Chris has been (patiently) waiting for the garage to be completed so he can pick up the Deere he ordered.  He’s been diligently cutting the lawn with a push mower for the past three months, so it was with a bit of fan fare that he took delivery this weekend.  Miguel picked him up at the farm at 9 AM sharp with the pick-up truck and trailer, and off they went.

By the time Becky and I got back from heading in a different direction to pick up all the light fixtures for the house, they had the green tractor unloaded, gassed up and ready to go.

Arianna got to share in the inaugural ride, and Opa even let her steer a little bit.  We celebrated with a picnic of hot dogs on the front lawn — because there is really no other place to sit.  The backyard, where the patio will be, is full of bricks and a cement mixer since they are in the middle of building the chimney.  The garage is full of construction materials — and the house is full of dust.  A blanket under a tree in the front yard next to the dumpster full of remodeling debris was about as good as it gets.  To quote Arianna “This is gonna be so much fun.”  And it was.

If you’ve been following our blog — you’ve seen “No Rhyme or Reason Farm” go from bad to worse.  I could see the vision when it was bad — which is what got us into this predicament in the first place.

But now that it is “worse” — some days I’m not so sure I can see the vision anymore.  I have a hard time imagining this coming together.  The idiosyncrasies of the house that looked so charming in my initial vision, lose their luster as the house gets stripped to its bones and our builder, John, tries to figure out the best way to put it back together again.   I give him credit for keeping the vision (or at least not telling me when he can’t see it either).

So this week — amid drilling the well, planning the walkways from the garage to the non-existent porch and yet to be completed patio, amid watching a spaghetti mess of wires wrap through the house and in and out of the walls — I need to focus on the “vision” again.

Here is the vision.  This is what we are aiming for — with six weeks to get there.

Yes, NUTS.  They are everywhere on this property.  There are black walnut trees everywhere.  Right now they have hard green balls that will fall soon.  The green husk will soften and rot exposing the black walnut for the squirrels.  This property is a squirrel utopia.  Plentiful food — and a house to store them in.  A real house — not a squirrel house in the knot hole of some tree.  The squirrels have made themselves at home in our home, and they just got their eviction notice.

When the exterior soffits and fascia boards came down, so did the walnut shells.  I thought that was the end of them, just up under the eaves, on the outside edge of the stone wall that extends to the roof line.  But that was not the extent of their storage space.  As boards came up to make room for the infrastructure (plumbing vents, hvac, electric boxes) the nuts came out.

Eventually, we decided the master bedroom ceiling had to come down, and with it, more nuts.   And then, on the underside of the attic flooring – now exposed to the bedroom ceiling — it looks like we have Chestnut too — not NUTS, but Chestnut wood.  The American Chestnut succumbed to a blight in the early 1900’s.  These floor boards have been here since the mid-1850s — supposedly, it’s REAL American Chestnut.  We thought about pulling it out of the attic, replacing the attic floor with plywood and using this random width, really thick and very special wood for our first floor hardwood flooring — but the cost of doing that was NUTS!  So, the chestnut wood will stay in the attic, where it’s been for more than 160 years.  At least the nuts they were hiding are gone.

The house has been torn apart and in some ways looks worse than when we first saw it — when we could see the vision.  Now it sits there with no front porch, no doors, no windows, no shutters, looking forlorn and hollow.

I think it must feel like a transplant patient, getting a new heart, new lungs, new kidneys.  The work is going on inside — new plumbing, new electric and HVAC; all necessary parts to bring the house back to life.

Old wood is ripped out, new wood is expertly milled and put into place, plumbing & electric lines are run through the house, but with no well and no power, the house is still lifeless — as if waiting for a defibrillator to resuscitate it.

