Over the last few months, we’ve really been adding to our collection of milestones:

First one on deck for this blog:  the summer kitchen!  You may recall from prior posts that the Summer Kitchen has long been attached to the Big House, originally by an open-air breezeway, next by a 1960s/70s north-wing addition that enclosed the breezeway, and finally in our version of Edge Hill, via the kitchen pavilion space that replaces the 60s/70s addition.

The original kitchen structure was one of the most dubious parts of our entire project.  We always knew we wanted to save/rehab as much of the original summer kitchen structure as we could, but our contractor knew the team would have to evaluate what (if anything) could be saved once they got into the thick of things.  Thus, during demo, we were left with:

Sort of like a boxer with one tooth left . . . but still fighting!  The two walls not pictured in the photo above had already been re-pointed and stabilized, but the wall facing us had SERIOUS issues.  It has been bowing inward for years – even a lay person could notice that it was curved, at some point deflecting in about 5 inches:

It was basically like someone had taken a huge swing at the center of that wall, and the whole structure was at the point of cave-in.  Our motto was: “don’t sneeze near the wall.”

Part of the problem was a prior renovation had removed the rear wall to the building, which had been providing lateral stabilization.  Another part of the problem was that the gutter downspout, as you can see above, was channeling all of the water directly into the foundation of the of the building.   It was a disaster waiting to happen.

Enter the Herr & Co. rehab team, who first built temporary walls to make sure the remaining structure was not further compromised by our repair, and who then began to take the wall out, brick by brick:

As you can see in the picture above about halfway down, at some point someone had tried to repair the wall by simply applying new mortar, but that mortar was too hard (and our bricks are super soft), which caused the bricks in the center of the wall to begin to disintegrate.  Normally,  we’ve learned, you want your mortar to be softer than your bricks so that if there is a weak point being damaged by water, your mortar is the first to go.  This gives the homeowner a red flag about the problem and also a much easier to repair once the water problem is fixed.  Alas, a water problem and a poor repair spelled DOOM for our wall.

Our guys saved the good brick, but much of what was there was too compromised for re-use.

Finally, the wall was down!

Then, it was time to start building it back up. First, the roof was removed.  This shot shows the original chimney breast windows, which had illuminated the loft in this building.  During de-construction we did not find any glazing in these windows, so the sashes had either been long removed, or the openings may have just been shuttered with no glass.

Many historic Shenandoah Valley homes have these small windows, and we knew immediately that we wanted them to shine light into the new space.  As a result, wse had the builder frame a vaulted roof for the space that would not obstruct the windows.

Then, the wall was rebuilt from our salvaged brick!  The new brick will have a lighter mortar color as compared to old hard grey mortar, in line with what we used on the rest of the project. This building will always have a little “Frankenstein’s Monster” quality to it, closing in on two centuries of use and repair, but at the end of the day, we are so pleased with the final result!

The large windows were left at their original hight, which will be a little lower than typical today, and you can see the mason did a running, or “American”, bond on this structure to match the original design.  We think those old bricks really cleaned up nice.

On the interior of the summer kitchen, we sprayed a layer of insulation and will keep some of the original beams and fireplace exposed (sorry for the sub-par lighting in these pictures):

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Finally, we got yet another little surprise when re-constructing this room.  The remaining original beams that you see in the shots above support a hanging shelf.  There is no indication this fireplace ever had a mantel, so we are guessing that this shelf served that purpose, hanging from the original beams.  One day we were up on a ladder inspecting the brick work and looked down at the shelf:

In the center of that photo you can see an old tin stencil:

“S. Moore” – Samuel Moore bought the house in 1846!  Looks like no one had cleaned that shelf in quite a while.  We think this stencil would have been used to mark trade goods coming from Edge Hill.  Pretty neat!

Saving the summer kitchen has been a real labor of love. We see ourselves using this space almost daily for the duration of our lives at Edge Hill, first as an office/workspace, and then, in our golden years, a downstairs bedroom for single-floor living.  We have designed this space to “age-in-place”: ensuite to the room shown above we have a good-size closet and full bath that is fully handicap accessible.  We will love our bedroom upstairs with its view of the river, but are under no illusion that we will always want to (or be able to) go up and down the grand staircase.  Incorporating the Bill Logan maxim of the 5 Ps -“Prior Planning Prevents Poor Performance” – we have a space that will hopefully see us through.

Further, if you recall, the summer kitchen was the only part of Edge Hill that originally had a basement space, which we think was the original root cellar.  We have saved and incorporated that room into our basement . . . which one day may hold an extensive collection of Three-Buck Chuck!

We morbidly joke that with the scope of this project, we both plan to die in this house (we wouldn’t be the first).   Our family has picked up on this, and a couple of birthday’s ago one of us got this card from the Winters’ side:

Assuming we achieve the goal of out-living our renovation, now we can joke, with more specificity and certainty, this will be the room we die in!

A micro post- but, MACRO excitement.  The crowning feature of our addition is the roof lantern skylight.  As most of you know, we are taking a lot of design cues from Thomas Jefferson, but our inspiration structure – Pavilion IX on the Lawn at UVA – has a hipped roof that comes to a point at a chimney, and we don’t have a fireplace in the middle of our building . . . so we looked at other, better-known Jefferson structures – and – jackpot!  Jefferson loved natural light, utilizing oversized windows in many structures, and had a particular penchant for skylights.  He had them in the dome rooms at both Monticello and UVA’s Rotunda, and he also had skylights in his second-story rooms at Monticello.

After some design discussions, we chose the folks at Renaissance Conservatories in Pennsylvania, and they delivered the final product this week!

All set!  Now to stand back and enjoy the view…

. . . and all of that natural light!

And, one of the coolest features: we can remote vent this side light window to get some airflow when the weather cooperates!

We are still waiting on the pointed finials, which will cap off the completed look, but those will be installed down the road.  Now, let’s hope this week of rain lets up sometime soon so we can check out the stars.

It feels like spring has sprung here in the Shenandoah Valley – the trees are budding, blooms are popping up, and we are having temperatures in the 90s today.  Time for sunglasses and ice cream!

Things at Edge Hill are looking sunny, too.  Chad has been hard at work in our little garden.  We’ve always had big dreams for an idyllic spot where we could drink wine, watch the kids run, and enjoy the butterflies landing soundlessly on our growing harvest.  A couple of years ago, Chad and Steve put in some sweat equity to build beautiful garden boxes:

Then, last year (I think?), I got Chad this industrial table and stools made out of a tractor gear that he’d had his eye on . . . but time and weeds (and chickens) crept in through the mulch:

This year, Chad got 6 tons (literally) of stone delivered to finish off the look.  The stone actually got delivered just before a seasonally late March snow, and the girls thought the pile of rocks made a great sledding slope.  You can see the stone pushing up against the beds on the left (not the extra-giant mound of fill dirt in the back), and also behind Caroline and the snowman in the shot on the right:

Guys, that’s as much stone as the weight of an elephant!  Chad spread the stone by hand (he was paying penance for a crime in a former life) and added a border to keep the stone from drifting away over time.   The finished product is beautiful!

We did, in fact, enjoy a glass of wine by candlelight out there the other night.  The dusk truck traffic diminishes the ambiance a bit, but it was still delightful (everything is relative).  We are growing tomatoes (heirloom and cherry), banana peppers, jalapeños, serranos, chard, lettuce, and radishes, to name a few.  The tomato harvest has been dismal the last two years, so we’ll see what we get . . .

At our last house update, we had taken everything down to the dirt – in other words, as low as we could go.  Literally and figuratively.  We were feeling the construction blues, for sure – timeline and budget both took a bit of a hit.  As you’ll remember, termites were to blame.

Out came the floors and joists – a complete gut job.

We have, however, gotten the termite problem remedied (I think Orkin wants to kill us, because they have had to come back out ~3 times, but they have been great to work with).  The good news was that, in ripping out almost all of the floors in the Big House, we gave the tradesmen much easier access to the crawl space – the plumbers and electricians were delighted that they avoided crawling on their bellies with the creepy crawlies to run wires and ducts.  We were also able to add back a much stronger floor system, complete with concrete piers.

This improvement actually stabilizes the walls of the house, too, so were are 3 for 3: 1) termites eliminated; 2) stronger infrastructure; and 3) happy subcontractors.

The subfloor has already been put back down, so we are back to where we started but with an upgraded model:

Now that we are building instead of tearing down, we have started getting to some of the *fun* decisions.  There is, however, no thrill without some stress, right?  We are going a little crazy right now trying to make sure that every outlet and light switch is in the right spot (and thus trying to anticipate where our un-purchased, twinkle-in-our-eye future furniture will be placed, where we will want Christmas lights, and where we think we will need feature lighting on the antique art we will surely acquire at a charming antique shop in the south of France on our tenth wedding anniversary (Chad, are you reading this?  I hope you’re booking plane tickets . . .)).

But, despite all of that, it has been great to see things taking shape.  Our bathrooms have been framed up, the central vac lines have been installed, the door from our master bedroom to master bath has been cut through the brick wall (see on the left wall of the first picture below):

(and here it is again, from the other side of the new, Kool-Aid Man doorway – straight ahead in the picture below – Oh, yeah!)

and, the porch outside the mudroom is taking shape:

AND – almost all of the exterior brick has been completed!  The match with the original stuff is AWESOME – we are so pleased!

We are starting to source light fixtures, and faucets, and tile, and wall paper, and door knobs – OH MY! Heaven help us!

We have also acquired a trench the size of the Mariana out back to daylight our foundation drains.  It involved an unintentional cut to the water line for the entire farm and a much rockier project than the subs expected, but they got the job done.

Happy spring, y’all!  Cheers to coming out of the winter season without too many snow days!

We are pretty sure whoever came up with the maxim, “It gets worse before it gets better”, was renovating an old house.  In our project planning, we told our builder to assume worst-case scenarios for the Big House . . . all the plumbing needed to be re-done, we needed to remove the old heating systems, we needed to install air conditioning, we needed a new roof . . . pretty much everything but walls and floors . . . Weeeelllll, we knew we would need to do some work to “shore up” one of the sagging floors, but we almost didn’t even count that in the face of all of the other work on the list.  Relatively, a minor thing.  I mean, we were living there for two years!

The sag, however, should should have tipped us off.  We found out there there was some termite activity, but again, we had lived there, how bad could it have been??

Bad.  Very, Very Bad.

Apparently, termites had, and have, been living there for decades, cozy deep in our floor joists, drawing moisture from the poor drainage plan and exterior walls.

These terrors spilled out of a beam this week.  We had already had the house sprayed, and now have a direct-dial-cell-phone relationship with our local Orkin man.  At this point, we moved full steam ahead in the removal of every single floor joist in the larger rooms of the Big House in an attempt to eradicate any “home” that termites may have established at Edge Hill.

Let’s see that side-by-side:

This work has given us a dramatic perspective on the construction of the Big House, with foundations (and fireplaces) running deep (but a complete lack of vapor barriers).

The removal of the floors has felt like we are ripping out the heart of the Big House, but we are taking all of these steps with our eye on the future.  Insecticide (all of it, right now, please) will be applied.  Vapor barriers will be laid. New beams will be installed.  The original pine floor boards will be salvaged and returned for the next 180 years.  There will be holiday parties and fetes for years to come.  But for now, we have dirt pits and and thresholds four feet above grade.

We did make one more interesting discovery.  In the rear parlor of the big house, there was a small-board floor installed overtop the original pine floorboards, and we had speculated that they were put in to help prop up a sagging floor.  Turns out, that floor had been there a while:

This tag says: “Sam Moore” “Quicksburg, Va”.  Sam Moore bought the house in 1846!  We don’t know why he installed this flooring overtop the original pine flooring, but we have salvaged it and plan to incorporated it into the floor of the Summer Kitchen.

Upstairs, we have also been de-constructing, and opening a passage from our master bedroom into the future en-suite. 

Meanwhile, in the new addition, we look less like a disaster area.

Bricks are going up!

Stairs are going in!

The basement floor is poured!

We have also tied the addition into the original summer kitchen, and integrated the summer kitchen and root cellar into our addition:

At this point, as we walk around, the house looks raw and open, but we know the next few weeks will see us turn the corner and we will begin thinking about floors, finishes, and final coats of paint.  Until then we will dream about it getting better.

We usually love snow, but this year Edge Hill has been hit by every dry slot the meteorologists’ forecasts, leaving us with a very dry and mostly mild winter.  Bad for sledding, GREAT for house building.  Thanks, Mother Nature!

Our last post left you with a view of the below-grade poured walls, with the north wing of the house begging to rise up and show its new form.  Ta-Da!

