The Restoration Process
How it all began
The house was obviously neglected. It’s not that the owners abandoned it, but no one lived there and only on occasion did someone come by to cut the grass. It had an odd combination of siding, some horizontal aluminum on the first floor and then darker green vertical siding on the second floor. The roof was peeling away with obvious patchwork across most of it’s sagging expanse. Some bricks on the chimney were missing and there was a large vine growing up on the side of the house. I remember wishing someone would do something about it. Fix it up somehow. All I recall is how I already had my hands full with a wood frame Harmonist house I was knee deep in restoring.
I remember I was working on the facade of my house when the old man cutting the grass approached me and just asked me if I wanted to buy his house. He said he’d been watching my progress and how I was taking the time to return the house back to it’s former glory. That’s why he wanted to sell to me. He said he knew I’d take care of the house just like I was with this one and that he didn’t want to sell to just anyone who wouldn’t care.
I told him I already had another historic house someone else sold to me with the same line. I said it was in deplorable condition and that I didn’t need another headache. But he persisted: He said he thought his house was different somehow; he said the walls were real thick and you could see big timbers in places. I don’t think I even walked through it when I asked him how much. I had a hunch it was different. It was similar to other Harmonist houses, but the dimensions weren’t right for a frame house and it wasn’t brick, so it had to be a different construction. I thought just maybe it might be log. We haggled for a few minutes and he made me an offer that I thought was really reasonable. When he walked away I had immediate buyer’s remorse but just couldn’t bring myself to back out of the deal.
After the closing I expected that they’d need a couple days to move out. I say they because it was like a family reunion when I came to take possession of the keys. But they never did move out. After they tired of reminiscing I took a look around. It was like walking into a museum dedicated to life in the 60’s. I last saw the old man drive away in a pick up with a few boxes in the back. All the odd collection of furnishings, dishes, even clothes in the closet…all of it just abandoned just as if they were going on a vacation and would return any minute. However, it continued to sit empty. Oh, there was a period where I regrettably had a desperate renter I felt sorry for. And I even found myself waking there years later answering the phone with my love telling me a plane crashed into the World Trade Center. After a second call I said it sounded like a terrorist attack. Twenty days later I was married, and a day after that I was mobilized and on the way in a Humvee to the Pentagon. And again the house was abandoned.
Two more mobilizations, with one to Iraq, and I had an epiphany. Years earlier, after the renter left, curiosity got the better of me. I had gotten a pry bar and a hammer and peeled off a piece of paneling.
Sure enough, under it and many layers of old remodeling efforts sat a large brown log. I remember touching the smooth side of it and felt a kind of energy surge. I knew then I had to restore it. And, while I was in Iraq, the plan came together. I would take a short two year program in historic building restoration to hone my preservation skills and launch my biggest restoration yet. Oh yeah, don’t forget to finish a brick Harmonist house I had started when I left for the Middle East in 2006, but then start the restoration.
I chose to intern with a crotchety country minister who was a master at historic log work. The first day he had me help hew a log with a broad axe in my bare feet because that’s how they did it. I had the privilege of helping save log buildings destined for ruin or the bulldozer in the Appalachians and learned how to cut mortises and lay up log houses. So with a wealth of new skill and knowledge and now experience, we (my good friend and master carpenter Jason and myself and whoever I could recruit) set out to restore the house in 2010. There are several books on moving and adaptive reuse of log structures, but little information on restoring and preserving a historic log house in situ. I determined not to cut corners. If this was to be done right every effort would be made to retain original materials, restore what could be practically restored, and only then to duplicate when necessary. This meant trying to determine what was original, what was replacement or remodeled materials, and what was missing. The missing was the problem. The best guess I could make was that the house had gone through a minimum of four remodelings. Techniques, materials, molding styles, door heights, thickness of materials, window openings, sash styles, color schemes, wall paper, news paper as underlayment, or other evidence can reveal approximate construction dates. You may even find dates and names written on walls.
I believe plank walls were added during three periods starting when the house was relocated about April 1824. The Harmonists removed most of Samuel Heslet’s handiwork from when he built it in 1822, such as pegs in the log walls used to hold plank shelving inside and out, and removed the original stairs. They marked the logs with Roman numerals starting with the sill log as Roman numeral I. The numbering system also marked the cardinal direction, or side the walls went on and the sequence from left to right with a series of tick marks – all for easy reassembly. You cannot reassemble or relocate a log structure without knowing exactly where each log went without a lot of unnecessary axe work. The Harmonists added their trade mark steps and entry way with thick plank walls isolating it from the rest of the building. They added a second chimney and two fireplaces, one above the other on the first and second floors with the classic Harmonist angled chimney in the attic that clears the summer beams and exits at the center of the roof. The firebox though has an uncharacteristic arch instead of the flat jack arch as in the rest of the Harmonists buildings. Heslet or the Harmonists whitewashed the interior of the log walls.
