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Restoration
When Mr. Osso moved away, I was left alone to
carry on, and I was terrified. I needed solace. I turned to my bible - - The
Old-House Journal! I knew it would answer my questions, tell me where to find
materials, and give me inspiration, encouragement, and the strength to continue.
And it did.
The fire in the '50s had done severe damage. The
kitchen and dining room floors had been replaced with narrow oak boards,
arranged haphazardly. The center hallway was floored with remnant wood. Tin
patches and holes marked the places where pipes had once gone through. The hewn
ceiling beams were badly charred and had been painted over by previous tenants.
 Our first priority was to replace the destroyed
floorboards with authentic replacements, which meant old, wide-plank,
11-to-12-inch boards. I called The Barnsider in Sugar Loaf, New York (about an
hour and a half away). After Michael and I went to see their wood and made a
deal, they sent down two old-fashioned country boys, Pete and Bill, to install
the wood. I cleared the furniture out of three rooms and stored it, filling the
attic and basement. "The boys" set up their big table saw in the
dinning room. We worked in harmony; everyday they arrived at 8 a.m., and I'd
have a pot of coffee waiting. While they sawed and hammered, I vacuumed up
sawdust and debris.
One day the plumber was there too, drilling a
hole through the dining room floor to extend a pipe for the radiator. The drill,
saw, hammer, radio, and vacuum were all going at once. I stopped the vacuum and
wanted to run out from the house screaming. Instead I fled to the cellar; when I
reached the bottom of the stairs, I saw how the plumber barely found space to
run his extension cord along the cluttered floor to shine a light up through the
cellar ceiling to the dining room, and I just started laughing.
So this is how you renovate an old house. You
laugh, you cry, you want to scream, you can't escape the dust, the debris, the
clutter, the chaos. You wonder if you'll live long enough to see it finished.
But you go on.
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