back in early 2006 the "north parlor" in our house looked like this.

This is the fireplace in what we call the "North Parlor." The painting is done on board and we think it's a charming piece of folk art. She's rather out of proportion with tiny hands and feet holding a very tiny kitten when compared to the size of her head.

The piece on the mantle was purchased from Acanthus Antiques in Grand Rapids. It's actually the top part of a door surround - it came with the side pieces, too.

It's hard to date the actual fireplace - is it original, or not? Either way, at some point in its history it has been propped up in the basement. The wood floor was reinforced, and a concrete "wall" was poured to hold it all up.

And then... the beginning!

Welcome to our brand new blog!

In February of 2006 (geez, has it been that long) we purchased the Stow-Hasbrouck house just north of Marshall, Michigan. What we thought would be a refresh the paint-and-paper adventure has turned into a termite-riddled obstacle course!

We've been asked to see pictures of our renovation progress, so I'm starting this blog to record progress, share pictures, and, there may be a bit of whining along the way.

Let's just say that a rehab of this magnitude is not for the faint of heart or weak of commitment.

Here is information about our house from the State of Michigan Historic Sites on Line web site:

Narrative Description
The Stow-Hasbrouck House is a one-and-one-half story, side-gable, fieldstone building with a gable-roof, clapboarded, rear ell. The house stands on a rubble fieldstone foundation. The symmetrical facade displays an entrance in the center of each half flanked on either side by a window in the first story and two low attic windows in the low second story.

Statement of Significance
The Stow or Hasbrouck House is a little altered pioneer-era southern Michigan house which possesses interest for its unusual floor plan and fieldstone construction. Most documentation suggests that the house predates 1844 but the exact date of construction is not known.

Marker Name
Stow-Hasbrouck House

Marker Text
STOW-HASBROUCK HOUSE Granville and Catherine Stow, natives of New York State, built this house between 1836 and 1844. In 1861 Matthew Hasbrouck bought the house. Also from New York, Hasbrouck descended from the French Huguenots, who sought refuge in North America from religious persecution in Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries. In 1937 the Huguenot Society of Michigan was organized here. The Stow-Hasbrouck House is listed in the National Register of Historic Places.

Period of Significance 1826-1865; Significant Date(s) c.1844

Registry Type(s): State Register listed 06/15/1984; Marker erected 04/12/1985; National Register listed 12/02/1993; Site ID# P22774