After rebuilding the house a clay plaster was applied and again whitewashed.
Several years later hand split oak lath was nailed with square lathing nails directly to the log walls over the whitewash and the house plastered again.
Some time during that period the outside of the logs walls were furred out with wide oak planks to serve as nailers for horizontal siding. The Harmonists favored a thin pine plank board, hand planed on one side to smooth the wood and level out the saw marks and uneven surfaces. Then a small bead was planed to the bottom side of the board to create a shadow line that served as a drip edge. This was called weatherboard and is of uniform thickness. The boards are laid with wider spacing at the bottom than the top of the walls.
The front facade of the house is the prime wall and has the most uniform siding boards and spacing to present a more refined front to the public. There are beaded corner boards on each corner of the building. There is little overhang on the gable ends of the house with the roof sheathing capped off with a small barge board. Many Harmonist houses were re-roofed in the Victorian era with larger Victorian roof features added changing the lines of the houses making them more English in appearance than German. The weatherboard was painted with white linseed oil paint. It was stark white, but yellowed slightly over the years as is characteristic of linseed oil.
More plank walls were added to segment the large open rooms into smaller purpose build rooms. Sometime later the west chimney failed because it was angled too much and exceeded the center of gravity and was dismantled to the foundation under the floor. It was probably the Heslet chimney since it was not centered in the house as the Harmonist did the rest of their chimneys, but in the room that was probably the original kitchen. It also had a through-wall firebox cut into the logs of a more traditional English style that a Scotch Irishman would have been used to.
During the Victorian period taller windows were added to the East side of the house. Right before the Great War the old wide plank floor was removed and a strip floor added on the first floor probably due to extensive termite damage and a period kitchen added with rudimentary plumbing with cast iron sink. A second window was added to the West wall in the kitchen and the cellar trap door was enclosed in a plank wall as well as the attic staircase. The remodeling came fast and furious in the next four decades adding a second floor bathroom, coal furnace in the root cellar, and small shed addition finishing out the last work.
It becomes important at a point, if you’re serious about saving a historic house, that you become familiar with and use the correct terminology. If anything, the definitions keep your thinking straight.
You will encounter original materials and possibly a fully original structure with no alterations whatsoever. This is a prime candidate for a preservation effort where you clean and preserve the original fabric of the building as it was when it was first built. Too many well intentioned, but ill prepared people dive in without a plan, basic knowledge or at least a vision of what they want as a result. Way too often stripping compounds are wildly applied ‘to reveal the old wood’ when in fact great effort originally went into graining the plain uncharacteristic woodwork by what was probably an itinerant grainer, to make it look like a more expensive wood; or worse yet too much reality TV convinces you to apply the latest paint color permanently ruining brick, scroll work or leather wall treatments. This is known as remodeling, or what I call succumbing to chronic and unrelenting sales pitches that make you feel bad about your historic house. Be honest and know if your are about to remodel or not. Do not remodel. It is often irreversible and destroys the authenticity of a period house.
Start by learning the basics of house styles. The style – the character defining features – are your starting point. A wonderful guest showed me a picture of her house and I told her what a wonderful Richardson Romanesque she had. For the first time she knew her house style. Knowing this and other attributes about your house and the neighborhood will be the benchmark for your plans and vision.
Our house leaned over a foot to one side. The floors were humped in places and sagging in others. This should tell you there are foundation problems that must be addressed. Wood and masonry doesn’t like to bend and will shatter and crack before it fails. Ignoring structural problems is like ignoring cancer. The original floor boards were split, cracked or missing due to hundreds of year of wear and structural problems. Hearths were revealed, i.e., with missing brick, holes, and a lot of unmentionable things and soot in them. Lots and lots of soot. Things like this help to visualize how the house was operated. In my case, first wood, then coal, then gas, then wood again in a more modern wood burner heated the house. How were ashes dealt with? Perhaps that’s why the garden has such black soil? Termite damage led to removal of rotted logs. The house had to be lifted up about 16 inches, the rot removed, and replacement logs fitted and inserted and the house set back down. Did you ever wonder why newly “rebuilt or restored” old log buildings have a lot of stone in the foundation, often up to and beyond the doorway or even to the bottom of windows. Perhaps the crew rebuilding it didn’t know how to cut and fit in new logs so chose the easier route of using fill stone instead. Look for unusual things like this in your restoration as clues to repairs and then ask why there was a repair. What was going on or going wrong?
The siding had to be removed because the chinking had fallen out and strong drafts were flushing any heat out of the building. Previous owners had sheathed the outside with thin foam insulation and on the inside furred out the plaster walls with two by twos and infilled the cavity with insulation in an effort to save energy. This resulted in the loss of not only the historic character but also squeezed down the height of the ceilings and brought the walls inward creating small confined spaces instead of the open rooms of the original house. This was a short sighted solution to a bigger problem. This was all removed. I had a dendrochronology study done of the logs. This is one way to determine the age of a house, or at least when the trees were felled. In my case, the winter of 1821-22.
