Fine Furnishings

During our time away from the farmhouse, we inevitably get involved in some sort of Vermont-related activity, most often taking the form of furniture restoration. Much like our love for this beaten up old home, we have become hooked on run-down antiques that are begging to be saved and restored to their former loveliness.

Antiquing is not a new hobby for either of us. It's kind of odd to imagine a 6-year-old enjoying the occasional visit to the antique store, but this was in fact my upbringing. Tony has been building and fixing furniture for years, and together we have developed a love for finding and fixing old pieces of furniture. There's a certain joy in taking a beautifully crafted item that now looks like it belongs in a garbage heap and putting in the hard work to bring it back to life after 100 years of neglect. I get a kind of adrenaline rush, lame as that may be, every time we make visible progress on one of these items.

We first discovered our renovation talents after taking an old barn door and antique cradle rocker and, after sanding and staining them, combined them to create the dining table in my Brooklyn apartment. The end result was pretty great, or so we thought, and a new hobby was born:

While we have specifically sought out some items, including two claw foot tubs and an antique washstand, the majority of our acquisitions are pieces we simply came across and fell in love with. An antiques dealer down the road from the farmhouse has two barns full of old goods, which is where we discovered a cabinet with a hand-cut glass door that we plan on converting to a wine cabinet. We've also enjoyed 'pickin' through antique shops around Pennsylvania's Amish country. The more beat up the items are, the better, because that means they'll be priced at something we can afford. Elbow grease is, after all, free :)

We're keeping a record of our progress with each item in slideshow #5, titled Furniture Restorations. I will put up a post when there are new photos added to this album. Feel free to check out what we've done so far! Our wine cabinet is close to completion. It was hell scraping off the layers of paint in the cabinet and all over the glass door, but it's been cleaned and is nearly prepped for staining. We are now working on refinishing another cabinet (no purpose defined yet) and a hallway bench/coat rack.

Click here to see our furniture restoration projects, start to finish!

We hope you find the work as interesting as we do! Personally, watching Tony take apart a hallway bench, which could have been knocked over by a sneeze, and turn it into a sturdy item that won't injure you upon sitting down is fascinating stuff to me.

Enjoy and keep checking back for project updates!

- Melissa

Have Hazmat Suit - Will Insulate

"Have Gun - Will Travel" might just be the best name for a television show, ever. If a camera crew were to follow us around as we create organized chaos at the farmhouse, I believe the show could be called "Have Hazmat Suit - Will Insulate", or at least that could be the title of this weekend's episode. As promised, hazmat suits were donned with the greatest of style as we prepped and insulated two rooms downstairs. The real challenge was simply being able to get to the house...

 

And to think, I was hoping to see the lawn...

So this is what happens when you leave a house in Vermont unattended for the month of February. We rolled up to the house at 10pm Friday night. It was cold and foggy, making visibility low on this already streetlamp-free road. As the cars flew by one after another, we realized it would be near suicide to attempt to dig out a parking spot for the van at that hour. Standing on the side of a road with fast-moving cars and poor visibility, throwing piles of ice into the roadway just didn't seem like a great idea. Call us crazy. So we waited until the next morning and were greeted by a pile of frozen snow and ice that laughed in the faces of our plastic snow shovels. After an hour of struggling and little progress, we threw in the towel and Tony drove back into town, finding a guy at the local deli with a snow plow. His full name happened to be only one letter off from a rather famous Star Wars character, and this brought us a great amount of amusement. Morning struggles aside, things seemed to be on the up and up. 

