BEFORE THE ARCHITECT – Mrs. AG's House Designs AND HOME BUILDING PLAN DESIGNS
CONTEMPORARY
ANTIQUE REVIVED
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The owner/builders bought a tract on which this old house stood. They were to bulldoze it. Really. Knock it flat and pack it off to the local dump. Mr. & Mrs. AG talked 'em out of it, paid next to nothing, got next to nothing, and put this Humpty-Dumpty back together again.
Neighborhood word had it that this structure a couple of centuries or more ago was a crib for chickens and other small livestock. Then a cabinlike structure was built (most of the left side of the real property) in lieu. In the 1940s, a wing was added on the right. It had been owned as a summer cottage by a reasonably mysterious fellow, a man of earned wealth, a man who appears to have bugged his own house. We met his surviving wife - a self-professed witch w/ eye -patch and long black cloak. She said the AG's kids could call her "Granny Patch." She said the place might still be haunted by the husband of hers who died inside. Didn't take long before we agreed. The old boy got to behaving well after a set-to.
The AG and Mrs. AG worked 5 years to fix up this nearly knocked down treasure. Milk paint was underneath layers and layers of deck paint in the older part of the house. (Granny Patch's family was fond of sailing and it genre and accoutrements - to wit, a reasonably accurate map of Maine coastline a chunk of which the family owned - along with other residences by the seaside in Asia and Europe - was hand-painted boldly up the front stairway wall from foot to head landing.) Milk paint -- bright yellow, green, red, and blue - - set deep in the recesses of the hardest wood the AG ever worked - simply, very old yellow pine. With the lights on in the basement, you could see between some of the floor planks into the underneath here and there.
Mrs. AG redesigned her way through this one, bringing it into the 20th century while respecting its dignity with senses all over of age and old bearing. Old mouldings stayed. So did old hardware. So did old, old windows and doors (after lots of time in intensive care). The back stairs were very narrow and very steep and very welcomed if one wanted to get upstairs in a hurry from the kitchen. She left most of the walls where they were, refinished all the floors with AG (over 100 sheets of course paper alone), added closets, a laundry, two heating stoves, a new kitchen, a lot of interior lighting, hundreds of hours of wall and ceiling work, rebuilt the butler's pantry, new bathrooms, a new family gathering area next to the kitchen (the family's favorite room), repaired the foundation, pointed the chimney, repaired drainage problems, rebuilt windows, fixed a couple of horrendous problems with structure, built a paddock and stable for a fabulous horse named Aries, and generally had a wonderful time of it. The steam heat worked swell once the 70-year old son of Boston boilermaker and steam heat plumber had at it.
Three pics from the front.
The first is a Before, just before the dozer was to hit the house, and wipe if off the face of our planet. No heat. No water. No power. No keys. No hope. No way.
Here is what most of it finally looked like at the frontside. The AG and The Missus still had to raise painstakingly about 2-dozen perennials from seed and plant 'em all over the place. Gorgeous. Pride of the whole family. (The folks who got the place next took a lawnmower to the whole shebang. (Still wondering why the AG and The Missus leave most scaping to others?)
Currier & Ives, watch it fellas.
Two from the backside.
First, a before on the same day as the first shot in this series.
And second, after Mrs. AG had at it a while. The paddock and stable are off to the left and outside this frame. Just inside the left frame you can glimpse the end of a potting shed cum hay room attached to a two-car garage. The last reddish room on the left is the porch that Mrs. AG directed to be the really get-away family space. Snowfalls from that room's vantage were spectacular.
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