Rebuilding Our 300-Year-Old House, Part Two

Building the Kitchen at the Heart of Our Home

In Part One, I shared what it looked like to tear apart a huge section of our nearly 300-year-old house and start putting it back together.

But there is a pretty important part of the story I left out. We didn't wake up one morning and decide it would be fun to rip apart an old house and build a giant new addition.

The house basically decided for us.

Finding Someone Willing to Save the House

Then came the next problem: finding a builder. We talked to three different builders, and nobody wanted to do what we wanted to do. They all wanted to tear the old house down and start over because building new would have been easier than tying a modern addition into a house that's been standing for almost 300 years.

Tearing it down wasn't really an option for us. We wouldn't necessarily have been able to rebuild on the same footprint, and once we started looking at the numbers, a completely new house would have cost more than $1 million. We had already paid for plans we couldn't use, and one builder even told us that making the old house and the new addition look seamless wasn't possible.

Eventually we found an older, experienced builder who understood what we were trying to do and was willing to work with the house instead of trying to replace it.

I Drew the Layout Myself

The layout was probably the most important part of the project to me. I drew out how I wanted the house to work, and Dave helped turn what I had in my head into something we could actually build.

This was my original sketch. Nothing fancy, but it was enough to show how I wanted the old house and the new addition to work together.

Purple shows the existing house. Green shows the addition and the new spaces we were creating.

We took the old kitchen and divided that space into an office, laundry room and walk-in bedroom closet. The addition became the new open kitchen, dining room and living room, along with two spaces that were really important to me: a big working pantry and a mudroom.

The pantry is basically a second kitchen, and the mudroom handles all the boots, coats, farm clothes and outdoor gear that come with living here year-round. I wanted the house to actually work for our life, not just look good in pictures.

We Did What We Could Ourselves

Building is expensive, so anything we could reasonably do ourselves, we did. We were also incredibly lucky to have family who could help us.

My dad is basically the cabinet king. If you've been inside our farm store, you've already seen some of his work. He helped with all the shiplap and helped create the big barn-style store counter. Having him involved with projects at the house saved us a lot of money, and we also have family in the electrical business who helped with the major electrical work.

We tried to save money in other places too. Our big two-door refrigerator is commercial rather than one of the extremely expensive residential versions. It gave us what we needed for a fraction of the price. The harder part was getting something that big into the house, but luckily my husband works with heavy machinery and is pretty good at moving things that probably shouldn't fit through a doorway.

Once the cabinets started going in, I could finally see the layout I had drawn becoming a real room. The sink had a home, the stove had its place, and the island wasn't just a rectangle on a piece of paper anymore.

The Space Finally Came Together

The island became the center of the whole room. We cook there, eat there, unload groceries there, open packages there and gather around it when people are over. More importantly, it connects the kitchen to the dining and living room so the whole addition feels like one space.

After that, the rest came together little by little. Cabinets, countertops, appliances, tile and all the finishing work slowly turned what had been an empty room into the kitchen we use every day.

There are definitely things I love about how it looks, but the biggest thing is that it works. It fits the way we live, the way we cook, the way people gather here and the way this old house needed to change for the next chapter of its life.

Just Another Chapter in an Old House

There wasn't a kitchen here before this project. Now it's one of the places where we spend the most time, and it opens directly into the living and dining area from Part One.

We added something completely new to a house that's been standing for almost 300 years, but it doesn't feel like a separate house or an addition stuck onto the side. It just feels like the next chapter.

This house has changed over and over again as different families needed different things from it. This is just our turn.

And we're definitely not finished yet. Part Three is coming.