What we’re calling the “Pavilion” (in other words, the addition – in blue, above) and the rehabilitated (and somewhat expanded) Summer Kitchen (center building to the left of the Pavilion, above) are all framed up and connected!  First, they started on the floor structure which ties into the Big House for one unified first floor level .

Then, up went the walls.  The framers actually framed, sheathed, and insulated these sections on the ground and then raised the whole unit as one:

It’s like a very complicated barn raising!  Taking advantage of some new insulating techniques, our house has a rigid foam insulation on the exterior, house wrap, and then the spray-foam insulation will be applied after all of the trades complete rough-in.  Placing a layer of insulation on the exterior of the vapor barrier will hopefully help prevent any mold-inducing condensation from occurring inside the wood framing of our walls.  For maximum coverage, the entire interior will also get a course of spay foam insulation.  We should be nice and sealed up (or, as sealed up as a new-old house can be).

Finally, the walls are up, and you can see the small second story addition (our new closet) taking shape:

The roof for the Pavilion was framed on the ground and then a crane placed it and the other roofing trusses in place:

Next came the curved entry called an “exedra”. Think of this like one half of a clam shell above the door.  We straight up stole this from good ol’ Thomas Jefferson and we feel no shame.  For more about Pavilion IX, the T.J. structure that inspired our Pavilion, look here.   The framers told me that they had previously done an arched entry, a curved wall, and a dome, respectively, but they had never done all three at once!

They nailed it!  Here is a view from the inside:

This magnificent room will be the hub of our family life: the kitchen.  A staircase will descend from to the right corner of the above picture (currently boxed off for safety) down into the basement.

Work has also been ongoing in the original portion of the Big House where we are remodeling one the ten original rooms (the only one that had already been remodeled before).  Originally, this upstairs room contained a back staircase and a smaller bedroom, but in 1952 the stairs were removed and a bathroom was installed on the second floor (no more chamber pots or late night outhouse excursions! Luxury!).

We are taking that room and dividing it into two bathrooms, one en suite to the master bedroom and one hall bath/laundry combo for the twins.  We are so very happy we will be keeping the other nine rooms of the Big House virtually identical to their original form, but we had to have some upstairs bathrooms, y’all (and do you REMEMBER what that existing bathroom looked like?  Frat-tastic).

During our demo, we found this amazing architectural ghost of the old back stairs, and you can just see how those risers clipped the frame of the door below (see the diagonal line in the top right trim?), and how good of a job they did in matching that trim when the stairs were removed.

And here is a shot of the staircase peeking down from the second story; those stairs were quite narrow!  Suck it in!

Last, I will leave you with what may be our favorite find to date.  I was removing some old sheets of particle board “flooring” in the attic in preparation for the vacuum removal of the dirty old cellulose insulation, when I stumbled upon this scrap of paper.  It was dark.  I picked it up and put it in my pocket.  The next day I remembered it, retrieved it, and was amazed.

The stamps read “Confederate States”, and this envelope is addressed to Capt. James Beale, 14th Regiment Va [illegible], Jenkins Brigade [illegible].

You. Guys.  James Madison Hite Beale is thought to have BUILT Edge Hill circa 1840!  This is concrete proof tying him to the house!  We have no idea how it survived, but it is a great find and we are excited to add it to our treasure trove of house history (we also have an original signature from JMH Beale, but admittedly we bought that on eBay).  We keep saying we are at the end of our treasure-finding days, but who knows what will turn up next!

Until our next post, I’ll leave you with our new favorite view on the farm, which is shot from the window in our future mudroom (just imagine that pile of dirt is some fresh sod, that’s what we do!):

Over the past month, there hasn’t been a lot of visual progress at the site, but here is a quick update.  The basement work is a “go slow and get it right” affair, and since we’ve been planning this project for years, we aren’t in any rush – especially where waterproofing is concerned!  The Cliff’s Notes are the we still have a big hole (“No go down there, not safe!”, as Cora would say), but our basement is taking shape.

The black forms that you see below are a product called Form-A-Drain, which combines concrete forms and drainage in one nice package.  They will stay in place for good as one element of our waterproofing plan for this basement space.

The concrete footers were poured and then work began to form up the walls of the basement.  This work took time, as the forms are heavy and must be buttressed (see below on the left) and the rebar must be installed prior to the pour.  Below on the right you can see the intersection of the new basement with the foundation of the original Summer Kitchen.  There have been several conversations about getting this right, as it will be a key weak point in making the basement water-tight.

The kitchen pavilion will feature an entryway that curves inward, and below in the center you can see that foundation wall beginning to take its “U” shape:

And . . . drumroll please . . . the forms are down!:

Climbing down in the hole and finally experiencing the scale of the basement gave great perspective; we are so glad we added the windows to bring in some natural light.

On the exterior you can see the green spray-applied waterproofing membrane, as well as the insulation which will help climatize the space:

This picture is taken from the “true front” of the house – you can see the summer kitchen, smoke house, and the Little House in the background.

Also, we had our first real “change order” after our builder suggested we could easily add a 10×10 storage room under a future porch that will run along the Summer Kitchen’s north wall.  Below, about half of the space you see with the new footers was in the original plan, as that is where the exterior stairs go down into the basement (that big gap will be double french doors).  The back half of the space was originally just going to be back filled and under a porch with some foundation work, but for less than $1,000.00 we decided make it a useable exterior storage room.  That’s our kind of change order!

So . . . still below grade, but the flooring system is on order, and over the next month we can’t wait to see our plans rise above grade!

After commenting enviously on a friend’s post showing off a beautifully completed kitchen addition, she responded that at least we had #started . . . and so we have!

The selective demolition discussed in our last post progressed for about a week as the crew carefully detached the addition from the Big House and Summer Kitchen in preparation for teardown.  Here you can see the kitchen in the Big House, in which we so excitedly prepared our first hotplate-and-toaster oven meal at Edge Hill, now fully detached from the original portion of the Big House:

Above, you can see the original peak of the roof and then the addition with it’s nonconforming brick.  This addition housed the added downstairs bathroom at Edge Hill.  Of note is the door you can see at the bottom of the picture under that bathroom addition, which leads down into the creepy-crawly crawl space (SO MANY WOLF SPIDERS).  You’ll see that space a little later on!

Finally, the Summer Kitchen was fully detached as well, which revealed the full extent of decay in that structure.  One portion of the solid brick interior wall collapsed during demolition, and the remainder and a portion of the exterior wall has been removed as well:

Time for the big toys to do some heavy lifting.  Cora and Caroline were particular fans of this excitement (from a distance).  Digger Digger Digger!

Our project at Edge Hill has always been a family affair, and thanks to some skilled cousins manning that equipment, those now-separated structures came down fast!  Debris cleanup also went quickly and soon we were down to the dirt (see below: the Little House on the far left, the smoke house in the middle, and the separated Summer Kitchen on the right):

…and it was time to start digging all the way down:

Immediately in our path was one of the house’s old cisterns (there are two!), which had to be fully excavated (see the pit at the bottom of the above picture).  It was hand dug, lined with brick, and parged.  What a monumental task building it must have been.   Now that it is removed, we will have to fill the resulting hole with some concrete slurry, so it is an actual money pit!  Haha!

What a great perspective!  On the right, you can see the foundation of that creepy crawly crawl space, day-lit and home to thousands of spiders no more!  The cistern went down below our final basement grade (in the far right in this corner) . . . man, that sucker was DEEP!  Cora and Caroline have had so much fun playing in the dirt of their future playroom!  They are particular fans of the “muddy puddles”.

In the demolition process, we were left with a cross section of the Summer Kitchen, which we will tie back into our new addition.  I’ve been so impressed at the work of the selective demolition in safely separating the portion of the structure that will be saved from the portion that had to come down.

The basement level of the Summer Kitchen, originally a root cellar, then a boiler room, will be repurposed as a wine cellar (one day).  The kitchen space on the main level of the Summer Kitchen will be a multipurpose room and will physically look much the same as it did upon construction, minus the kitchen furnishings.  We are still deciding if we will maintain the board ceiling above the kitchen space, or if we will remove the board sheeting (leaving the beams) so that when you stand in the space you can see all the way up to the ceiling.  Decisions. Decisions.

And now, a teaser of things to come . . . Footers have been formed up!

We’ve officially #started !

Y’all.  We know we haven’t posted in over a year.  We know you have missed our ramblings and photographs of mostly-destroyed things.  We know many of you have wondered if we are throwing in the towel. We. Know.

So, without further ado, feast your eyes upon a sight that made ours well up with tears:

See that big gaping hole on the left?!  Let’s look at that from yesterday’s viewpoint:

For the last year we’ve been waiting for this day.  Rachel and I set out to find a contractor who we felt could appreciate our scope of work, priorities, and who wouldn’t be afraid to question our decisions when he/she felt their experience was leading them to a decision contrary to our initial plans.  Enter Jim Herr.  We met some really great folks in bidding process, but in the end we chose Jim because from the start he offered insight and a perspective on our project that seemed to be the best fit for us.  This meant at one point “going back to the drawing board” and making some changes to our proposed plans to accommodate what Jim had determined we wanted…and we are grateful that his thoughtful consideration of our plans lead him to suggest changes we know will make this project all the better for us in the long term.  And that he made those suggestions before lifting a hammer (or drafting a change order)!

Today was Jim’s first day on the job, and this phase is being termed “selective demolition”.  This is the process of physically detaching the house portion of the Big House and Summer Kitchen structure from the addition that was built to connect those two original buildings.  We know as far back as the 1940s there was an open-air breeze way that connected the Big House to the Summer Kitchen, and we suspect it had been there all along.  In this picture from circa February 1965, you can see an arial shot of the Edge Hill from the front, complete with breezeway (below, it is the one-story portion that extends off the right of the house):

…and in the following picture of the rear of the house, you can catch a glimpse of the breezeway to the left:

Over the years, the breezeway was expanded by our predecessors into a precursor of the modern “open concept” living, kitchen, and dining area:

Here and below, you can see how the breezeway was enclosed and expanded. Today’s demolition provided a great cross-section, showing how they merged the old with the new:

On the right of the picture above is the roof of the original breezeway, and then shedding off to the left is the expansion that roofed over the living and dining space.  Here is a close up of that original breezeway roof structure:

Unfortunately there were some structural problems developing in this area and our plans called for a complete re-design of this transitional space.

This choice was one of our big struggles.  We loved the classic look of the simple breeze way connecting the Big House to the Summer Kitchen.  As you likely remember from history class, early kitchens were housed in separate buildings to minimize the risk of fire in the main house, and often a breezeway such as ours served as a somewhat sheltered path from the kitchen to the house. We thought about reverting back to this open-air walkway for aesthetics, but we couldn’t imagine ourselves cooking and eating in a building that is so removed from the rest of our living area (not to mention trucking over there in all seasons and weather).  Even if we climatized it, we felt it would still be too removed from where the rest of our living will happen – we’d need an intercom to call the kids to dinner.  We explored the idea of not having the kitchen over there, but we couldn’t imagine trying to fit a modern kitchen into the historic Big House.  So, at the end of the day, we decided to re-imagine this liminal space into our dream kitchen “pavilion”, which will connect to the Big House and to the Summer Kitchen by two hyphen structures that resemble the small dependency on the south side of the house.

Here is a view of the enclosed breezeway from the back side (looking through the screen you can catch a glimpse of the portico on the Big House that faces the river) where the previous owners tied the expanded breezeway (through the gap in the middle of the picture), Summer Kitchen (on the right), and a large screened-in area all together, anchored around a large chimney:

And this is a shot from the front, looking through the expanded breezeway to the screened in porch (waaaay in the back).  That chimney is going to shake the ground when it comes down!

Opening this area up also re-opened a space long inaccessible at Edge Hill.  The Summer Kitchen has an attic/loft and the access to that space was closed in by the addition of the screened-in porch area:

Re-opening that space yielded a treasure trove of stored items, including 4 screen doors, an original full-size interior door complete with hardware, half of a missing closet door pair with hardware, completing a set we had thought lost, and some great lengths of baseboard.  Jack. Pot.  Below you can see an closet door pair in the Big House that was missing its “other half”.  All of the built-ins in the house came in quartets, and one of the other doors in the quartet was also repurposed in that very room, so we knew we were likely missing a small door: 

And below you an see a lonely repurposed door, which can now be reunited with its long-lost match!  We plan to reincorporate those doors into a built-in in this very room, getting them as close as we can guess to back to where they were originally installed.

Today was the first step in our next big adventure, and we hope you are able to enjoy the ride with us!

