A southern view off the porch
The decision to renovate the old stone house versus build an entirely new structure has been difficult. Wouldn’t it be better to work with an existent set of walls (to make the stone house liveable, we’d have to gut the inside and come up inside the stone walls with everything new, including roof, plumbing, windows, etc.)? Rather than start all the way from scratch? Masons and others have inscribed various images and letters into the stones around the house: a sailboat, initials, dates, inderterminable sketches. The middle section, the oldest, dates back to 1760. Down the hill out front, the spring house includes inscriptions from 1740. The history of the buildings will show up on these pages soon as I dig into County archives.
But several limiting factors have ultimately overridden our purely emotional yearnings to love the stone house. First, Michael’s brother Timothy who owns the farm is allowed by township ordinance to break off a 2.5-acre or 20-acre parcel. The stone house sits on a section of the farm that can by broken off and sold at some point (an entirely enticing prospect for Timothy who has multiple children and he and his wife’s retirement to plan for) . . . and the stone house sits in an area that due to other buildings (barn, sheds, etc.) makes it difficult to even draw a 2.5 acre circle around it (which also means very little grow-able and livestock-able land for our food production).
Further, after discussions with various contractors, we’ve determined that a remodel will be more costly than the construction of the efficient home of our dreams . . . plus the stone house (which has two 18-in thick interior walls) would never be an efficient structure anyways. Moving heat around would always be a battle, but even more so due to the excessive size of the home for our needs.
Barring any complications with moving the buildable home site (associated with the easement put on the property during the lifetime of Helen Wickes, mother of T and M), it looks like we will build. But in the meantime, we will live in the stone house.
For this first year of our 2000-era homesteading, then, we hope to minimize costs associated with living in this house. An ancient oil heater operates from the basement (with asbestos covered pipes and all in it, of course), which will be quite expensive to use as the main heat source this winter. Can we say ugh to oil? I expect to whine about this quite a bit.
Our solution to throwing those oil dollars down the toilet is to install a wood-burning stove. We’d like to use an external furnace, but will not quite yet so as not to lose the piping and install work when we move into our eventual real home. So, in addition to chopping a helluva lot of firewood over the next couple of months we’ll have to figure out how to pipe in a freestanding stove.
Obviously we’re also considering covering the windows somehow to prevent heat loss that way. The attic . . . is daunting. It is enormous and has no insulation of any value in it. I wonder what we will do there. All in all, this house’s 3,000+ square feet present very large challenges in labor and cost to heat during the cold months. Anybody with a splitter feel like a jaunt to Pennsylvania?
(the old spring house, dating back to 1740)
well can you explain more about it
Hello there. Thanks for the question. We’ve moved out of the stone house I wrote about back in August. But having gone through a winter in it, here are some comments: we installed a 3,000 square-foot-capacity wood burning stove in the downstairs (after sticking a metal pipe up the chimney and insulating the whole thing for a pretty penny – all to avoid chimney fire and other dangers associated with the stone chimney structure that was degrading after years of exposure to rain, etc.). This warmed the rooms in proximity very well. However, due to an uninsulated attic, that was about it. The house remained chilly elsewhere, and we used stand-up oil space heaters on occasion. Despite having grown up in a wood-stove heated home, my adult passion for a clean home was challenged by the dust generated. We used a temperature-moderated blower on the stove so that the heat wouldn’t all escape up the chimney; it was on pretty much all the time and did help warm the rooms better than without such a fan. However, since it effectively removed the heat from the top surface of the stove, I was not able to cook on top of it – it was too cool! That was a bummer for me.
I’d be happy to comment on any specific questions you may have.