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18th Century Farmhouse Reno
Hi all!
My husband and I live in the family farmhouse on our farm in NJ. We are just now working on renovating the downstairs completely. We can date the house back to around 1750. We began last night in the dining room by removing paneling and chipping away at the horsehair plaster. There are 6 fireplaces in the home and they are all covered in, so we started with the one and we'll see how it goes. Here's a picture so far. (you can see part of it we opened. if you look hard you can see on the right where the opening starts to curve down and towards the top you can see the wood "mantle")
We have a lot of work ahead of us for sure. On our to do list is to continue uncovering this fireplace and re-mortaring the joints. We have all hardwood floors through out the home and they are the narrow cut wood pieces. We kept them upstairs but plan on removing them downstairs to expose the original wide plank floor which we hope to refinish.
There's a lot more on the list after this room including gutting the kitchen and replacing every window in the house.
Tags: 18th, century, farmhouse, fireplace, renovation
Views: 903
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Steven C Phillips on -
WOW sounds like a great project - Best of Luck! My partner and I have been restoring a Historic Gothic Queen Anne ( 5000 sqft) that had been a Faturnity House for 54 years ( it needed a lot of work ) Stay organized with your project - tackle one thing at a time - don;t start something new until the project you are working on it completed. Again - Good Luck and we look forwrd to UPDATES and more PHOTOS.
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Permalink Reply by Toni on -
You are in for a LOT of work! Yes, indeed, we need pictures! LOTS of pictures!
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Permalink Reply by Andrea Csiszlak on -
Thanks for the encouragement! I'll be sure to keep you updated.
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Permalink Reply by Lair Tienter on -
You can never take too many pictures. I take pictures every day and sometimes more often than that. For example I took pictures several times a day when building my kitchen addition. I still look back at those pictures constantly. even when hanging a picture I check where the studs are. It also is useful to keep your spirits up when the project gets you down. You can look back and see how far you've come. Take lots of pictures and be sure to share with us. Good luck, Lair
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Permalink Reply by Bobby on -
Good luck to you on you reno! Been working on mine for about 5 months and love seeing someone else attacking a similar project. I've got an 1830's farmhouse and am planning a total reno back to original style. Sometimes it gets depressing...so much to do...but like Steven said... stay focused...one thing at a time. I get excited when I find, in a antique shop, an old surface mount door lock which matches the originals in my house. The little things make for big accomplishments!
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Permalink Reply by Kathy Horstman on -
All the best to your efforts. Sounds like you truly have a great piece of American history under your hands.
As you work, you might want to check out what they did up at Howard Hall Farm in upstate New York. That house dates from the 1780s, but when I saw your fireplace excavation, it occurred to me that you'll be dealing with a lot of the same issue they are.
By the way, when you say "chipping away at the horsehair plaster," I hope and assume you mean you're removing the plaster that's covering your fireplace openings. Because overall, the plaster is part of the history of the house and its effect can never, ever be duplicated with modern drywall. If it has any integrity at all, I would urge you to repair and retain it. There are methods available to make that easier to do, as I know from experience.
Enjoy the campaign!
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Permalink Reply by Andrea Csiszlak on
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Thank you!
We would love to keep the home as original as we can. There are certain things though that we can't live with. The plaster is directly placed on the outside stone that the house was made of and therefor is very cold. While we appreciate this in the summer, my wallet doesn't in the winter and the kids are cold in their bedrooms. We so far have left the plaster on the second level while basically just painting up there to update it. Downstairs we have a living room/dining room that were once one room and now split into two. We are going to remove the separation wall and unite them again and drywall the two outside walls as well as part of the back outside wall. There is a load bearing wall that is on one side of that room. We'll be taking that out as well to allow the heat from the stove to filter upstairs. We really aren't sure what the home looked like in the past. I know that my husbands family bought it in 1933 and as poor farmers did what they had to to make it livable. There is a bathroom added downstairs and I do know that before that was put in, there was the main entrance to the home there. I have no pictures though to have any idea of what anything looked like. We also know that General Maxwell lived in the house during Revolutionary times, but alas, no paintings of it from then either.
So, we're trying to keep the moldings with the period and the original (I say original, but who really knows) wide plank floors are all basically intact under the newer hardwood floors. We're going to restore those on the first floor. For now, we have to concentrate on the first floor. Maybe one day we'll actually make it upstairs.
Right now, money happens to be the determining factor in what we can get done. The kitchen will be done after the living/dining room and hallway. After that we're hoping to work on the stair case and outside as well as windows. We don't have a lot of money to work with so we know it'll be a long road, but we'll get there eventually.
The entire home is built of fieldstone and covered with a beautiful (not!) faux white stucco type brick which is oh so gracefully falling off. We'd love to repoint the stone one day but may just have to end up doing siding until we can afford it. We have to do something.
Ok, well, I hope that much more info gives some insight into our project and I really hope you all don't give me the boot. We would really love to restore this to an earlier time and use the proper materials and get it to period, but at this point, we are young, it's our first home (and only) and have to sacrifice some things for the almighty dollar and personal choice.
I hope to post more pictures this weekend as we are planning to really start ripping into it.
Andrea
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Permalink Reply by Bill Hendrickson on -
We sort of have the same problem. The outside walls of the ground floor are right on double brick exterior walls. We are leaving it that way for now because to do otherwise we would have to do some severe damage to all the unique woodwork.
Here is a dining room view of the outside wall:
We would have to pull down all the 1/4 sawn oak wainscoting and window trim to do so.
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Permalink Reply by Kathy Horstman on
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That's my situation as well-- plaster over 2-wythe brick. If I tried furring out those walls, the stairway especially would become impossibly narrow. And the rooms in my foursquare are already small enough. So I live with it and find it tolerable, but I expect that fieldstone walls like the OP has would be a lot more leaky and erratic re: heat gain and loss.
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Permalink Reply by Andrea Csiszlak on
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Wow, that's beautiful! We have the same narrow wood floors. Thankfully (sort of) the home was never owned by anyone with enough cash to do the fancy wood work. I would love to have it but then again, it is hard to renovate without ruining it.
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Permalink Reply by Steven C Phillips on
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Good for you - you seem to have a "realistic" approach which I can appreciate. While I can appreciate the "purists" who restore everything (good or bad) to original. I have to be realistic and take into consideration the "liveability" of our home. We had to gut 90% of the interior walls and while we had the opportunity we spray foamed the walls and roof. Some people scolded us for that however by doing the spray foam we cut the heating bill by $1000 a month during the coldest season which added to the likely-hood that our house would be preserved as a single family for the next 100 years. Do what works for you and your family and that will work for your home as well. Continued success to you.
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Permalink Reply by Kathy Horstman on
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Why did people criticize you for putting in spray foam? Seems minimally invasive to me. But then, I'm going to have the underside of my roof foamed, as soon as the foam guys can fit my little job in to their schedule.
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