Over the past year, you may have thought that we had raised the white flag of surrender on our project at Edge Hill.  We left you with two babies on the way, busy careers, and a glimpse at a finished bathroom.  In the midst of the chaos of becoming parents to two beautiful girls, we did let a few things slide, like laundry (thanks for the help, Mom!), exercise (we’ll get plenty chasing the girls, right?), and, unfortunately, blogging.  We have, however, taken the past year to make the Little House our home, and we couldn’t be more happy with the result.

The next series of blog posts will go in-depth, room-by-room, to detail our design choices and give those of you enjoying the blog from afar a good idea of how we have set the place up.  Without further ado, the kitchen, in all of it’s panoramic glory:

As you may recall, the main existing design feature of the kitchen is the massive, 5ft x 5ft fireplace with working swing arm.  After some intense restoration, see the full transformation:

Let’s see that process in slow-motion.  First, repair the physical structure of the fireplace, replace the deteriorated brick with firebrick, install dampeners:

Then, excavate the old hearth so a new hearth can be poured.

Frame up the house.  

Add some paint, logs, open the dampers and light a match.  Bam.  Jackson approved.

A shout out to local weather forecasters, the Columbia Furnace Storm Team, who we track with great fervor during the winter so we can ensure a full rack of wood is in, dry, and ready to warm our quiet snow days at home.

We’ve already detailed the decisions of using pine salvaged from the original floor joists for our cabinets and soapstone for the countertops. The main run of cabinets is all function, featuring a built in butcher block, efficient gas range and hood (bought used), large farm sink, dish drawer, and fridge.

Looking closer, for the range we installed a simple and relatively cheap sheet of stainless steel as a backsplash, and added a stainless shelf to arrange our collection of measuring cups and stash the salt and pepper so it is always close at hand.

At the top of the open shelves we added an electrical outlet so we can blast the tunes during marathon cooking sessions, and the shelves to the left of the range hold our most-used pots and cookbooks.  Ina Garten features heavily, and right now we are also trying out some of the recipes from the Smitten Kitchen by Deb Perelman.  Our go-to for all things classic and comforting is the America’s Test Kitchen New Best Recipe cookbook.  A pot filler was not a “must” for our kitchen, as the range is pretty close to the sink, but we did spring for it and it is great to have a second water source in the kitchen, especially on busy weeknights when one of us is busy washing up the day’s bottles and the other is trying to cook some pasta.

A concession to a lack of drawer storage, we have two crocks divided into wood and stainless that hold our go-to utensils. To the right of the range, we installed a pull-out solution for our smaller skillets and pots, as we hate digging through drawers or shelves to find what we want.  Conveniently, large cutting boards also fit nicely to either side of the pullout.

For the kitchen faucet, we found a fixture that resembled an old water pump reimagined in chrome.  A hand sprayer came with this model, and it is a great accompanyment to washing up in the extra large sink.

We went with a smaller dishwashing drawer to maximize space in the kitchen, and reserved the shelves just above the dishwasher to store our everyday dishes.  For our pantry, we found a wonderful old cabinet at Burt Long’s Antiques.

It dates from about the 1820s and was our big splurge.  It is the perfect size for the space, and for overflow we have another set of shelves in our utility closet.  

Rounding out the kitchen, our secondary bank of cabinets holds the remainder.  Baking, Mixing, Appliances, dish towels, etc. We designed this station with integrated power and for the microwave and with a pull out shelf for our coffee machine and toaster, as we prefer not to have those appliances hanging out on our very limited counter space.

With some careful planning, we have our dream kitchen.  I bet you thought we couldn’t cram anything else in, but we still have one last detail on the way.

See that large blank spot on the wall to the right of the doorway?  Rachel’s Uncle Skip, recently retired, has taken up woodworking and has custom built us the perfect addition to our kitchen: a platter rack!

Skip recently finished this project, and just this weekend it will make the trek from Texas to Virginia.  We can’t wait to get it installed!

We know we’ve left you hanging over the past year, so here are some pics of us enjoying our kitchen.  It won’t be another year for the next post, we promise!

Until next time, enjoy the view!

All-  We feel like we owe a little explanation or two for the belated nature of this update.  Our loyal readers have been patiently (or not so patiently) waiting for the next blog update, and we’ve been a bit delinquent!  Well, let’s cut to the chase. Edge Hill is about to go from sheltering a family of two to sheltering a family of four!  That’s right, Rachel is pregnant, and not being ones to do anything the easy way, it just so happens to be twin girls!

This is a shot from our first ultrasound way back in March, and it’s the one we keep showing to anyone who will take a gander.  We are now over halfway through our term, and are looking forward to meeting the girls in late August! 

Due to the pregnancy, we were stopped in our tracks with the last of the major efforts left to wrap up the Little House:  painting.  With the fumes, it is recommended to steer clear of this chore for the first trimester at least, and to be honest, we were ready for a convenient excuse to take a break!  The break, however, is over. Time to get back to work. The next series of posts will hopefully walk you through the finished rooms of the Little House, detailing our choices.  We are starting with the Master Bath, the only full bath in the house.  In our past decade or so of life, living through college rooming situations and our first house with its TINY (but nevertheless en suite) master bath, we may have gone a bit overboard on square footage this time. After living with it, however, we can say we have absolutely no regrets!  If you recall from our Sketch-Up designs, the master bath takes up about 1/5 of the upstairs square footage, and is accessed via the closets that adjoin each bedroom (bottom, center):

This is a far cry from the “original” bath-and-kitchen combo that was part of the 1940s first-floor addition to the Little House:

Yes.  Just under the sink you can see a little patch of green grass.  That is where the water and septic leaked and the floor and wall had completely deteriorated.  There was no shower or bathtub.  Full. Demo. Required.

We moved the full bath to the new upstairs addition, and designed a spacious room with two independent vanities.  We also incorporated the restored clawfoot tub that we discussed in the last post, a large walk-in shower, linen closet, and water closet.  Everything in its place.

We started with five feet of bead board and then painted the upper walls and ceiling in Washington Blue from Benjamin Moore’s Williamsburg Collection.  The deep navy blends the walls into the ceiling and gives the room a great feel.

The floors are a ceramic tile we found at a surplus auction, and just so happen to be LEED certified.  We really liked the color so we bought a whole skid and used that tile in the downstairs mudroom, powder room, and utility closet, as well!  We went with a mushroom-grey grout, which provides a nice contrast and will also hopefully age well.

For the vanities, we used porcelain tops that we found dirt cheap at the contractor’s auction, and commissioned custom-designed bases after doing some serious Pinterest research.  The bases are constructed from old pine that was salvaged from the house when we did the demo.   We matched the vanity with a medicine cabinet we found TWO Black Fridays ago (that’s right folks, we’ve been sourcing since 2013), also dirt cheap, at the Restoration Hardware Outlet: $75.00 for the pair!

The vanities are nice and simple, and great for hiding all the crap that would usually live out on the sink deck:

Luckily we thought to measure the clearance of the vanity door in relation to the sconce, but we still cut it close!

As you saw before, the tub is a great shade of Tucker Orange from Benjamin Moore’s Williamsburg Collection, which we paired with some custom-painted oars and full length curtains and sheers that emphasize the high ceiling height of the bathroom:

For the tub, we are very excited to have incorporated a hand shower; it is as if fate knew we would need an extra-efficient baby washing station:

The interior wall of the bathroom starts on the left with our shower, the linen closet in the center, and the water closet on the right.  The access hatch to the attic HVAC is located above the linen closet and painted the same shade of blue to blend in with the walls and ceilings.

One priority for the shower was to incorporate a LARGE area to organize all of the bottles that seem to multiply in the shower as time goes on.  We were also contemplating adding a bench, but found a great garden stool online in our orange that fit the bill nicely, so we saved a bit of money and axed the bench.  Down the road we would really like to add a seamless glass door, but as a feature that was entirely discretionary, we decided to save our pennies and spend them elsewhere at the outset.

Because the shower stall is large and we like the subway-tile look, we used large-format subway tile, which was economical and “easy” to install (easy, that is, for our contractors – we have not yet tried our hand at tiling).  The floors and back of the niche are tiled in small stone, and we did spring for the anti-microbial grouting on the floor so hopefully we will be mold-free for years to come.

The linen closet might not be magazine-ready, but it is oh-so useful!  The key feature of this closet is the laundry shoot that you can see right in the middle of the back wall.  With our very small interior staircases, we have found no end to our happiness in having this simple solution for lugging our laundry down the stairs.  For the return trip, we got small cloth totes that are easier to manage on the stairs than a regular laundry basket. We lined the rest of the linen closet’s available wall space with shelves and incorporated automatic lighting so the lights are only on when the doors are open, a nice energy-saving feature.

Moving to the right, the water closet was the one bit of the bathroom where we were able to save the exposed brick walls:

We also used a motion sensing light/fan combo, as this means the lights stay on when the doors close.  The unit runs on a timer, so the lights and fan shut down automatically after the space is vented to save power.  

Finally, one of Chad’s favorite features is the magazine/TP combo rack he found on Amazon.  The water closet doesn’t have a lot of extra room, so this was the perfect solution for a back-up roll and some storage.

The bath is accented with a few nautical touches, including a whimsical octopus towel holder by the shower and cheap boat cleat towel hooks that Chad painted to match the tub:

The bathroom is now a relaxing sanctuary where we start and end our days, and though we still have some plans for finishing touches we couldn’t be happier with the finished product!

The thought of soaking in a tub is something that hasn’t occurred to me in about ten years.  Obviously there is no “with soaker tub” option in dorms, and college apartments that do have a shower/tub combination are usually not the kind of tubs you’d want to touch with any part of your body except your feet.  When we lived in Richmond, our master bath only had a shower.  The idea of a bath in the Old House is, as you might expect, simply laughable.  The only bathtub in the house had to be gutted (as you may remember from one of our prior posts),

and was replaced with a Bath Fitter-type shower insert.

As a result, the thought of sinking into a tub full of bubbles (possibly with a glass of champagne, a perfect mani/pedi, and some Frank Sinatra over the speakers) has been the thing of dreams.  Until now.

Last year, we were lucky enough to obtain an amazing claw foot tub for our Little House bathroom.  Here it is still hooked up in its original bathroom, with just a little antique dirt inside as a special bonus:

We transported it back to our house and it has been living in a barn out back ever since, awaiting its great makeover.  Although the tub was actually in great shape after a power wash and could have been used as-is, we were hoping to have it refinished eventually for aesthetics.  It had bit of discoloration and a few areas of wear in the ceramic:

Once we had the bathroom painted, we used the telehandler to move the unfinished tub out of the barn and lift it up to the second floor entrance so we could put it in the bathroom to try it on for size:

We love it under the windows (and will love it even more when the paint is removed from the glass and there’s a little more natural light).

Graciously, my parents offered to give us the refinishing as our housewarming gift.  How lucky are we??  The tub refinisher did his work on site by moving the tub into our unfinished closet room and tenting the entire area off with plastic sheeting.

We’ve been told any areas of wear and pitting are filled with a putty-like material to fill the gaps.  Then a spray technique is used to recoat the interior of the tub and the feet.  It looks brand-spanking new!   

For dramatic effect, see the before and the after:

Now, that looks like something I could soak in!  The visions of rubber duckies are dancing in my head…

The last step is to paint the exterior of the tub.  You can purchase a special paint designed to adhere to metal at Benjamin Moore or your other paint store.

We hemmed and hawed about what color to choose – classic all white?  Traditional black with white feet?  Or something a little…bolder?  Our color scheme in the bathroom has evolved into navy and white with hints of coral, so we decided to upgrade that from a hint to a pop by choosing “Tucker Orange” from Benjamin Moore’s Williamsburg collection for the outside of the tub.

Chad slaved away at this one day while I was out of town.  What a trooper – it turned out to be a bit more of a project than just slapping on a new coat of paint.  First, he needed to remove the original paint, as it was peeled and cracked in places.  Those old paint manufacturers did not mess around.  Chad ultimately used a wire brush attachment for his drill and the electric sander to strip the old paint off, and then replaced it with two coats of Tucker Orange.  The result is stunning – we couldn’t be more thrilled!

We learned from the gurus at the salvage store in Front Royal that the removable feet are imprinted on the back with either an “L” or an “S” – this means “long” or “short”.  The idea is to put the short feet on the side with the drain so that the gravity will assist the water in flowing out of the tub.  We certainly would have overlooked this without their insight.  Luckily, our feet are in the right positions and our tub is at just the right angle for optimum flow.  

And here to the tub is back in place and ready to be plumbed in.  What do you think?  It’s bold and a little funky, but we’re loving it.

And the good news is the tub can always be repainted as trends and tastes change!

Add a little hardware, and the tub was ready for its return to glory!  Spoiler alert: I have used the tub already, and it has certainly lived up to everything I dreamed about!