Saturday proved to be a great amount of unsavory and physically demanding work, but it needed to get done nonetheless. We finished demoing the front room, including the removal of the old ceiling. This process was a joy, as we were literally showered with the remains of countless dead mice and lady bugs, tile after tile after tile. Pictures are available in this week's slideshow, if you have the stomach for it. I expected us to be insulating the rooms by late afternoon, but as with most renovations, things always take longer than planned. Instead, the afternoon found us digging out the fallen plaster and wood from behind the baseboards. According to my schedule, the Shop Vac should have sucked all of that up within 10 minutes. According to the Shop Vac, it did not have the sucking power to pick up the plaster or wood so we spent over an hour digging everything out by hand. Why I even bother attempting to make a schedule at this point is beyond me. We finished off the evening by putting down a cardboard floor over the wood floors to protect them from insulation and whatever else lies ahead during renovations. We also cut the plastic for covering the windows. Bed time was well earned that night.

Tony surveying his flooring craftsmanship

Sunday brought blue skies and some sunshine, which was a great help in powering us through the day. We got to work early, hanging the plastic over the windows in both the front room and kitchen. We prepped the kitchen area by moving everything away from the walls and throwing tarps over the more valuable items, since we'd heard some horror stories of spray insulation floating its way across the room and gently raining down on everything of value. We laid down a temporary cardboard floor in the kitchen, and suited up!

Despite all of the awful stories of people having to shave their hair off or throw out their possessions, spray insulation was actually a snap! Once Tony got the rhythm down, things really sped up. We were able to spray the front room and the entire kitchen, with insulation to spare. It was a somewhat fun challenge, as you can't go more than 30 seconds without spraying the insulation, or risk the hose clogging up and becoming useless. We found ourselves scurrying about in hazmat suits with goggles and respirator masks, lugging 20 lb tanks of chemicals from spot to spot so Tony could cover the entire room quickly. The end result: a smashing success! We now know we need not fear spray insulation, and CAN do things that people would normally pay professionals thousands of dollars for. Cheers to the do-it-yourselfers! 

Forget cats and dogs! Click here to see raining mice and ladybugs during demo, and the addition of insulation! 

Motivated from our demo and insulation success, we are currently trying to lure Steven "the Demolisher" Lowe back to the farmhouse in 2 weeks. We hope to give Steve his own room to demo, as he is faster than a wrecking ball, while Tony and I tackle another. Will we be able to demo two rooms in one day, and insulate them in another???? Only time will tell!

Coming soon: another episode of "Have Hazmat Suit - Will Insulate". Stay tuned!

- Melissa

All Cold and No Heat Makes Renovation No Fun

Our dedication to this project and our drive to make progress may be superhuman in size, but it really can't compare to the beast that is winter in Vermont. The cold and snow have challenged us every step of the way. Spring has never seemed as sweet as it does this year.

Below I will post links to slideshows #4 and #6. They show our work in the house once the temperatures really dropped into the sub-zero zone. In the sixth album you will find pictures of some really lovely ice formations on the windows. These were taken from the inside on a Saturday morning when the temperature was -1 outside, which implies it was definitely colder inside. The house seems to be operating under the ice box principle of yore. Cold air, once trapped inside, remains there. Great when the perishables are food, not people.

 Album #4 welcomes the arrival of serious snow. Our accomplishments that weekend didn't translate too well from real life to film. We spent the greater portion of Saturday outside cleaning up piles of unknown items scattered throughout the backyard. We couldn't take any photos because everything was covered in snow by the time we had finished. We uncovered a great amount of wood, which we hope to reuse, antique mason jars, wrought iron fences, tools, and basic garbage. Everything was organized by type of item, and then left for mother nature to blanket over. We'll be checking in with those piles again in the spring.

Before the snow set in, Tony took me up into the hills behind the house to survey the landscape. Our lovely property is home to some serious ice-age boulders, rock walls formerly used for grazing cattle, and an incredible and intricate maple tree tap system. Check out photos Tony took of the tubing below. Once the house is finished, we hope to re-tap these trees and put this incredible system to use. Dallaryan Acres' Pure Vermont Maple Syrup, coming to a store near you!