Systematically, and sometimes not, the remodelings were peeled back till the original house was revealed along with all the problems. This is where your structural problems, and possible solutions are put into a plan. No, you don’t have to strip a house. In fact this is the last thing you should do. We stripped away all the incorrect material in preparation for the period of interpretation – 1822-24. This is something you need to determine if you’re going to apply for the investment tax credit. We took stock of the condition of the remaining materials, decided how to proceed and started to plan the process.
Key to the restoration was my wish to use as natural materials as possible and to do it as sustainably as possible. An existing historic structure is the most sustainable of all structures. The materials are all in place and the energy is already embodied in the structure. By adding a bit more energy and materials you have a shelter of character and history – or a sustainable structure – where energy, materials and culture were preserved. When you see a brand new building being touted in the news as sustainable, is it really? If no old materials were re-utilized, but only new factory built materials and equipment used, then there was a lot of energy put into its components and labor in erecting it. Who’s fooling who? It may save energy going forward, but not in the construction. So in our case this meant locally sourced materials and local labor adding to the energy embodied in the already existing building. Locally sourced didn’t mean the local home improvement store either who received in shipments from around the world. This meant sourcing local lumber from a local saw mill, milling and molding it ourselves, often by hand with hand tools, and painting it with our own formulated paint. I only shipped in what was needed if it was not available locally.
Energy efficiency was also a goal. I wanted the building to offer modern conveniences we all demand but at the least cost in energy consumption. Water consumption was also a goal and water saving appliances and fixtures were all sourced. Even the plumbing is unique delivering water directly to each fixture to minimize line loss. And as mentioned, once the historic colors were determined I mixed them myself as much as possible with basic naturally sourced ingredients. You decide in every purchase you make, consciously or not also. If you are of the same mind, you have the habit to go directly to the local store that you must break. Start to consider every time in every purchase the alternatives. Pause first, ask if there is an alternative to this paint, floor cover, wall finish, floor material. Can I refinish, salvage, reclaim, re-utilize? Its hard to do at first. You’ll end up with a mountain of materials. That’s the easy part. The hard part is the reclaiming and refinishing. You’ll make mistakes and poor decisions, but anyone can buy a house off the shelf.
Consider a restoration. The effort to preserve what is original, repair what is existing, but in need of some help returning it back to what it was in all its glory. If you have a commercial use in mind, such as a B&B or combination gift shop and apartment for yourself on the second floor, you may want to try for a historic tax credit. It’s a simple concept, that is somewhat difficult to execute. Too often the bureaucrats who spent way too much money on their education and are now trying to live off a government salary are going to help you as little as possible but sometime make the most unreasonable demands on you as they probably never lifted a hammer to ever attempt their own restoration, but will tell you what and how and no, you’re not qualified.
But there is a path to success if you’re willing to play the game. I chose to forgo a large credit because a cog for the Preservation office at the State decided he knew better about interior wall finishes for my specific building I sweated over for more than five years than I did and that the National Park Service Preservation Brief, that is a guide only, was not open for interpretation. But it can be done if you just cover up the logs with drywall for 5 years and you can have the credit comrade.
During the process you will become principled or not. The nots’ are looking to do a quick flip with as little investment as possible citing the need to make money. Principle will keep you from ruining our built heritage. Will you be among those who saved Paul Revere’s home or those who demolished Pennsylvania Station? Money has no principles.
You will be ridiculed by your neighbors and friends. You will have fewer and fewer real friends as you become boring. You will forgo vacations, new cars, espresso machines. You will care less and less about your looks and current fashions. You will be out of the loop on the latest shows or sports races. You will have dirt under your fingernails, paint in the oddest places, and speak a different language. You will become dissatisfied with the paint selection at Lowes and will read really old books on making your own paint. You will find that there are a lot of companies that will make you a custom cutter for that unusual molding profile, and you will build a collection of tools and know where the best places are to get the best deals. You will become more and more interesting as your house is transformed. You will touch almost ever square inch of your house. You will have a story of great interest of effort and ingenuity that went into something buried in the wall that no one will ever see again – but you will experience the greatest joy and feeling of satisfaction you will ever have, save the birth of a child.
McMansions got their name because millions are built and the masses buy them every day. Do you want to live in common every day or find that diamond in the rough and resurrect a house that was hand built – twice? Doing a restoration is for yourself, the structure, but most importantly you are preserving our built environment – our cultural heritage for yourself, your children and your neighborhood.
Enjoy the pictures of the Heslet House rescue and restoration. I hope to add more as I get comfortable with the workings of the website. I also have a blog on restoration, traditional trades, and neighborhood restoration under the History Notes tab of this webpage.
Enjoy!