We aren’t going to sugar coat it: for as much fun as this project has been, some of the big decisions for the Little House have caused some anxiety. When I call it our dream house, in no small part am I referring to the countless times I’ve dreamed of things NOT coming together. Luckily, we have recently gotten some major hurdles out of the way!

The first of these has been the spiral staircase. We mentioned in a previous post that we had ordered one from a manufacturer in Tennessee, and it arrived last month as the ultimate DIY. Our craftsmen love a challenge, and they had the project almost finished up before we could even take any progress pics.  I think they were just as excited about it as we are!

It is quite narrow; thank goodness our variance was approved! Our contractor then installed the remaining spindles, and it was a wrap:

Another point of stress was our kitchen countertop. In a prior post we mentioned that we wanted to go with soapstone, and to help defray the costs of this choice we did our own “shipping”. We first sourced the sink we wanted: a farmhouse style, extra-wide, single-basin MONSTER. Internet searching revealed several stone shops specializing in soapstone sink construction outside of Philadelphia, PA. After sharking for the best price, last fall we took a day trip up through the Amish Country and collected our treasure, which fit perfectly in our salvaged cabinetry:

For the countertops themselves we already had one piece of soapstone that we recycled from its former life in a Shenandoah County public school that we used to match with the sink. We knew that there was an old soapstone quarry outside of Charlottesville, Virginia, and using a daring leap of logic, we assumed that the public schools of the 1940s and 1950s would have sourced their materials as closely (read: cheaply) as possible. I dialed up the quarry, Alberene Soapstone Company, and they informed me that they are happy to sell their stone by the rectangle slab, but any custom cuts would be up to our installer. Luckily, our craftsmen had worked with soapstone before and felt up to the challenge! One day a few weeks ago I got the call that our slab was ready.  I hopped in one of the big farm trucks and headed to the quarry.

After donning safety attire, we headed to pick up the slab.

Unfortunately it was wrapped up to protect it from road debris during transit, and the anticipation of waiting to see the slab was killer, but well worth it!

The craftsmen then were able to cut it down so our single solid slab extends out into the window sill and accommodates our sink:

The recycled piece was also installed – a perfect match!

In this micro-post, we share an update in the Little House project for which we are most thankful:

Let’s see that again:

We have heat!!!

Wishing you a WARM Thanksgiving!
Chad & Rachel

Hey guys!  We have been waiting to write a post with some substance, because a lot of the current progress at the Little House is tedious detail work that doesn’t photograph well.  After our last post, our craftsman have been hard at work on the windows, doors, and trim of the Little House.  I think we’ve talked enough about windows, so take a gander at this:

That’s right, all of the windows are now in!! This is a huge step forward, as we are now able to make progress on the finish work of the interior.  Also, as I’m sure you’ve noted, we have doors!  The doors have a little story of their own.  When we were demoing the little house, we found a variety of exterior doors on the house.  Thus, in deciding what to keep, we got to do a little picking and choosing!  While assessing our options, we were trying to pick something with a good bit of character, and we were also concerned with boosting our natural light given the small existing windows on the house.  With those considerations, we had an easy winner (sorry for the poor photo, we are currently doing this post while out of town!):

We also liked this door because it continues a three-or-one fenestration theme we’ve inherited with the little house.  In the existing windows, the sashes are three lights over one light:

For the door we chose, there is one large pane of glass, and then three panels, one of which is also divided into thirds.  We like the symmetry there, so we saw that as our sign.  We took the original door to a cabinetry craftsman, and he quadrupled it for us.  The first shot shows the two front doors (stacked) beside our inspiration door, and the second shows the slightly larger two rear doors (also stacked):

We got some insulated glass panes for the glazing, some Ebay salvaged hinges from the same maker of the hardware that was used on the main houses, knobs and deadbolts to keep out unwanted guests, a little weatherstripping, and BAM:

We have exterior doors!

We also have an exterior door from our master bedroom that will lead out to a small deck for fire egress purposes, and for that spot we didn’t want such a large window as we used on the first floor doors.  Hunting with Mom through an excellent architectural salvage shop in Front Royal, I stumbled across this beauty!

I was immediately drawn to this guy because of the three light upper window, which keeps with the three-or-one theme and will let some morning sun into the master bedroom without sacrificing privacy.  Salvaged doors are reasonably priced, and after double checking the measurements we sealed the deal:

After stripping off most of the old paint, our craftsman hung the door.  Now to finish restoration and glaze the upper windows…

As for the trim, we picked a style that we really liked from a home we visited this past summer:

This trim is a bit more ornate than the plain board trim that would have certainly existed originally, but we justified this change as reflecting the changed use of the house in its present function.  We liked the clean lines, and our craftsmen Colon and Dustin are using rough-sawn pine lumber to custom-fit each window and door:

(Future Laundry Room)

(Future Kitchen)

The craftsmen have also been hard at work hanging interior doors and finishing our interior wall cladding in our closets:

(Guest Closet)

We also have made some progress in the full bathroom!

Outside the house, several other projects have come to completion, and we now have an approved septic field!  This involved a great amount of digging across a decades-old farm area with multiple hidden utilities just waiting to be found by the excavator, but he did a great job.  Here is where the septic comes into the house, passing under an existing power line:

And here is the settling tank, all ready to be hooked up:

The septic line travels about 150 feet over to the distribution box system:

And once it was all approved we backfilled, and moved on to the next project!

Which, it turns out, was another DIY endeavor and turned out to be our least favorite task thus far.  Of course, it involved MORE HAND DIGGING.  About two months ago, we found out that the crawl space under the addition required a french weeping drainage system to meet code requirements and prevent flooding.  As we plan to install several mechanical systems in the crawl space, we didn’t object, but here is where a little prior planning would have made a world of difference.  When the pad for the crawl space was formed, we did not clean around the edges or use cement forms along the rear of the house.  Instead, we poured the concrete right against the dirt of the hole that had been dug, which was perfectly fine.  Until, as it turned out, we had to dig down beside that concrete and install the drainage system.  This entailed us crawling down into the foundation trench and hand digging a channel for the drain tile.  As this earth was previously undisturbed, it was incredibly compacted and filled with river rock.  The progress was slow, back breaking, and tedious (we felt like Jean Valjean), and we were lucky to be able to trench 8 feet in an hour.  For future reference to other diggers, dig a bigger hole, use concrete forms, and install the drain right away!!

Here you can see the sill of the footer, and I am using a pick axe to trench down beside it so any water drains into the trench drain tile and not our crawl space:

The following day, we painted the foundation with a water sealant coating, just in case the french drain doesn’t 100% solve the problem.  Belts and Suspenders, Folks.

This stuff wound up getting pretty much all over us, and for future reference, this is a job you want to do in a hat, long sleeves, and pants.  The scrubbing required to remove the tar sealant from skin is brutal.  Don’t even ask about what you have to do to get it out of hair.  At last, we had our drain trench dug and foundation prepped!

We then laid some landscaping fabric and ran our drain tile with a slight decline to our sump pit (also hand dug):

Dad found a remnant four-foot piece of large plastic culvert for our sump pit, and we were so grateful!

We dug down so the drains would be well above the level of the sump:

And set the pit into place, drilling 4 and 1/8 inch openings in for the drain tile.  After watching several YouTube videos on the subject (this house couldn’t have been done without YouTube), I found a great how-to on DIY sump pump installation from Apple Drains in North Carolina.  The dude who narrates is hilarious, and he fully explains the all aspects of the project and tells you why you are taking different steps.  I added two lines going into the crawl space, one for the pumps power supply and one for a garden hose that I can hook into a dehumidifyer for the crawl space.  It took me about two hours of measuring PVC and gluing the whole thing together.  Here you can see the white PVC lines running into the pit:

And here you can just see the drain tile poking into the pit on the edges, covered with filtration fabric, and the green device at the bottom of the pit is our pump:

Despite how labor-intensive this task turned out to be, we are hopeful that our crawl space will be moisture free for life, and I have some confidence in knowing how the whole thing works!  After reading all of this, I’m sure you will share in my excitement when I came home to this inspection result:

Each day we are getting closer, and for our interior design fans, we are nearing the phase where Rachel will take the helm and detail our choices room-by-room.  So exciting we can hardly wait!

We hope everyone has enjoyed their summer!  With the last few weeks left, you are probably wondering if we are going to make our goal of a fall move-in.  At least, that is the question we keep asking ourselves!  We are at the stage now where so much in the Little House has come together that it seems like we could be just days away from the big move (I mean, it is not exactly like life in the Big House has our standards too high), but in reality, there are still a number of steps to go.  Here is what has been done:

Walls are in! We already discussed the re-parged brick walls, and those won’t change; they will just be painted.  The rest of the house is a 50/50 mix of wooden wall covering and drywall:

We are using a five-foot bead board wainscoting for our bathrooms and laundry, and here is Rachel in the future water closet in the middle of the drywall process :)

The tub will go in front of this double window:

And here is the upstairs bathroom all primed and ready!  From left to right:  Shower, linen closet with laundry chute rough-in, and water closet (the green square is the access to our HVAC):

The laundry chute leads down to our utility closet, which is just beside our future laundry room.  You can see some of our extra insulation hiding in the chute, which will eventually get a door made out of bead board.

Back upstairs, our added matching bedroom closets each feature an exposed brick wall that used to be on the exterior of the house.  The new exterior walls and ceiling are dressed up in horizontal barn board, which we ambitiously plan to whitewash based on the methods of HGTV all-star Sarah Richardson:

All this hard work has been courtesy of our contractors, and meanwhile Rachel and I have returned to our nemesis:  Windows.  We salvaged the original windows from the Little House, and magically (I kid you not) found extra matching three-light over one-light windows in a building on the property.  All of these were old-school, solid wood sash construction, and we couldn’t bear to pass them up.  Our contractor even custom-made the window jams out of some of our salvaged lumber! Here is a window before restoration in its new frame:

Of course, the restoration process has meant a couple of stressful nights of paint stripping, wood repair, sanding, priming, and glazing…

And  restoring the original window frames:

But now we have the first round in and ready for a final coat of paint!

And here are several windows restored and back home in freshly primed frames:

Speaking of salvaged lumber, Rachel and I had one of our best days this summer when the first round of furniture we commissioned for the Little House showed up early.  After working so hard to salvage any lumber we could from the demolition of the Little House, these beauties validated all of our efforts.  We hope these pieces never leave the Little House, and are doubly special to us, as the craftsman, Ernest Henry, was a good friend of my late Grandfather French.  It really doesn’t get much more local and meaningful than this!

Mr. Henry started with a rough pile of lumber filled with nails:

He takes all of this to his workshop, removes the nails, then cuts and planes the wood down:

And transforms it into beautiful furniture.  I think even Mr. Henry was a little excited when he dropped off our new kitchen table – he said bringing the finished furniture to the house was like a family reunion for all of the old wood:

Here it is getting a test run:

We have an odd nook in our downstairs living room, so we designed this writing desk to tuck into it:

And Mr. Henry also made three matching bathroom vanities which we designed around some great sink tops that mom and dad found for a song at a local surplus builders auction (Jackson the Dog approved!):

We are so pumped with the final product!  Mr. Henry also gave us a sneak peak at our future kitchen cabinets, which will be made out of the same salvaged pine.  Here are some of the front frames:

We can’t wait until it is time to install the kitchen!

Over the last two months, the work on the Little House has been going forward with minimal efforts from yours truly.  With our lives in the Valley now ramping up with various commitments, we are glad to report on some great news.

Our last posts filled you in on the roof and and some electrical progress, bringing us to the step where we needed to finish up the framing and plumbing.  While we are rather proud of our past d0-it-yourself capabilities, we draw the line at potential future fire/water damage.  Luckily, we have had some great help with the basic electrical and have contractors handling the HVAC and plumbing.  Unfortunately, the photos from this phase aren’t the most exciting (so the writing has to be extra good, right?).

Downstairs:

You might remember the old, winding staircase that was original to the house.  Its width and stair height do not meet modern building code requirements, and the staircase had a few structural difficulties . . . The below picture is after we had excavated over two feet of soil from under the floor joists.  Due to the giant crater we created, the stairs were floating approximately three feet above the ground.

Luckily, if an existing component of the house pre-dates the building code, it is grandfathered in so long as the structure is repaired and not completed replaced.  Thank goodness our craftsmen are the best – they were able to shore up the stairs and now they are sturdy, safe, and gorgeous.  Renewed to their original, narrow-but-charming glory!

The little hidey hole under the stairs was also a component the craftsmen were able to save.

This has been one of our favorite parts of the renovation so far.  Here are the stairs from the top down.  We are finally using them for the first time (without risking life and limb, that is)!