The rest of our work that weekend was performed indoors, although I can't say the basement was much warmer than being outside in a snowstorm. We used massive pipes to hammer even more massive support columns into the area of concern in the basement. The digging proved difficult as the ground actually had ice cycles coming up from it. We are able to do some support work, but ran out of house supports. With the closest Home Depot almost an hour away, that work had to wait until the following weekend.

Click here to see a slideshow of snow-covered Jamaica and one cold basement.

Our most recent weekend at the house can be seen in the sixth slideshow. Steve put on his thermals and his brave pants and returned to the house for another weekend of freezing renovations. While we made some big progress in the front room with the bay window, we also spent a significant amount of time huddled around our kerosene heater. The house was so cold nearly every bottled liquid we brought inside froze, with the exception of a bottle of Orange Crush which obtained a sort of slushy texture. This ended up being fairly delicious, but it makes the contents of said soda pretty concerning. They must put some serious chemicals in Crush if it can avoid freezing solid in those temperatures. 

Our initial plan for the weekend was to complete the basement supports, but nature wouldn't allow such progress. We discovered that one corner of the basement, the only corner that was not treated to new foundation work by the previous owners, is sinking in one part but raised in another. This is due to the high frost level, which is getting in between the bricks and causing them to separate. To level the house, we needed to kick out part of brick wall supporting that corner, allowing it to settle a little lower, and then level it using house supports. Once it was level, we could leave it be until the spring, when a mason could come in, repair the brick work to the proper height, and then remove the house supports.

On paper, the plan sounded fool-proof, but the reality was quite different. The ground was completely frozen, and kicking out the brick wall would leave that corner of the basement completely exposed to the elements. A hole in the wall nearby already had snow pouring in, making our new plan look less and less like a good one. We opted to put it aside until the spring, which was a difficult reality to accept, and go to work on the opposite side of the house. 

The rest of our weekend was spent demo-ing the front room. We still have one wall of lathe and plaster to remove, plus the ceiling, but once these are knocked down we will be ready for insulation! Insulating the front room will actually be a huge step for us, and we are excited to have at it. The insulation has already been ordered, and we plan on getting that done this weekend. 

Click here to see Steve "the Destroyer" Lowe demo his heart out! 

The clock is ticking to Insulation Saturday, as it will forever be known. We'll be updating again with new stories and photos soon!

- Melissa

Getting Down to Business

With another trip to Vermont only a few days away, we are hoping to get all caught up on this blog before it is time to post even more photos and discuss our newest adventures, and adventures they shall be! We will be insulating the first of many rooms this weekend. This involves a few choice dress-up items, including a hazmat suit, gasmask and goggles. The end result promises to be priceless, and I can't wait to suit up and reach my fashion pinnacle.

In the meantime, let's look at weeks three and four of renovations. My parents, Susan and Artie, came up to the house for the first time and got right down to business! We took our first steps into actual room renovation in the upstairs bedroom at the top of the stairs. Tony's mother was hoping to re-do this room first, as it somehow seems to be the warmest room in the house. We achieved some victories in that department, including the fixing of two windows. Up until that day, we had not been able to open any windows in the house, but we discovered by removing the trim, we could easily remove the windows, sand them down and ... Voila! The windows would slide up and down. It was a mini-victory for all. We also replaced a broken pane of glass, and scraped paint off of the doors and trim, but unfortunately that is about all we made in terms of progress up there. Between Mrs. Dallaryan and my father, we did manage to remove all of the wallpaper, only to discover that the plaster below was too cracked and, even worse, no longer connected to the lathe behind it. As we expected, all of the walls, not just the exterior walls, will need to come down and be replaced. Hello, extra work, good to make your acquaintance.

When you push, the wall pushes back!

We did make significant progress in other parts of the house. Tony was able to totally demo the upstairs "bathroom," and Mairim and my mother got down to the business of hanging construction lights. The electric company had come and installed the meters the week before, so after wiring the construction lights in, we had light in the evenings!!! This was a huge morale booster, and now allowed us to run space heaters and gave us the ability to work into the night. We no longer operated on the sun's winter schedule.

