Greg Stone and his wife became the devoted guardians of this house in 1972.

Greg Stone and his wife became the devoted guardians of this house in 1972.

Greg Stone and his wife became the devoted guardians of this house in 1972.

It’s been half a century this year that, in the midst of an exhausting search for a home for our young family and my widowed mother, I spotted the newspaper advertisement for what has since become our home.

The ad was accompanied by a picture of a stately white wooden house with two fireplaces and a porch with Greek columns. A long, gracefully winding stone driveway led to the house and a red barn. A stone wall stretched along the roadside of the property, and there was an old wagon wheel leaning against it at the driveway entrance.

Maple trees lined both sides of the driveway and the wall along the road. I fell in love with the image before I even looked at the house.

I knew nothing about classical American architecture. But I knew the place had all the elements of a perfect picture, line, shape, form, color and space. Passers-by still stop to take pictures from the same angle.

I won’t bore you with some of the initial disagreements my wife and I had about it, but we bought it.

This was long before home inspections became part of the routine of buying a home.

Before taking over the mortgage on the property, I hadn’t noticed that the roof shingles of the barn and the house were disintegrating or that the barn floor, on which concrete had been poured, was falling apart. was collapsing.

Inside, the plaster ceilings were clumping together (I’ll get to something called calcimine in a bit). Much of the paint on the decorative woodwork inside was peeling off, exposing green paint that I assumed was applied in the 1950s.

And there were generations of layers of wallpaper applied on top of each other. The furnace was a decrepit monstrosity that had been converted from coal to oil and was on its last legs. This does not even sum up the bad surprises we encountered.

I got a hint of what to expect when the first morning I left for work and pulled the fan cord in the small galley in the kitchen, it came loose and I didn’t couldn’t turn it off.

The summer following the purchase of the house was marked by numerous violent thunderstorms, exposing all the leaks in the roofs above our head and the barn.

If I had my life to live, I might have been better prepared for this if I had chosen engineering or medicine over journalism, had the house inspected, and negotiated a price taking into account all the obvious flaws, then hired contractors to essentially rebuild and restore the house, a beautiful 1852 structure although dilapidated in the Greek Revival style of its time, modern temples of domestic life in these regions before the civil war.

Instead, we decided to do the work ourselves, and that has been a big part of our lives for the past 50 years. We became devoted guardians of that house in the photo that I fell in love with in the spring of 1972.

Here are some examples of what that entailed.

Restoration of ceilings. My Connecticut Yankee ancestors approached cracks in ceilings with a substance called calcimine, which they generously sprinkled on flaws, much like my approach to these problems. The problem is that by the time we moved in, everything was dirty and it’s not easy to remove it. First you have to remove the paint, and I remember I used a liquid stripper. They then say you have to scrub off the calcimine, but I used a wallpaper scraper instead and although it was laborious, it worked pretty well.

Then, with an old-fashioned beer can opener, I cut v-shaped grooves in the exposed cracks and filled them with one of my favorite restorative materials, joint compound, and l covered with another coat of material and sanded it down. The joint compound is on par with what would later become another of my favorite repair materials, Gorilla Glue.

Another early project involved repainting the exterior, which had decades and decades of layers of paint that clumped together and could not be repainted. My neighbor built me ​​a wooden scaffold to do the job, and I stripped all the paint with an electric paint stripper and repainted one side at a time over a three-year period from the Watergate hearings to the Bicentennial.

I brought to the maintenance chores of this old house the cheap Yankee approach of fixing wherever I could. I discovered that I was not the first to use this method. I have come across many places where sheets of lead, soft, flexible and rustproof, were applied to rotting wood.

I was using plastic lumber before I discovered Gorilla Glue and started shaping pieces of wood and gluing them together. This was especially useful for repairing the beautiful decorative work along the eaves of the house.

I learned so many DIY tricks that the editor of a DIY magazine hired me to write articles for their publication.

The car barn was among the many other challenges I faced.

I built support pillars under the old floor beams to prevent the floor from collapsing and, with the help of my neighbour, I raised one side of the barn to replace a rotting sill and several poles on this side. Before I started, I spent weeks at the local library studying the structural dynamics of raising a house without killing myself.

If I had been richer, I would have hired a contractor to completely restore the post-and-beam structure, which my wife considered demolishing. But it was part of the photo in the newspaper, a rustic and beautiful sight that I never tire of. Everything is stabilized and ready for the next owner.

That’s how I saw things. I have always felt responsible to posterity to do what I could to preserve the classic structure and the landscape that surrounds it.

We are not only the owners of these beautiful old places, but the stewards.

My wife was my partner in the gardens and other plantings as well as in the tapestry and painting that we did.

She is known locally as the “lady daffodil” for her plantings along the wall in front of our house. A local newspaper columnist put a note in our mailbox one day thanking her for the pleasure she got from her gardens.

When our kids finally finished college and went out on their own, we had an addition built to the el wing for a large kitchen and turned the old galley kitchen into a pantry. It opened up our perspective on the land behind our house that we had spent decades clearing and developing.

The pandemic provided the free time for my flagship project, restoring the Doric porch at the front of the house as best I could. There are many houses of this vintage and style in our neighborhood, but ours is the only one with a Doric porch. This is the most striking feature of the house and the one that still required attention.

I cannot say that we have restored the house to the letter. But it is in much better shape today than it was 50 years ago. He still has the charm that drew us to him from that photo in the newspaper ad, and one of these days we hope someone comes along and takes responsibility for it. These places are cultural treasures.

Greg Stone is the retired assistant editorial page editor and longtime writer and editor of The Day.

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