Downstairs, we also have an electrical panel,

plumbing for the mudroom laundry,

plumbing for the downstairs powder room,

the height of the kitchen window has been adjusted and the plumbing is ready for the sink, dish drawer, pot filler, and refrigerator,

and we are wired for a chandelier above the kitchen table!

Upstairs:

Things are moving right along on the second floor, as well.  The brick masons removed the remaining plaster from the walls and cut channels for the electrician to run wires.  The masons then filled the channels with mortar:

The channel above the door will be for wall sconces (to add a little ambiance), and the lower channels are for light switches and outlets.

The masons then covered all of the brick with two coats of mortar.  They add score marks to the first layer, as shown below, so that the second layer will adhere to the first more securely.

And the second coat – voila!

We plan to paint over the mortar for a finished but rustic look.  We are also really excited about the vaulted ceilings and exposed roof in the bedrooms (we may have mentioned that once or twice).  When the HVAC infrastructure was added, ducts were inserted into the walls and ceiling.

We obviously need to find covers for these, but we are so thrilled with the thought of central A/C!

What was once a maze of framing and subfloor is now starting to materialize into a bathroom.  We now have a toilet stall,

the framing for two medicine cabinets and vanities,

and closets that connect to the bathroom!

Most exciting of all is the claw-foot tub!

What, you can’t see it?  That’s probably because the tub is still out in a barn :)  We went on an excursion to Walton & Smoot Pharmacy in downtown Woodstock. The pharmacy is still a family-owned business, and is still a social hub right in the heart of town; however, before it was a pharmacy, the building housed Woodstock’s hotel.  The second floor of the building is still the ghost of the old hotel, and sinks, toilets, and tubs are still plumbed in for the skeleton of each room. 

We were able to find a tub that wasn’t in bad condition, and with the help of a little muscle (a.k.a. Chad’s brother, Daniel, and his friend, Matt), we got the tub back to Edge Hill.  Once the floors are in, we’ll get that baby into place – until then, we are dreaming of the first soak.

Once this baby is all hooked up we are going to refinish and paint it to match the room. We are also jazzed to have the framing up for our shower…

…which holds water!  (see lower left corner, below).

Whew.  And to top it all off, last week the building inspector paid one of his merry visits and informed us that our rough in was good to go after we add in a few more electrical outlets (luckily none need to be cut into brick walls!).  WHAT GREAT NEWS!

After we add those outlets, the next step is to add copious quantities of insulation.  After this very cold winter in a non-climate controlled Big House, we are HUGE believers in insulation.

And, more good news: our drywall installation is booked for the end of June/beginning of July!  Things will really start taking shape over the next weeks, and a fall move-in date is looking to be within the realm of possibility.  Fingers crossed, and, of course, we’ll keep you posted!

As we prepare to weather the winter storm, some recent progress is really warming our spirits!

THE LITTLE HOUSE IS FINALLY GETTING A ROOF!!!

Loyal Readers-

As many of you surely have observed, this summer has been a bit slow on the updates as Rachel prepares for the bar exam and we get organized for our new careers . . . as General Contractors!   Just a few weeks in, and we can see why these guys get paid the big bucks to coordinate construction projects.  In light of our relative ignorance of the construction process, things have been moving slow, but last week, we made progress by leaps and bounds.  Behold:

Our building permit for the Little House!!

After laboring over the volume of information required a few weeks ago, we were surprised at how fast the actual permit was issued.  And so, we’re off!

The first phase of the rehabilitation of the Little House was to prepare new footers inside the original structure, and dig the foundation for the addition.  Here is the general plan:

You can see the existing structure in the foreground, with the addition coming off of the rear.  In the picture below, the addition is covered by the roofline that comes perpendicular from the existing structure:

The layout of the downstairs preserves the kitchen (top left) and living room (top right) as they were in the existing Little House.  In the picture below the large white rectangle is actually the roof of the porch.  In the addition to the Little House,   there is an office (back left),  and mud room/powder room/utility closet (back right).

Upstairs, the two bedrooms of the original structure remain unchanged, with the very narrow “existing” staircase to the far right (more on this below).  The upstairs portion of the addition includes a central jack-and-jill bathroom flanked on either side by dressing rooms, which address the complete lack of closets in the original house.  We’re also adding back a walk out deck, as the left bedroom currently has a door to nowhere.  We are pretty sure that there would have been a deck structure in the past, but we can find no evidence of the old dimensions and we know there has been no exterior structure on that part of the building since at least the 1940s.

Now that you have context for our dream Little House, here is the dirty truth.  Digging foundations is for the dogs.  What awful, terrible work to embark on in early July.  Oh well, at least it is good exercise!  For the existing structure, the original floor beams were 4×16 timbers that were actually installed with the brick walls, see our last post, in particular, this picture. in the image below, you can see that we have removed those beams and have dug a foundation trench 24 inches below the bottom of those beams.  Our new floor support structure will be installed on the new foundations, and will not rely on the brick structure for support at all.

During this final demo project, we had to remove the floor supports, but also needed to leave the original stairs in tact so they can be repaired.  If we were to demo them completely, we would likely have to install a new set of stairs to code, which would destroy the historic integrity of this charming-yet-narrow, turning staircase.  Lucky for us, it seems that the stairs were entirely floating on their upper supports, and we were able to just remove the floors from under them!

Here you can see the stairs curving upward on the right side of the door that leads into the little house’s living room.  You can also see just how deep our brick foundations go.  In that image, the door is about three feet above the dirt floor of the crawl space of the living room of the Little House.  Another cool feature of the little house are these wrought-iron hinges, that still supported the door into the little house!  The hinge has a large metal spike that was simply pounded into the door frame, and the bottom decorative leaf has one nail.

Below, you can see the thickness of the original door frame.  Also, to the immediate left of the doorframe, you can see a wooden block in the space where an interior brick should be.  As we demoed the Little House, we realized that in order to attach anything to the walls (in this case, baseboard), the builders left voids in the course of brick and then mortised in wood blocks.  Once the blocks were installed, they could then nail whatever they needed into the wood backing block, rather than trying to anchor anything into the brick.

Outside, we turned to the pros, and had a large foundation dug for the addition.  It is hard to tell from these pictures, but we went down more than four feet!

The next step is to form the foundations and have them poured in concrete, then we will back fill the area with dirt and pour a concrete pad for the floor of our crawl space.  Once the concrete work is complete, the masons will install a few courses of cinder block to bring our walls up to grade, and we will frame our structure from there.  Progress!

Speaking of progress, the work on the main house right now is a bit in the conceptual/intangible phase, as we have been working with our (highly recommended!) draftsman, Gary, of Drafting Services in Harrisonburg, to bring our vision of the addition to the main house to life.  Below, a teaser:

Bonus points to whoever can guess our inspiration for the addition structure in the comments!

It has been a month of life events (and thus, regrettably, no posts)!   After 10 days on the market and some hectic negotiations (three offers!), our house in Richmond was under contract, and the permanent transition to country life smacked Rachel in the face.  We got a great offer on the house, but the offer came with a May 1 closing date, conveniently two days into her final examination period, and nine days before graduation.  No biggie.  All she had to do was pack our worldly possessions in the spare time that remained after final exam studies, finishing work on the journal, and enjoying the company of the great friends she has made at law school these past three years.  She’s a trooper!  Two weeks ago Dad and I pulled up with a farm trailer and loaded 75% of our furniture, leaving our house in a sad state of disarray and chaos.  Do we still have Pyrex dishes for baking dinner?  Nope, they are packed.  How about microwave-safe dishware to heat leftovers?  They are in the box with the Pyrex.  Luckily a couple of bottles of wine were around when we needed them.

With graduation looming, the chore list has really taken a backseat to other important tasks…like actually graduating.  And then, Rachel’s bar review books arrived.  What. A. Month.

Despite all of the happenings, we have managed to find five spare hours to forge ahead on the demolition of the Slave/Little House.  For those of you coming up to speed, this building will hopefully be our temporary home come fall, and will shelter us as we embark on our extensive renovation/addition project at Edge Hill.  After ripping off the roof last month,

we turned to the next step in the Little House’s demolition process:  gutting the interior space.  We started with:

(notice the holes in the floor of this second-story room)

So I started by ripping down the lathe and plaster ceiling on the first floor (Steve and Gina had been responsible for doing this on the second floor).  I have new respect for them, as I soon learned that this process was basically a dirt shower, and understood why Steve unexpectedly sent us some advanced eyewear last week(!)

No, we are not headed to AVATAR in 3D.  These goggles have foam seals that press against your face and seal out almost all dust.  Designed for professional spray paint applications, they were a godsend for this job.  Well equipped, we commenced.  Notice the ceiling before:

and after:

After the first floor plaster ceiling was down, we went back upstairs.   A lot of debris had accumulated on the second story floor after we ripped off the roof and while the masons worked on the brick, and this had to be removed before we could pull up the flooring.  We shoveled it down through the conveniently pre-existing holes in floor (see the light shining through the ceiling in the picture above? ).

Once the debris was removed, we moved to the floor boards.  Here, Rachel is inspecting our method of attack (I bet she will love this one).

After a number of discussions, we settled on our approach of standing on the floor and ripping it out backwards.  This was no small consideration, as our other option was to try to stand on the ground floor and hammer the floorboard up from underneath.  The advantage of that option was standing on terra firma.  The disadvantage was that we both lacked the upper body strength of “Ahhhhnold”, and we were basically standing underneath the falling floor beams once they were loosed.  Ironically, safety drove us back upstairs, where our disadvantage was that most of the underlying support was in a state of decomposition.  We tread carefully (Christine, stop reading here, OSHA ain’t got nothing on us). We prised up each floorboard while trying not to vault ourselves out into the void, and surprisingly made pretty quick progress!

Now we just have to do it all over again for the other upstairs room, and then shovel all of the debris out of the building.  What’s everyone doing next weekend?  :)  Yeah right.  Next weekend is Foxfield Races.  We have our priorities, and as the former owners of Edge Hill dabbled in horse breeding, we like to think they would approve.

Until now, the most fun we have had with demolition was in the upstairs, mint-and-black, goose-border, mold-covered bathroom.  We decided it was time to amp it up a bit and undertake demo on a larger scale.  If the bathroom was bumper cars, this project was a monster truck rally.

You may remember that Edge Hill has a few dependencies – we’ve spent a lot of time restoring the smoke house, but the property also has a summer kitchen and a smaller house which we have nicknamed the “slave quarters.”  It should be noted that this is a point of contention: I am actually highly skeptical that this building was a dwelling place for the farm’s slaves; it sits within a stone’s throw of the main house and has a second story, both of which are highly unusual for Virginia plantations.  Chad, however, disagrees.  He notes that it is also highly unusual (and ostentatious) for smoke houses to be built of brick; our smoke house and “slave quarters” are both built of brick, and thus the other extravagances might be explained by the James Madison Hite Beale’s overall flare for the expensive.  Regardless, John Wayland noted that Edge Hill had as many as 12 slaves, so we are still hoping to one day find an answer to our dilemma!

The original brick house has two rooms on the first floor, one to the left and one to the right, and two identical rooms on a second story.  This is where Holmes Fowle’s daughter, Mary, grew up!

A one-story addition was added on the back at a later date – based on some newspaper we found backing the linoleum, we know it is at least as old as the 1940s, but might even be older than that (the addition is where the electric and plumbing entered the house).

By the time Chad and I arrived on the scene, the inside of the slave quarters was in a sad state of disrepair.

The downstairs room on the right:

This was originally the kitchen, and although the floor and ceiling are rotted, the fireplace still has its original working swing arm!

The upstairs room on the right (above the kitchen):

The downstairs room on the left:

The upstairs room on the left:

And the addition:

As you can see, there is a lot of work to be done.

Our first job was to remove the addition.  We had the electricity turned off:

Very, ahem, professional…

and then called in the Grave Digger – well, that is, Paul and the telehandler!  With the fork attachments, Paul was able to simply pop the addition off the back of the house.  If only it was all that easy…

Afterwards, it looked like the aftermath of a tornado, but all we had to do was load the pieces into a dump truck and wave goodbye.

We saved the hard part for Round 2.  Time for us to call on Steve and Gina again!  Isn’t this what all American families do in their spare time – shovel, scrub, and wreck houses that aren’t their own?  Don’t know what we would do without them!  We split into two teams: Chad and I tackled the roof on one half of the house, while Steve and Gina worked from the inside to tear down the ceilings in the second-story room on the other side of the house.