Click here to see light return to the Cheney Farmhouse for the first time in 30 years!

These two weekends were a good reminder that a lot of effort can sometimes result in only minimal visible progress. I believe this is true of every serious renovation. Our first weekends of pure cleaning made the house look significantly better, but to really get this house into fantastic shape, we'll have to make things look a lot worse first!

Bring on the demo.

- Melissa

What Have We Done?

It was a mix of rain and snow on the day of the house signing last October. There was no sun to be found in the sky, and it was pretty darn chilly to boot. We took a final look at the house before going to the signing some ways down the road. As we made our way through the house, we came to the "downstairs bathroom" (air quotes because there isn't an inch of plumbing in the house, and never was). Rain was pouring in from the ceiling, leaving holes in the wood floor to show just how powerful years of ongoing water damage could be. Take that, homeowners, said the inclement weather.

We looked around at the rotting floor, the dripping water, and the garbage/beer bottles/old furniture littered everywhere. Tony turned to me and said "What were we thinking?"

Thankfully, we've come a long way since that challenge-filled morning. The morning after we signed, the weather cleared and we got right to working! The first weekend in the house was spent mainly cleaning. The ladies strapped on some masks, gloved up and got to sweeping, organizing and cleaning the mold off of doors and walls. Healthy air was key if we planned on living long enough to get any work done! I had the pleasure of sweeping up a multitude of deceased rodents and their droppings. Tony and Alastair made their way outside and tried to patch up the hole in the basement wall and leak in the roof over the downstairs bathroom area. Mairim and Alastair also worked on the architectural plans for the house. We also got started on our fruit orchard by planting 5 trees to the right of the house. They included two apple trees, one plum, one pear and one peach. By the end of the first weekend, our project was already looking far more manageable. The decision to buy the house seemed like a sane one!

Click here to see a slideshow of our first weekend of work!

Our second weekend at the house followed soon after, with best friend and roommate Steve Lowe joinging the fray. Steve, Tony and I spent a weekend at the house cleaning and, most importantly, bringing light to the home! Our new electrician, John, is the fiance of the lawyer who closed on the house for us. He's a good man and a great electrician, and he will be popping up more on this blog in the future. While Tony and John got to building the new electrical box downstairs, Steve and I made light of the ratty, mouse-covered furniture that had been left in the couch. By the end of the weekend, we had moved 3 couches, 2 upholstered chairs and 9 mattresses outside to the street. The terrifying thing about all that? Only one couch was left by the end of the weekend. I hope whoever took that stuff has a good steam cleaner, but I somewhat doubt it...

All in all, it was a very uplifting weekend. The cleaner the house got, the better we felt about this undertaking. Tony, Steve and I attacked the kitchen area on day 2. With the couches now gone from the room, we set to organizing what was scattered about the floor. We ended up finding some gems, including a hand-hewn country church pew, which we plan to reuse, and a bevy of antique doors, farm tools, and old mason jars. Some less than valuable finds included about 100 dirty Budweiser bottles and a filthy toilet bowl. Now I consider myself a brave woman when it comes to dirt, the elements and the creepy crawlies being found throughout the house, but the insides of that abandoned toilet were truly scary enough to send me running from the room screaming.

Click here to see a slideshow of massive cleaning on the second weekend.

Also, check out a few before & after photos of the kitchen and dining room area:

 Nothing says progress like a kitchen that is no longer filled with turned-over couches!

-Melissa

1880, Cheney Farmhouse ; 2010, Dallaryan Acres

When we're not at the farmhouse, my mind still thinks of it often... like, for example, between the hours of 9-5 Monday through Friday, when I am glued to this computer. It's such an immense project that it sort of gets in your head, your bones even, and settles there. Sitting at a desk all day doesn't quite suit our active personalities, when really what we'd like to be doing is working day in and out on this beloved project of ours. Right now I am sitting and typing, but my body is telling me... go get a crowbar and knock down some plaster. Alas, that is not an option, so we will continue to beef up this blog in the meantime!