The garage deserves it’s own post.  First of all, it cost about 3 times what I thought a garage should cost.  Mind you, I have no real perception what a garage should cost, other than it’s value to me — which is merely a place to put the car when I come home.  But a garage is apparently a big deal.  It is home to the various back yard implements — and — if completed before our other house sold, could potentially store all our earthly possessions until the house would be blessed with an actual “Certificate of Occupancy.”  I can see that there is value in that — my stuff could be close at hand, I wouldn’t have to pay for storage at some off-site location and I could even organize stuff by room in anticipation of moving day.

But the rain prolonged the process, the house sold — and all those earthly belongings are (hopefully) safely stored in an off-site pod facility.

The garage is nearing completion.  It still needs siding and exterior lighting, and the interior space provides room for the cars — and a Man Cave too.  I love the slope of the roof and the privacy that the garage will give the patio, creating a “courtyard” feel.

One of the “reasons” it took so long to buy the No Rhyme or Reason Farm — is that we were trying to get inspections done.  There was a newly installed “pump thing” in the basement with a date of install of May, 2014.  So, water must have been working/pumping recently.  With the frozen winter and the lack of a functioning sink anywhere in the house, it was difficult to verify gallons per minute, or quality of the water.  But there is a springhouse with a bubbling brook, so water must be present — and the quality must be good — because Florence (Reason) lived here until a ripe old age and the water didn’t kill her.  All good “reasons” to go ahead and buy the farm.

Now we find that the PVC pipe rising from the ground, is not exactly a well.  It’s more like a PVC pipe shoved into a cistern that is about 12 feet deep.  It appears to have a beautiful stone circular interior wall, like a wishing well.  My wish is… I wish I had a well.  So now we apply for well permits, the builder stakes out a new spot in the front yard to drill a well and we bite our nails wondering how deep they will have to drill to give us a real well.

In the meantime, walls go up, and walls come down.  Walls on the addition and the garage rise quickly, get wrapped in Tyvek and topped with a roof.  The framing takes shape for the guest bedroom and bathroom.  And the wall comes out between the two bedrooms upstairs to open the space into one large Master bedroom.

The stone wall comes down between the addition and the house to create an open flow between the kitchen and the family room.  And stone comes out of the upstairs master bedroom to allow for a closet opening where we are stealing space from the bathroom closet.

But the best wall is the one I am building with the stones from that $#^&* non-existent well.  No point in having that beautiful circle of wishing well stones covered in, never to be seen again.   I am pulling them out, one by one, along with other rocks laid bare by the excavation for the garage and the addition — and I’m making my own wall.

The plans are approved, and it all seems like fun and games until the construction actually begins.  Then it seems real.  For the first time, I have a sinking feeling of what have we done!?!

The space is marked out for the new addition and the garage.  The excavation begins and there are huge piles of dirt every where.  The space looks too tiny.  I’m sure we’ve made a mistake; it looks like there is no way the living room furniture is going to fit into this addition.  John tells me rooms always look small at this stage, but when the walls are up, it will look fine.

Instead of putting walls up, floors are coming down.  The entire first floor is gone.  It gives new meaning to an “open floor plan.”  It’s fascinating to see inside the walls, examine the old construction and envision the finished product.

And now it’s time to start making decisions.  I thought the tough decision was deciding whether to buy this place or not.  Apparently that was the easy decision.  Deciding on kitchen appliances, siding colors and whether to open the fireplace or not — are much bigger decisions.  And every decision comes with a price tag.

The drama continues.  We can’t buy the house because we need inspections.  The inspections can’t be completed because we need repairs (well and septic).  We can’t do repairs until we get a mortgage.  And we can’t get the mortgage because we need inspections.

Our builder continues to be patient; but I’m not.  I’ve had enough of this.  I put together a proposal, went to the bank that owns the property and asked for a construction loan.  Within 24 hours, I had their commitment.  We closed on the property 19 business days later.

We finalized plans, got engineering drawings, the township issued building permits — and then the rainy season hit.

A storm came up, trees came down, and we started our woodpile while waiting for construction to start.