Luckily, Chad and his brother, Gio, had bravely removed the metal portion of the roof a few months ago:

And yes, they rode up to the roof in the bucket of a telehandler.  So, up we went again:

While I am not typically afraid of heights, being raised up two stories on the bucket of a telehandler, balancing on the edge while watching Chad scamper up on potentially rotten roofing boards, and hefting 14′ beams over the edge of the bucket and past the roof of the porch without heaving myself over the edge with it – well, this raised my adrenal levels a little higher than the average weekend chores.

Chad worked with a crowbar and a saw to pry off each roof board, one by one.  He had to be very, very careful about where he put his weight so that he didn’t end up going through the roof.

Eventually, it looked more like this:

And even these pieces came down at the end, but were stacked and saved for later use:

Possibly to be used as aesthetic exposed beams in the bedrooms of the renovated slave quarters?

Meanwhile, Steve and Gina pulled down lathe and timbers from underneath.  It started like this:

And with some crowbars, safety goggles, and elbow grease, it finished like this:

With a lot of this in between:

Luckily, Steve only fell through the floor once or twice, with no physical injury :)

And finally, it looked like this:

Sometimes it has to get worse before it gets better!

WordPress sent us a really neat summary of Living on the Edge(Hill)’s activity in 2012; can you believe this stat?

We had readers in 27 countries!  This may have been an accident, but we’re grateful for all of you who read our blog on purpose and who are sharing this journey with us.  We have gotten so many helpful suggestions, hints, and help (a book on window restoration, using exterior storm windows, what mixture to best clean hardwood floors, what a thermocoupler is,  extra pairs of work gloves, etc.) – thank you, thank you, thank you!

Dreams for Edge Hill in 2013:

• More refurbished windows!
• Breaking ground on a modern addition (hopefully complete by the middle of 2014…? A girl can dream!)
• A completed smoke house
• A completed slave quarters
• More history of Edge Hill’s former inhabitants, hopefully backed by some concrete documentation
• Research on restoring and/or replacing plaster walls

Even though it is a crisp 28 degrees in 75% of our house today, we are still enjoying the ride and can’t wait to see what 2013 will bring.  Happy New Year!

First, apologies for the absence of posts this fall.  When I’m back at school, Chad works harder than ever on the house, but he doesn’t always have extra hands for picture-taking!  We can’t wait to provide a window update, as the first set is back in the frame and they look AMAZING!  Also, we may have a roof on the smokehouse this week…get ready for it!

This weekend, we broke up the monotony of my final-exam studying with plenty of holiday cheer.  Chad has had a few issues with the heater in the last few weeks (I think the house was an average of 40 degrees in mid-afternoon, requiring some serious Eskimo-style layering), but now the entire first floor is opened up, warm, and feeling like a real house.

Here are a few pictures of Christmas season at Edge Hill!

First, a “big” welcome to Jackson, the newest member of our family!  We don’t know if he’s ever seen a Christmas tree, since he grew up in Hawaii (do they have to import Christmas trees there? Or do they just decorate palm trees?).  He is just as goofy as Afton and we’re having a blast integrating him into our “pack.”

Cami is not too sure if she’s a fan of TWO Great Danes in one house, so she watched the Christmas prep from a distance.

We got a wild hare mid-decorating and decided to pull down some of the paneling above the Great Room fireplaces.

Here’s the “before”:

And…what’s this? A little corner of wall paper showing from behind the paneling?

And another piece hiding up in a corner where a piece of panel had already fallen down:

And, down it came!  You can see the plastic vapor barrier that was behind the paneling. 

It makes the whole room start to feel less dark and depressing.

AND!  The remains of the border we found above the second mantel has the same pattern as some of the gorgeous wall paper we uncovered in our attic adventure (And this is one of our favs, it’s gilded)!

And here is the full pattern:

Most of the decorations are courtesy of my Aunt Barbie, Uncle Skip, and cousins Jen and Christine, who gave us “Our First Christmas” as a wedding present.  It is so nice to have five tubs full of yuletide spirit in our first few years of (student-loan ridden) married life!  Barbie also made the adorable little cross-stitched pillow, below.

Apologies for the poor lighting in the next picture, but when we moved in this door was laying on its side mysteriously in the Great Room sans hardware…and now is hanging AND has a doorknob, so it is exciting to have a picture of this guy pulling his weight!  The icing on the cake is that this is our bedroom door, so we are no longer living in a cut-through space!

Now that we’ve got a bedroom door, maybe we’ll get a chance to remove these wonderful mirrors above the very traditional mantle…

A little mistletoe for the front hall:

And, drum roll, please…the TREE!

A 10.5-foot beast – what a treat to have room for a big tree!  Unfortunately, we accidentally picked one with razor-sharp needles, but Chad valiantly lit the whole thing in record time and we decorated with the first round of ornaments (there are still a few that need to make the trip from Richmond).

We hope some of you will get a chance to stop by while the house is decorated.  Happy Holidays, everyone – and for those of us who are still students, best of luck with final exams!

Sneak Peak of the Improving Roof and Reconstructed Wall – Full Blog Post to Come!

So you know how sometimes you start a small project, say…stopping that leak in the cabinet underneath the sink, and low and behold it is time to replace the plumbing in your entire house?  Enter: Edgehill Windows.

After some assessment it looks like I have stockpiled material for several (long overdue) posts, but here is how it all began.

About a month and a half ago I decided that I needed a place for various projects as the winter weather approached.  Luckily, Edgehill was constructed as a working plantation home, and, as such, comes complete with an external office, the South wing, that is only accessible from the outside.

In the traditional separation of spaces that would be expected on plantations of the 1700s and 1800s, the farm office was an isolated room so that the business workings of the farm and all of the range of clientele did not enter the family’s living areas to conduct business.  No horse trading in the living room, please.  In thinking about our plans for the room, Rachel and I have envisioned a home office that is insulated from the chaos our friends with children tell us we are heading for just a few years down the road.  At present, however, the room is in pretty rough shape (but what around here isn’t!).

I decided that the first step for the South wing was to stop any further damage (also a theme around here).  I had an obvious starting point:

No/broken windows = water damage, insect infestation, dirt and debris, increased thermal damage from freeze/thaw cycles, basically nature’s first opening to reclaim the space.  So I said to myself, no big deal, I’ll just get some glass cut and patch that bad boy right up.  What a fool I was.

After getting some window panes ordered from B & L Glass in Harrisonburg (those guys are great, and incredibly fast!), I got on my ladder and started to remove the old pieces of glass.  Unfortunately, the wood started coming off as well.  I quickly realized that I wasn’t doing a ton of good in replacing just the broken panes when the bottom of the lower sash had some considerable rot damage, and paint was peeling everywhere.  What to do?  Google, obviously.

I put down the scraper and retreated to the computer to get some advice from the experts on a prognosis for my windows.  From my hours of blog reading I came up with the general spectrum of my options.

1) New Windows! Maybe tilt-outs! Vinyl that never needs painting!  Insulated Low-E Glass!  Thanks Google advertisers, but with our goal of saving as many of the historic features of the home as possible, it seems almost sacrilegious to think of removing our 170 year old (mostly) solid-wood craftsmanship.

2)  A quick patch.  Replace the broken panes only, but expect to be back on the ladder as the glazing compound from the other window panes sheds down in a rain of crap every time window is opened, and who knows, maybe the remaining old glass itself will fall out too.

3)  Complete Restoration.  Can you see the aforementioned plumber planning his next vacation?  A quick search revealed that this option is either: Incredibly expensive (think removing all windows, shipping them off to a professional shop, waiting several months, and having them returned and installed) or a DIY project on steroids.  Being a broke public servant with a wife in graduate school, you can see where this is headed.  I knew that with the winter approaching I would need a job that I could work on in the evenings while Rachel is grinding out her last year at law school, and the more I researched the process the more it seemed that this task would certainly fit the bill.

I decided I needed a plan of attack.  My research led me to these general steps:

1) Remove the windows from the frame entirely (full restoration of a window still in the frame is nigh-on-impossible).

2) Carefully remove the old glass, salvaging as many of the wavy old panes as possible.

3) Clean the salvaged glass.

4) Remove all of the old paint and window glazing putty from the de-glassed window sashes.

5) Using wood epoxy liquid and compound, restore the integrity to any damaged/soft/rotting wood.

6)  Sand the cleaned and repaired sashes and dry-fit the glass.

7) Prime the sashes with good quality oil based primer.

8) Install glass with oil-based glazing compound.  Wait two weeks.

9) Paint.

10)  Install.

OH HOLY CRAP WHAT HAVE I GOTTEN MYSELF INTO?  Well, you are probably also thinking, what have you gotten yourselves into, this post is going to be days long!  In order to not short change or bore to death, the remainder of this post will be dedicated to Steps 1-3.  It looks like steps 4-6 will be getting their own post, 7 will have its own post, and 8-10 will close it out.  I told you I was sitting on a stock pile!

I got a pretty hilarious comment when I started with step 1.  My brother Daniel had been around the farm a couple of days and knew I had started working on the windows of the South wing, and then one day he drove by and the window sashes were just gone.  He became concerned that I had just lost patience and had a rage moment.  Rather, I had just made the determination that I would be tacking the windows on my own terms, and not on a ladder:

Leaning against the wall in the picture above are the two pieces of trim that hold the bottom pane in the window frame, and form half of the track that the window slides up along.  Luckily, the windows in the house are not weighted, and thus I had no complicated ropes and pulleys to deal with.  The top window sash just sat nestled into its frame on this ledge (it didn’t lower, unlike the windows in the a main house):

Once the windows were out and I was off the ladder, the project immediately felt more manageable.  Now to remove the glass.   I started with just a putty knife and determination and wound up with shards of wavy glass and a horrible temper.  Back to google.  My options turned out to be chemicals, heat gun, or broken glass.  I chose heat gun.  A quick run the the hardware store and I returned with what seemed to be a souped-up hair dryer, the 1200 watt Wagner:

I chose this bad boy because it was pretty cheap ($25-ish), had decent online reviews, and because it comes with two heat settings.  I had read online that you can’t heat the glass up too much, or it cracks.  I can now tell you as a primary source that it certainly does.  After trying a few tricks, I found that if I held a wide metal blade putty knife as a shield over the glass where I was heating the putty the glass stayed cool and the heat was directed right where I wanted it (Sorry no pic here, not enough hands!). I also found that those little metal points that hold the window glass during glazing are a blessing in that they can save a pane from falling out when the putty has failed, but if the putty is still good those little suckers are hard to find and if you press on them the wrong way you will crack your glass.  Moral of this story: Go slow:

Also, a word to the wise, you never know what is in that old putty or paint on the putty, which you are essentially vaporizing; I donned a respirator for this job, and for several others in the window escapade:

Last trick.  I realized that I didn’t necessarily have to get all the putty off the window glass with the heat gun to remove the glass from the sash.  This is good news as it means less chance of breakage, but it also means you have windows with glazing compound stuck all over them.  I did some research and decided to try an experiment.  I went to Lowes and picked up a gallon of acetone (nail polish remover) and soaked the dirty windows in pure acetone (careful here, acetone can be nasty on skin, its fumes are terrible, it is ridiculously flammable, and it is HORRIBLE on some kinds of plastics as will be part of a later post.)  This is where having a PhD candidate in Materials Engineering for a brother comes in handy.  Gio kindly did a little chem and told me that acetone would not react with Aluminum.  Thus, I went to food lion and got the largest cheap foil pan I could find:

As acetone is also highly evaporative, I decided to use saran wrap to mitigate my losses:

Careful though!  Any time the saran wrap hit the acetone it completely melted away.  Note all of the glazing compound above?  Now see:

Amazing! (The green glass in this picture is new, so you can also get an idea of my range of thickness in the old glass, pretty interesting).  I still have a little to scrape off the edges, but it came right off.  The scientist in me wants to tell you that I tried this with two time periods, about 4 hours of soaking and 24 hours of soaking.  Four hours didn’t cut it, but 24 hours worked magic, I hardly had to scrape at all!  And the acetone loosened EVERYTHING, not just the glazing compound.  Last, I found that the acetone didn’t lose its efficacy through multiple uses, I was able to clean several batches of window glass with one pour of acetone; just be diligent about keeping the foil covered so you don’t lose much to evaporation.

That whole process only took a week!…er…this is going to be long process.  Up next:  More experiments! Paint removal and wood restoration take center stage.   As always, if you have any advice, please let us know!

“Outstanding among the old ante bellum southern plantations is Edge Hill, at Quicksburg.  Standing majestically on the edge of a hill overlooking to the east many acres of rich bottom land is the beautiful old colonial mansion house with adjoining slave quarters.”

This post will focus on the history of the Edge Hill property from the time of the English land grants to the construction of our house, with more to follow in subsequent posts.