The Dallaryan Family have been proud owners of this home since Oct. 15, 2010. Numbers 1-5 of the photo slideshows you see on the right-hand side of this blog document our progress up to now. It might not look like much, but we've been trying our best considering the weather conditions these last few months. Signing on a house just as a New England winter is coming on, bearing in mind there is no heat and foundation work can't be done with frozen ground, has made our progress seem meager at times. We're focusing on improvements in baby steps, not leaps and bounds, and anyway spring is only a few weeks away at this point!

Before we begin delving into the work we have done so far, I think it is important to have a blog post on the history of this fine little home. Nothing extensive or high school textbook in size, just a few lines to tell you the story of our home... from then til now, if you will. My goal: keep it short and keep you captivated. Here we go:

The Cheney Farmhouse has been standing, once looking a little better than it does today, since 1880. It was built by Wales Cheney, a local carpenter and furniture maker. Rumor has it a few pieces of his furniture are still on display in a local museum. I wouldn't be surprised, as the quality of his woodworking is partially what sold us on this lovely home. The home has been abandoned for the last 30 years, minus a few droves of mice, bats and small woodland creatures whom hoarded their nuts for the winter in every crevice of the house. The last resident to live here, aside from Mother Nature, was Florence Crowninshield, a granddaughter of the Cheneys, who came to live in the house as a teenager. She may or may not be the young girl sitting along the dirt road in the photo above, which was a gift from a new neighbor.

Flash forward to Presidents' Day Weekend 2010, when fate lent a hand in finding this home new owners. Tony and I were in VT for a weekend of snowboarding, and made a stop at the house after having shared a collective "WOW" when driving by earlier. As we peered into the windows, who should pull up but the owner, Bill Knight, a rugged older man in a pick-up. The first words out of his mouth were "You want the house? You can have it. How much?" We laughed but found ourselves following this complete stranger into an abandoned house via a hole in the basement wall (he had no key). Despite being freezing inside, fairly run-down and littered with 30 years of junk, there was an overall welcoming feeling and warmth to the house. It was as if it had just been sitting there, waiting for someone to make it a home again. I took one look at the craftsmanship of the staircase and fell in love. 8 months later, Mairim and Tony signed their names on the deed. We now have the fixer-upper we've always wanted, and then some.

This is the story of the Cheney Farmhouse, faithfully told and I believe fairly accurate. Now all that's left to tell is the future! So begins the transformation of Cheney Farmhouse to Dallaryan Acres! (hand-carved sign to follow).

- Melissa

A Renovation Recap

Welcome to the Cheney Farmhouse. This little diamond in the rough is a 130 year old farmhouse located in Jamaica, Vermont. Despite its peeling paint and overall haunted appearance, this baby is still standing strong. And level. Two key factors when renovating an antique house, or so I think.

With that said, I must admit that my opinion is one that doesn't really hold much clout in the renovation world. According to my college degree I'm an artist, and according to my upbringing I'm a tomboy that was always tagging along with my dad and older brother; together we built things, dismantled things, soldered things, welded them, sawed them. My renovation skills are basic at best, but the will is there! The other players in this story offer a bit more experience than I. My boyfriend Tony and his sister Mairim are co-owners of this house. Mairim and her husband are both architects, so there is no need to expound upon their skills and know-how. Tony is a man of many acquired renovation talents. He has taught himself how to repair and build any number of things, and is now a skilled builder of furniture in his free time. Their mother is an experienced green thumb, and together, we plan on restoring this house and its 140 acres of Vermont mountain greenery to its former glory.

Please join us and watch as we laugh, cry, work, sweat, freeze and stumble our way through this massive renovation! Let the games begin...
- Melissa