Renovating to Restore: Adventures Repairing the (amazing!) Borden Milk House in Wassaic NY
It's a stressful time, so we've got to celebrate the wins when we get them. Kitchen As you may remember, we are (very slowly) preparing the kitchen for renovation, and this necessitated the removal of a built-in cabinet/drawers thing that acted as a wall between the original kitchen and the mud room (prep room? laundry … Continue reading Little Victories
Remember the gate? I was unhappy with it, but also just happy it was up? Gate looking shiny on its first day... before it started sloping downward into the mud. Well, over the following weeks/months it just kept slowly (not that slowly) sinking down to the point where it was pretty much unusable. I thought … Continue reading Gate part two!
The world was a different place in 1870 - in most ways it was terrible. Women had practically no rights, racism was even more rampant than today (slavery had just been abolished, on paper), and residential indoor plumbing was pretty rare.* Life wasn't too bad (comparably) if you were a land-owning white male, but decidedly … Continue reading The Metalwork.
As mentioned (2 or 3 million times), we bought the house sans inspections. One of the most promising aspects was the electric: it looked new-ish; the house had a new meter; generally the wiring looked pretty good (there was no knob & tube wiring, for example). The house's distinct lack of walls gave us easy … Continue reading The Electric.
From the ground, the chimney appears reasonably sized - we thought it was up to Sergiu's chest or shoulders. Oh how wrong we were... When the roofers were replacing the crazy roof, they mentioned that the chimney (the bit sticking out of the roof) was in truly awful shape - crumbling into nothingness. Given the … Continue reading The Chimney.