This post might get a little text-intensive, but we will try and spice things up with photos as we can.  Our sources mainly include local texts – we owe much thanks to John Wayland, whose detailed book contains an exhaustive account of how the Edge Hill property has changed hands, which we will now plagiarize  summarize.  We also got a nice surprise that we mentioned (ages ago) as the “more information” we were waiting on to do this post: the Google machine led us to the special collections library at Marshall University in West Virginia, where there is a collection of original letters, including several from James Madison Hite Beale, the man who built our house; copies of those letters arrived in the mail last week!  MAJOR SCORE!  But more on that later; now, to start at the beginning…

The Native Americans once hunted…ha!  We can’t go that far back, so we’ll start with the English “acquisition” of the New World.

Land in the Shenandoah Valley initially belonged to one of several wealthy English land barons, and Edge Hill was no exception.  Ownership of Edge Hill purportedly transferred into private-citizen hands October 21, 1731, when an Order of Council of the Virginia Colonial Government gave Joist Hite and Robert McKay the right to settle 100 settlers on 100,000 acres in the Shenandoah Valley.  One of those settlers was Daniel Holman, who had been chosen to settle the fertile river bottom plot that is now Edge Hill.  This transaction was soon challenged by Lord Fairfax, who also had a large land grant in the Valley.  Fairfax disputed Hite and McKay’s claim to settle the Valley, and ultimately Daniel Holman petitioned Fairfax directly to clear title to his land.  In 1750,  he received three Fairfax grants, 550 acres of which ultimately became Edge Hill.  This is an overview of the land grants in the region:

And here is a close up of the Holman grants:

You can see “Edge Hill” in the center of the map; also note the “Old River Channel” (referenced below).

Except “Edge Hill” wasn’t Edge Hill back then – it was temperate forest.  Enter the mule, plow, and other accoutrements of mastering the wilderness.  When Daniel Holman passed away, his son, Jacob Holman, inherited the land.  In the Revolutionary War, Jacob Holman rose to the level of captain and in his later years became one of the largest farmers in the Valley, and a significant slaveholder.  At death, his will listed 17 slaves by name, which were passed to his family.

When Jacob Holman died in 1784, the property passed to his heirs, and, though separately owned at times, remained in the Holman family for a total of 92 years.  In 1823 and 1824 Abraham Hoffman purchased the two parcels of Edge Hill that had been separated in the Holman family’s inheritance scheme for a total of $17,700.

In 1829, five years later, the progenitor of Edge Hill as we now know it entered the scene.  Colonel James Madison Hite Beale purchased the reunified Holman land grant for $19,484.  At that time, the deed book noted that the parcel contained 613 3/4 acres.

Wait, What?  The original parcels were 550 acres, where did that extra 63 and 3/4 acres come from?  Was it a gift from God?  Well, as it turns out, sort of!  Between the time of the original platting of the property showing 550 acres and 1829, the whole Shenandoah River, which forms the east boundary of the property, MOVED!  Remember the “Old Channel” noted above?  And, instead of a big to-do, the property owners to the East agreed that the 63 and 3/4 acres of their land that was now stranded on our side of the river should be included in the Beale purchase.  That’s what I call neighborly love.

So who was Colonel Beale?  A little digging has told us quite a bit.  Colonel Beale was the son of Taverner Beale, who originally owned Mt. Airy plantation, located just down the road from Edge Hill.  In approximately 1800, the locally-famous Mt. Airy stone house was constructed on the property (after the Beales had moved on):

(Thanks, Google Earth!)

Mount Airy is a property with its own richly-detailed past; at one point it became the summer home for the Vanderbilts, and you can read more about it  here.

With his well-heeled neighbors in their stone house down the road, in the late 1830s James Madison Hite Beale set off to build his own large farm home.  The entry in Life Along Holman’s Creek helps us date construction the best:

We know from the other dates listed that James Madison Hite Beale ultimately sold Edge Hill in 1846 and moved to Point Pleasant, (now West) Virginia, and thus 1840 is listed as the approximate build date of the still-existing house by J. Floyd Wine in Life Along Holman’s Creek.

Additionally, thanks to our amazing find from Marshall University, we know a bit about the personal dealings of Mr. Beale.  He was a wealthy business man, and most of the correspondence relates to his business transactions.  Attached to one letter we found a great hand-drawn map of the property:

In addition to being a farm owner, the interwebs tell us that:

Beale was elected as a Jacksonian to the Twenty-third and Twenty-fourth Congresses (March 4, 1833 – March 3, 1837). He served as chairman of the Committee on Invalid Pensions (Twenty-fourth Congress). He resumed agricultural pursuits.

Beale was elected as a Democrat to the Thirty-first and Thirty-second Congresses (March 4, 1849 – March 3, 1853). He served as chairman of the Committee on Expenditures on Public Buildings (Thirty-first Congress), Committee on Manufactures (Thirty-second Congress). He declined to be a candidate for renomination in 1852. He resumed agricultural pursuits. He died in Putnam County, W.Virginia, August 2, 1866.

(We found this description on academystamp.com, where, apparently, we can purchase a copy of James Madison Hite Beale’s signature.  Hellloooo Anniversary Present.)

From an ancestry website, we have found images of Beale’s final resting place in West Virginia:

In 1846, as mentioned above, JMH Beale sold the property to a colorful man named Samuel Moore.

Moore and his family will be the subject of the next installment of the known-history posts.  In the mean time, if you see anything that seems off, we will pass the buck and blame it on to our sources!  But seriously…if you are in possession of more accurate information, please pass it along and we’ll make the appropriate updates!

This summer, we tackled quite a few projects, and we DEFINITELY got our hands dirty in the process.  A little grime didn’t scare us – attic dust (including a two-foot snake skin), greasy carpet, musty closets, rotting wood, spider webs, rodent nests – we saw it all.  With all this in mind, please be impressed when we declare this our dirtiest job of the summer.

I think at this point, we’ve also established degrees of dirty: there’s dusty-dirty, dirt-from-the-earth-dirty, dirt-due-to-time-dirty, and trash-dirty.  This project created a new category: unsanitary-dirty.

What project deserves these lofty descriptions?  None other than the upstairs bathroom:

Before we moved in this summer, the bathroom situation was my “deal breaker” – I told Chad if I had to use this bathroom in the middle of the night, we were moving out and finding an apartment.  Luckily, although the downstairs bathroom isn’t really our style, it is completely functional, has worked great this summer, and kept me from having a meltdown over the past few months.

Chad’s brother Daniel is moving in soon, and in lieu of rent, he is paying us in a quick fix to the bathroom (this is mutually beneficial, as it means Daniel will also have a private boudoir).  The plumber came to do a quick assessment and we got some great news: no evidence of lead pipes!  Turns out, we’re too old for even that.  Some not so great news: the pipes are galvanized steel, and thus have a propensity to rust and prove difficult to work on.  To prep for the plumber’s big project, Chad and I put our work gloves back on and embarked on the type of demo often featured on HGTV.  We were, however, determined not to look as wimpy with a sledge hammer as the owners on TV.

First, the toilet:

Yeeeaaah…and the flusher was broken.

Luckily, the Logan Farm magically produced an extra toilet; however, the plumber said, “You’re replacing this really old toilet…with an old toilet?”

Chad just laughed – it was free, so we’re not looking the gift horse in the mouth.

Luckily, although it was covered in crud, the flange is in tact and ready for the replacement commode.  We were also wondering if the leak marks in the hallway below were from the toilet’s plumbing, but our fancy-shmancy Tupperware container didn’t seem to catch any drips, so we the shower seems to be the culprit.

We plugged the hole to prevent any noxious fumes from escaping:

The panel for the plumbing is right next to toilet – the one thing that was moderately convenient in this whole bathroom.

The brass-colored pipe at the bottom in the middle is for the tub’s overflow system; however, our tub had a fatal flaw.  The tub’s overflow hole should be linked to the brass overflow pipe by a connector.  Unfortunately, our tub lacked the connector, and the open hole was separated from the brass pipe by an inch-long gap.  The last handyman’s fix?  Clearly, the tool that fixes everything: DUCT TAPE.

See that duct-tape patch at the top of the tub?  That’s all that was between the dining room ceiling, below, and a really gross tsunami.  I don’t think the duct tape was always up to the job, based on the water stains and the crumbling lathe we found this summer.

Ultimately, the brass pipe would need to come out in order to remove the tub.  After much twisting, torquing, and jiggling, Chad finally resorted once more the Saws-All:

Freeing the tub also requiring removing the layers of surround and tile above the tub.  Enter the sledge hammer…and our rusty kitchen knife.

We didn’t exactly have a putty knife, so the rusty, old kitchen knife we found in May had to do:

You can just call him “Thor.”

Note: we only had one hammer, but we found the back of a crow bar also serves well.

We had to take one portion of tile off all the way to the door frame (on left), revealing some of the original horse-hair plaster and lathe underneath.

On the back wall (pictured just above), we noticed the framing had some writing – another find!  This time we have the (presumed) contractor signing his framing; he must have been proud!  This also helps us date the bathroom installation (if you crane your neck sideways you can see):

And by helps, we mean date this board explicitly to November 21, 1952, nearly 60 years ago…but that’s nothing for this old house.

In attempting to get a clear shot of this writing, we had to remove an oddly placed cross two-by-four, which seemed to have a lot of nails fastening it to…something.  We went around to the opposite wall and discovered we had just ripped out the support for the neighboring closet’s clothes bar…oops!

This closet is slated to be gutted, so we weren’t so worried about its structural integrity, but this escapade led us to examine the rear wall of the closet:

Wallpaper!  While someone has obviously gone to great lengths to remove most of the wall paper in the house, this closet went overlooked.  It appears that the general motif does match the style of the papers we found in the attic, so it is a good chance that it is original-ish.

We were glad that the owners who removed the rest of the wallpaper weren’t 100% thorough!

But, back to the bathroom.  We were able to completely finish removing the tile, and with the help of Chad’s dad and brother, were able to get the extremely heavy, cast-iron tub out and down the stairs.  The “finished” product looks like this:

Hopefully next time, we’ll actually be able to show you a bathroom rebuilt, rather than just something we’ve torn down (it’s becoming a theme for us)!

So with the summer winding down, we have a few large projects to check off the list before our life becomes back-and-forths between work, law school, and UVA football.  Rachel’s now entered her last week of her summer at BotkinRose in Harrisonburg, and we’ve been commenting a lot on how fast the summer seems to have gone…and then again, how some parts seemed to last forever.  Like the weeks awaiting our appliances, the week without a dryer because it blew up, the week waiting for our first green tomato to turn, or the week when Afton mysteriously developed a stomach ailment and aimed at all of our carpeted surfaces.  What a summer!

And what a lot of work it seems that we have been able to accomplish (even in the face of the mountain ahead).

With all of this reminiscing on our minds, there was one task that we had been putting off – time to call in the reserves.  The in-law reserves, that is.  On a rare weekend with no family events (and no major golf commitments – Steve’s tee time was 6:30 a.m., so he was done before lunch), the Winters Family piled into their car and came to the country….where they were promptly put to work.

Rehabilitating the dependencies is one of the main goals for this fall/winter, and the first step in that process was the removal of all of the debris that decades of neglect and rainstorms have deposited on our poor smokehouse:

And the view into the rafters:

Apparently the smokehouse had served as a repository for a surprising number of old gutters, unused timber, and a random collection of detritus.  Add a 200 year-old roof and countless windstorms and you get the perfect mix of rotted out support beams, dangling sheet metal, and the worst kind of Jenga you could imagine; a veritable death trap.  Oh, and did I mention that the floor contained a mix of Virginia creeper and POISON IVY?  The. Worst.

After a consultation with our craftsman, Colon, we were told the first step was to remove everything except the four brick walls and any of the structurally sound timbers.  We were advised to obtain scaffolding, and, as luck would have it, Dad purchased some at a sale years ago (and Mom, despite several close calls, did NOT throw away the all-important connector pins which transform scaffolding from pile of metal poles to a useful support structure).

Enter the Winters Fam:

Minus the wedding attire, these folks were ready to get down and dirty:

(We promised Gina some quality time with a sledge hammer.  Wish Granted…oh, and she may have forgotten appropriate footwear and attire…farm wardrobe to the rescue!).

First step:  Haul out all of the ground timber that had fallen over the years and any low-hanging fruit.

Second Step: Construct scaffolding in an area least likely to be struck by falling debris:

Step 3:  Start pulling, and pray your target doesn’t pull back:

Piece by piece, we slowly removed all of the old wood, metal, and trash.  We got two full loads of wood for the burn pile:

And one load of metal for the scrap yard:

As we came to the end, things were looking pretty…well, at least there was no more rotten wood!