Just because a house is old, doesn’t mean it’s historic.  I know very little about the house.  The real estate listing says it was built circa 1850.  I do know that’s before the Civil War (1861-1865).  Serendipitously I met a woman in the break room at work.  In the course of conversation, I said we were in the process of buying an old house in Chester County.  She knew the house well.  Her husband had helped to care for the elderly woman that lived there and after her death, they sold the farm to a developer.  The developer envisioned a sub-division with a new road and 12 or so houses on the 20+ acre property.  The township had other plans and said no.  The developer began “renovating” the farmhouse for a “flip,” did minimal improvements — or worse yet — put lipstick on a pig — and then lost their shirts.  The property became bank owned.  The bank subdivided the property into six lots, with the farmhouse being on the largest lot with the most useless property (picture a heavily wooded, steep cliff).

But while the house may not be historic, it has some unique features that should be preserved.  There are the remnants of an old spring house, and remnants adjacent to the house that appear to be part of a summer kitchen.  The beauty of the property is in preserving its character.

The 203K consultant warned us that the historical society was formidable.  She said it would be difficult to get on their agenda, they would have very strict rules and we may not get their approval until August — or later!

We trudged forward, got on the agenda, and showed up — designs in hand.  Mostly they wanted to tell us the history of the house, make sure we weren’t going to level it and build some objectionable “modern” structure and ask that we put corner stones where an old barn had been.

They said the farm had been known as the “Reason Farm,” after the people who had owned it.  The Reasons, a black family, had inherited the farm from the white property owners generations before.  It was unusual for blacks to own property outright during that time, and the house had become part of the underground railroad.  But the farm has other history as well.  Part of its original acreage was lost during prohibition when its bootlegging operation was uncovered.  The development on Reason Lane now exists on that part of the old farm.

So, the Reason’s Farm has now become the “No Rhyme or Reason Farm.”  There is no rhyme or reason for doing this — other than:

• reclaiming an old house from disrepair
• living closer to work
• being closer to my kids and granddaughter (that’s the best reason)
• having space for a garden, fruit trees and chickens
• designing a shell of a house to be what we want it to be
• and dreaming of actually living here … some day … when the permits are issued, the well is drilled, the construction is completed, and the moving vans are gone.

So, it’s a disaster.  But it has potential.  Except it’s tiny.  You can only fix tiny to a certain extent.  If we do this, we need a garage.  And more important than a garage — we need space.  The house has no closets, the rooms are funky (you walk through one bedroom to get to the next), there is no defined living room, there is no open concept kitchen, the stairs are steep, there is only one bathroom (if you can call it that — it’s actually worse than an outhouse) — and it’s upstairs.  The house is 1500 square feet.  Every room takes up the complete depth of the house, 14 feet from front to back — front windows and back windows are in the same room.  There is no center hall, no rambling spaces and no dining room/living room/family room/guest room/powder room — there is just no room!

But that’s okay.  We watch “Tiny House Nation.”  If those people can live in something that size — we can do this.

We make an offer, contingent on a few inspections (well & septic) — otherwise, the house is pretty much “as is.”  Five acres, in Chester County with an old stone farmhouse — with a well and septic in disrepair.

Then we found a builder.  They were on the internet — and if they’re on the internet, they must be good.  Not only are the good, but they’re Amish… and patient.

The winter has been brutal, the ground is frozen, the water won’t run, the septic is broken.  We can’t test the septic until we can get well water to run.  We can’t get water to run because the house has no heat.  We can’t fix the well, because we don’t own the house.  We can’t test the septic unless we can fix the well.  And so round and round we go.

The mortgage broker recommended a 203K mortgage.  If you ever hear those words — RUN.  We wasted time and money trying to meet requirements, run inspections and design a house that would comply with ridiculous requirements.  But John, our builder, took the delays in stride while we work through designs, filed for permits and met with the historical society.