spoken for

I wish I had more things to say these days but I don’t have too much. I was able to get out on Friday though, while Anita watched the kiddos for a few minutes. Went to the post office and the bank, heehee. But on the way to the post office, I saw the house built by my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather in 1784. YES, that is seven, onetwothreefourfivesixSEVEN greats! I love this place and I’ve been watching it get renovated over the last few years. The only thing I wish is that I had pictures of it before the cleaning up and renovation started. The man who owned it before the people who do now, he refused to do anything with it, and the property was literally covered in brush and old cars and other trash metal. Ah, I guess a collector/restorer wouldn’t refer to the cars as “trash” but they were NOT taken care of at all and were all rusty. He also refused to sell the place, so it was only in his death that it went to someone who would actually care for the place.

I just realized I’ve talked about this house before so rather than re-post all of the images, just check out the first I took of it and the most recent, 2005 and 2009.

These old houses take a lot of work to restore, if, for nothing else, because you can’t just do what you want, you have to make it what it would have been like when it was built. Hence: restore.

We have another house in town that I love to see that’s been rather recently restored. This one isn’t quite as old, built somewhere between 1820 and 1850 but it has a unique history: it was used as a medical dispensary for the Union army during the Civil War. I was lucky enough to be able to get a close look (though we didn’t get to go inside) and take photos there of the girls a few years ago, but it is now owned by someone else who has turned this little un-insulated cabin into something livable.

Here it was in 2007 while it was for sale:

And after it sold and was restored, inside and out, and being lived in, 2008:

However, imagine it without the bay windows. At the time I took the photo, the windows had just been put in but since then they’ve been removed. The historical society, or whoever it is in charge of these things, got after the guy and he had to get rid of it because it was out of period, or style, or something. Steve and I disagree, a bit, on this issue. We both feel like if it’s your property you can do what you want with it, but I think that with these historical homes, care should be taken and they should be restored as much as they can be, so I was pretty happy when the window was removed. I think that people know this before they buy these homes so if they don’t like the idea, they shouldn’t buy the house! I digress…

Pretty neat though.

The only other thing that I have to say is that in two days my great-great-aunt is coming in town! I’ve never met her before, she lives in California, so I’m really looking forward to this. She’s 93 and apparently still runs around like she were 45. :) Grandpa describes her as a pistol! He went out to visit her in July and arranged for her to come in and visit with all of us. I have lots of questions to ask her – she was about 10 years old when my great-great-great-grandfather died! I hope she’ll tell us lots of stories! I need to order a video camera, actually…