(Note the salt line on the brick, above – the demise of the poor sports car in the ’60s.)

There would have originally been a 4×8 beam in each of those notches, and the smokehouse would have had a total of 12 said beams for holding salted meats in the process of being smoked.  When we got into tearing out, only 8 beams remained and of those, the two pictured are the only that we kept, and we might lose one of those to its current state of decomposition.  But hey, one 200 year-old beam is still pretty awesome!

Also, during the deconstruction, we found just a few of the original roof trusses:

Looking more closely:

Wooden peg construction, the real deal!  A profile shot:

While these beams aren’t salvageable, we did get one (!) full length truss (the side that the roof lies on) and one (!) full length cross support, when, together with a second truss, these form the famous “A” frame that originally supported the roof.  We are going to use this construction method as a template for our new structure.

We also found some paneled shutters, which we believe might have been original to the house. There are some louvered shutters on the property as well, but these paneled shutters have peg construction, and appear to be perfect matches to the hinges that are also on the house:

Lastly, we noted that every piece of wood taken from the structure was riddled with nails to hang meats.  After spending the day handling the wood, we noticed we could even smell the smoky scent in the old beams.  It smelled like authenticity.

After our day of de-construction, Rachel and I did a little Google-ing and discovered a few fun facts about smokehouses, which we will leave  you with:

1. There were originally smokehouses on every self-respecting plantation.  Think of them as modern-day meat refrigerators; if you wanted pork in the summer, it had to be an extremely fresh slaughter or salted and smoked.
2. Meats would sometimes be kept for 3 years in a smokehouse, and most smokehouses were constructed with very secure doors, as the smoking typically only took place for about a month after slaughtering (February to March), but meat thieves were at it all year long.
3. Of the 88 original structures found in Colonial Williamsburg, 12 are smokehouses.  It seems that practicality is a good form of preservation.
4. Smokehouses were traditionally made of wood; “[l]avishing the investment of bricks on a utilitarian building devoted to a smoky, almost industrial use was pure ostentation.”  Lucky us!  It seems that the process of smoking and salting meat is directly inapposite to brick preservation.  As mentioned before, the salt erodes the integrity of the brick, and salty brick is mercilessly attacked by fowl as a source of mineral supplement.

Next post we’ll be back in the house, tackling Dan’s bathroom:

Holy mother of frat bathrooms.

In our last post, we were optimistic for a quick turn-around on the landscaping endeavor.  Alas, stormy weather, Gio’s awesome wedding, and a suspicious rash of farm truck break-downs forced us to push the finishing touches on this project to the back burner.  UNTIL YESTERDAY.

When you last checked in, this is where we were:

Bare, and mercifully vine-less…but with a long row to hoe (insert thigh slap and pathetic laugh here)!

Next step: bring in the tiller!

Our muscle man, Paul, came in with the tiller to remove the massive root structures that were left behind after hacking out the leafy tops.  Voila:

(Looked more dramatic in person, I promise).  Although Paul is quite good with the farm equipment, we asked him not to go TOO close to the house with the ferociously spinning blades, so we came behind him and pulled any remaining roots and stalks out by hand.  It was at this point that Chad and I both learned some fun things.

1. Urushiol is an oil not exclusive to the leaves of poison ivy plants (which were long-gone at this point), but also exists (and thrives) in the plant’s woody stalks and roots (for up to 5 (!) years).
2. Gym shorts and a t-shirt with the sleeves cut off do not provide sufficient protection against urushiol.
3. According to the dermatologist, one of us is in the 15% of the population that is immune to the scourge of urushiol.
4. Chad is The 85%.

Within 24 hours of exposure, Chad was feeling very itchy and very desperate.  Sam and Gio’s wedding was in 6 days, and there may or may not have been facial swelling (let’s not even talk about the other portions of his body).  Luckily, Harrisonburg has one natural-remedies store, and although we were not interested in the seaweed cookies or homeopathic poison-ivy pills, the jewelweed soap was a god-send.  Combined with a gallon of calamine lotion and self-control against the itch worthy of a gold medal, Chad was looking good as ever for Sam and Gio’s pictures.

With the poison ivy saga and a happily married couple behind us, we felt ready to tackle the yard once more.

Taking inspiration from Longbranch Plantation in Upperville, we wanted to do a border of pea gravel along the edge of the house to prevent any future weeds and vines from climbing up the brick, fronted by a bed of the five boxwoods I gave Chad for our anniversary.  We started by raking the tilled ground as level as possible, and used landscape edging from Lowe’s to define our beds.

Measure it out, then score with the Saws-All where it needs to turn to keep it approximately 2 feet from the house.  Checking the distance at several places keeps it from looking like you were drinking cocktails while gardening.

Each piece of edging comes with 4 stakes to secure the piece at various places.

And, as always, Afton was nothing but helpful.

Next, time to class it up.  Remember those bricks in the dirt mound a few weeks ago?  Part of the process of salvaging the brick was segregating the perfect bricks from those that had chips, cracks, and missing parts.  Although we can’t use these broken bricks in any structures, we collected two full pallets that are PERFECT for landscaping:

We dug a little trench along the edging, nestled the bricks in, with the good edge up, and packed extra dirt around them to keep the line secure.

Finally, we used landscape fabric and accompanying pins (also from Lowe’s) –

– and laid it out across the bed to even further prevent weeds and vines.

After laying the fabric, we topped it off with the gravel.  Chad found an unexpected good deal on reclaimed stone from a flat-roofed building at Grass Roots Landscaping outside Harrisonburg.  It turned out to have a little dirt in it, but otherwise was exactly what we wanted.

(Please note: Chad’s brother, Daniel, is in the process of moving in with us!  He brought a bed, clothes, and…”road” tires for the ‘Stang.  Not entirely sure what that means, but they totally work with our decor).

FINALLY, we were going to plant these dang boxwoods.  Same process applied for this step as with the one before: level with a rake, plant the boxwoods, cover with landscaping fabric, top with mulch.

We measured to allow for the average maximum diameter of 3 to 5 feet – we’re hoping eventually the line of individual plants will merge into a stately hedge.

Bring in the mulch!

And (drumroll, please)…..

Fewer bugs, less poison ivy, and a little easier on the eyes.

Now, let the sun shine – we’ll provide the daily 25 gallons of water from the spigot across the yard!

Edge Hill has fertile soil.  This is a double-edged sword – great for corn and tomatoes,

but not so great for keeping your house from being devoured by Virginia Creeper and poison ivy.

(Luckily, this is the slave house – even the main house wasn’t quite this bad.)

The stranglers were inching their way up to the second-story windows of the house even though Chad had ripped them all down within the last year.  Two weeks ago, Chad went at the vines with a chemical assault (Round Up), weakening their defenses.   After the withering had begun, we picked a perfect evening to take our first stab at “landscaping.”

We grabbed some shovels, shears, and work gloves –

– and began hacking away at the Virginia Creeper around the front of the house.

We started by giving the plants’ foliage a buzz cut, and discovered one of the reasons we’ve had so many bugs inside our house.  Major ant, wasp, and cricket habitat (Chad took a stinger to the hand with the first cut).  There were also dozens of well-fed praying mantises who evidently got too stuffed to keep the thriving insect population at bay.

After trimming back the ground growth, we stumbled upon a magical outdoor liquor cabinet:

As we peeled back the layers of scrub, we found the step we had been tripping over for months, decorated with a few beer cans and shreds of plastic.

After a few more slashes with the shears and an epic battle between our lower backs and some well-rooted vines, we had made great, great progress.

When we came back a few days later to pick up the trash and sweep off the porch, we found ANOTHER HOUSE TREASURE:

“Edge Hill”

“1920”

If you look closely, you can see the above inscriptions are etched into the concrete step leading onto the front porch of the house.

After we cleared the above-ground portion of the plants, we brought in a tiller to turn over the cleared ground and prepare the bed for planting.  Depending on the weather, we’re hoping to write about Landscaping: Phase 2 later this week!

So far, we have been taking all of the pictures for our blog with the iPhone camera, which has actually done admirably well.  This is largely due to the fact that our slightly nicer camera has been out of commission – the cord we needed to upload pictures from the camera to the computer has been missing for quite a while….

…and by a while, I mean since September.

We finally got a card reader and released the pictures that have been hostage on our nice camera.  We found fun pictures from a  horse race in the fall (woohoo, Fall Foxfield!) and a few of the house that have been waiting to be unlocked.  Here are a few of the better ones:

This black snack somehow slithered to the top of the woven wire fence in our front yard – he’s about 3 feet long, 4 feet off the ground, and wound like a corkscrew around the top wire!

Afton really wants to make friends with the mama cows and their calves, which were also in our front yard for a while.

But she’s like the 7 year-old boy who flirts by leaving a slug on your desk or punching you in the arm – more annoying than endearing:

And finally, a few other wall paper images.  This one was too delicate to unroll in one piece, but was a beautiful pattern – wish we would’ve found it in better shape.

This is a tulip wall paper –

– that matches the tulip border:

And, on the back of this piece –

– we found these amateur charcoal and pastel sketches:

What gems!

I’m still astounded that this is the view I see every morning when I let Afton out:

If you don’t look at the broken TV antenna on our roof, it’s a little slice of heaven :)

We have successfully had two breakfasts and one dinner in our fully-operational kitchen!  Here are some pictures, and more to come on the kitchen transformation…

Hey guys!

I guess it is time for me to do my first post.  Later on I’ll detail the history of the house, but I’ll start with how Rachel’s and my dream of Edge Hill got started.

As little boys, Daniel and I would often discuss who was going to live where when we grew up.  For some reason (likely beaten submission) I didn’t put up much of a fight when Daniel unequivocally said he wanted mom and dad’s house.  That left me on the hunt.  I had always liked my grandparent’s limestone house on Lee Street in Woodstock, but one day when I about 12 years old we went to dinner at house that dad was buying as a part of a new farm.  The previous owners were good friends of the family, and we got a tour of the house with all of the architectural details highlighted.  I fell in love.

In my fourth year at Virginia I took a class with Architectural Historian Richard Guy Wilson focusing on early american architecture, and for my final paper in the class I did a study on the property, and I think that was when I made my decision; one day I would live at Edge Hill.  But who would want to live there with me?  As you have seen, the house isn’t quite move in ready.  What young woman would want a life in the country in a run down house where what doesn’t work far outnumbers what does?
Enter Rachie.  As most of you well know, Rachel and I met my first year of law school, and a little over a year later we were engaged.  What you may not know is that as a little girl Rachel also had an interest in historical homes.  Well maybe more than an interest.  She would full on dress the part in colonial garb while volunteering at Sully Plantation.  JACKPOT!

I don’t remember the exact first time I took Rachel, but I remember two reactions: Shock and Awe.  The place was in such a rough state that it was hard to believe it could be livable, but the potential was also shining though the cracks in the plaster.  At that point, I began experimenting with a 3D design program called google sketch up.  Though the design process, Rachel and I began to envision a home where we could grow old together.  Literally.  We are using ADA standards for the bathrooms so we can wheel each other around if that ever becomes necessary.

The only loose end with our dream was the timing.  When Rachel and I got married, we weren’t sure what we would be doing three months later, she was deciding on law schools and I was job hunting for after the bar.  Well, two years down the road it seems that fate took control and here we are, both working in Harrisonburg and jumping head first into life at Edge Hill.  It seems that the only one who has no worries about this whole process is Afton, who spent a hour this morning harassing the cattle and sprinting in her new yard.  Now if only mom would get here already!

Hello, world!

If you’re reading this blog, it is likely you are a friend or family of either Chad or myself.  As such, you likely know about our dream of moving into Edge Hill, an 1840s plantation in Quicksburg, Virginia.  In its current state, the house is neither glamorous nor move-in ready.  Many of its original historical elements have been diligently preserved…and not much else.  On the way out is a truck stop whose office was run out of an addition built onto the original structure in the 1960s, and on the way in are Chad, myself, and our Great Dane, Afton.

I am finishing up my second year of law school at the University of Richmond this Friday (!), and after a year of living apart, Chad and I will be moving back in together for the summer.  Those of you who have seen the state of Edge Hill know that along with this transition comes the challenge of making the house liveable…with a lot of elbow grease and TLC.  See, for example, this pic from the day-after shoot with our wedding photographer in one of Edge Hill’s out buildings:

Luckily, the main house doesn’t look quite this bad and mainly craves some strong bleach and lots of scrubbing.

We are looking forward to sharing this journey with you – the ups, the downs, and the unexpected surprises.  Thanks in advance for all of your interest and advice!  Buckle your seat belts!!!

– Rachel, Chad, and Afton