Rebuilding Our 300-Year-Old House, Part One

Taking It Apart to Build It Back

When you live in a house that’s around 300 years old, you learn pretty quickly that there really is no such thing as a simple renovation.

You open one wall and find something else.

You pull something apart and suddenly you’re looking at wood that has been holding this house together longer than anyone in your family has been alive.

And sometimes a project that starts as, “Let’s fix this part of the house,” turns into something much, much bigger.

That’s pretty much what happened here.

What We Started With

This is what the back of our house looked like before we started.

And honestly, I love looking back at these pictures now.

At the time, it was just our house. The old shingles, the deck, the doors, the little additions that had been changed and added onto over who knows how many years.

But once we started taking things apart, we began seeing just how many different lives this house has already had.

This is one of my favorite parts of looking back through the renovation pictures.

Life was still happening right in the middle of all of it.

Kids running around. Animals needing to be taken care of. Gardens growing. Meals being made.

And meanwhile we were preparing to tear apart a huge section of a house that had already been standing for centuries.

Then We Started Digging

And I mean REALLY digging.

There was a point where I would stand outside, look at this giant hole beside the house and think:

What have we done?

Once the excavation started, there wasn't much pretending this was a little home-improvement project anymore.

The old foundation was exposed. Dirt was everywhere. Equipment was in the yard. Parts of the back of the house were opened up.

For a while, our backyard looked more like a construction site than a homestead.

But slowly, there was a foundation.

And once that concrete was there, I could finally start imagining an actual room instead of a giant hole in the ground.

It still looked enormous.

Actually, at this point I think it looked even MORE enormous.

Building It Back Up

Then came the part where everything started changing really fast.

One day there was a foundation.

Then walls.

Then suddenly we had this giant green box attached to our old house.

Seeing the new construction sitting beside the weathered cedar shingles of the original house was pretty wild.

Two completely different eras of the same home sitting right next to each other.

And that became one of the biggest things about this whole project.

We wanted more usable space and we wanted the house to work better for the way we actually live now.

But we didn't want to erase what was already here.

Things that had been covered up for decades and probably much longer were suddenly right there in front of us.

And then right beside all of it was brand-new framing.

There is something really strange and beautiful about seeing new lumber tied into parts of a house that have already survived hundreds of New England winters.

Some of the old wood isn't straight.

Some of it isn't pretty.

And absolutely none of it was built with the expectation that somebody would be standing there almost 300 years later trying to attach a modern addition to it.

But there it was.

Still doing its job.

Slowly, It Started Looking Like a Home Again

Framing eventually turned into walls.

Walls turned into rooms.

And for the first time we could actually stand inside and understand what this new part of our house was going to feel like.

I remember when the fireplace was basically just studs and a firebox.

You have this picture in your head of what something is going to look like, but during construction you spend a LONG time staring at lumber, wires, drywall and piles of supplies.

There are months when it feels like you're making enormous progress and somehow everything still looks completely unfinished.

Then eventually the mess starts disappearing.

Sometimes I look at this room now and have a hard time connecting it to that giant hole in the backyard.

This is the same space.

The concrete foundation.

The green walls.

The piles of lumber.

The exposed framing.

All of it became the room we actually live in now.

And right in the middle of it is one of my favorite parts.

The stone fireplace became the heart of the new space.

Warm wood floors, lots of windows, plants everywhere, places for everyone to sit and gather.

It feels completely different from where we started.

But it still belongs to this old house.

We're Still Not Finished

That's probably the biggest lesson I've learned from owning an old house.

You're never really finished.

There is always another project.

Another weird old thing you discover.

Another part that needs repairing.

Another idea you suddenly decide would be a GREAT idea until you're standing in the middle of demolition wondering why you ever started.

But that's also part of why I love it.

We're not trying to turn a 300-year-old house into a brand-new house.

We're trying to keep it going.

We're adding our little chapter to something that was here long before us and, hopefully, will still be here long after us.

And we've got a LOT more of this renovation story to show you.

So we'll save the rest for Part Two.