Even the bacon tastes better when we cook it here

When we bought the house, there were 3 kitchen areas (and that's not counting the kitchen in the in-law apartment over the barn). One kitchen for the small apartment in the back of the house, another central 'kitchenette' for student boarders. We knew we'd be ripping both of those out as a part of the remodel. 

That left the principle house kitchen. It was dark and close, with a low, swayed ceiling. The space was tucked into the extended/converted 'back house' or barn, squeezed between the dining room and the rear stair case, and almost completely filled with a pinewood island, cabinets and tiled countertops. It did have a pretty new kick-ass professional viking stove that we ended up saving and moving into the barn's in-law apartment. But otherwise, we knew it wasn't laid out well for how we wanted to use the space.  

For example: we had this wild thought that it might be nice to have enough light to see what we were cooking.  That lamp on the counter? That was a necessary addition. Because the space was that dark.  

Also, see that brick wall above the range? It's kind of hard to tell from the photo, but the mortar had sort of started to fall out in chunks. Which didn't bother me too much, except for occasionally finding mortar crumbs at the bottom of my soup bowl at the end of a meal. 

Not until I came home from work one evening to my Bride's steely-eyed refusal to use the kitchen anymore. This after a family of mice poked their head out of one of the gaps in the brick, and gave her whatever the rodent equivalent of the one fingered salute is while she was trying to toss together a stir fry.  

We ate a lot of take-out after that. 

Fortunately, that was only a few days before we moved into the barn apartment, and got to some serious work on the house demolition. 

The end product definitely managed to tick the box of "we'd like to have some more light in this space".

In many ways, this kitchen was at the heart of the house renovation.

First, it's where we end up spending the majority of our time together as a family. We all love to cook. And even more, we love to eat. The kids end up doing their homework at the counter while we make dinner. Dinner parties end up congregating around the appetizers laid out on the counter. It's the center of the house - pretty much the point you pass through to get anywhere else, one way or the other. 

Second, we knew we wanted to relocate the two stair cases that had been constraining the space. The stairs to the basement, and the back stairs to the second floor were both moved to other locations (the 'up' stairs went along the wall - as you'll see below, and the basement entrance was re-located under the front stairs, in a different part of the house entirely). 

This gave us a huge amount of freedom to design the space to our liking, with plenty of room to stretch things out as we liked.  

We sketched out some basic plans for our awesome architect, who fleshed in the details. (This was the same guy that came back to me with the idea of turning the old 'indoor hot tub' space into a meat room. I love this guy). 

We did make some changes to those planes along the way as we tore back the walls and saw what we had to work with. Those exposed beams and supports, for example - many of which still bear evidence of the whitewash applied when the building was a dairy barn - we left bare and worked into the room. 

One of my favorite ideas, though, was something we saw once on some home renovation show on cable a long time ago. My Bride & I have been joking about this idea for years, and given the opportunity, we insisted we include it from the beginning. Look again at that picture above... there are two dishwashers. 

Think about how insanely clever this is. A dishwasher is basically just a cabinet that happens to wash dishes. Stick some dirty dishes in it. Press a button, and voila: clean. I take dishes out as I need, put dirty ones in the other dishwasher. Press another button, and clean. And the cycle flips. 

Genius. 

The biggest argument we had when we sold our house in Massachusetts was that we had to leave our Aga cooker. My Bride wanted to take it with us. I argued that the people buying our house almost certainly expected to have an oven in the kitchen when they moved in. And they'd likely notice the large hole in the wall if we removed it. I wasn't sure that my Bride bought my logic, but I finally promised that we'd go find another Aga when we moved. 

This one is blue. We found it on Craigslist and brought it home. 

I'm still in love with the Aga as a cooking device, and think I always will be - an oven designed by a nobel prize winning physicist is inherently awesome. And it's even handier up here, where we're two hours closer to the north pole. The kids cuddle up next to its radiant warmth on a cold day, and it is simply lovely to never have to pre-heat the oven when I'm set to cook. 

The cabinets are all from a local place up in Bath, ME. The Kennebec guys designed these beautiful hand-planed cabinets for us to accommodate the giant slab of dark soapstone we found. And we kept the whole thing light by painting it a buttery cream. I never thought I'd end up with painted cabinets, but I love these. 

The leaded-glass hutch in the corner is another built in, incorporating material reclaimed from the home (as mentioned here). And you can see where the stairs shifted to on the other end of the kitchen, along with the little bit of remaining brick - turns out that most of the brick was simply a facade behind the original stove (which was located right in the corner where the bottom landing of those stairs ended up). The bricks that are left are exposed from the back of the dining room fireplace. 

One of the other neat features that ended up solving a problem for us was the downdraft vent behind the range top. 

We cook a lot of stir-frys and such - and while I love my Aga, there are times when you simply need an open flame. In the quest for a perfect cook top, I must have visited and researched and studied and asked around and visited some more about cook tops for months before we settled on this four-burner Wolf. But putting a range top in the island meant we had to figure out how the heck we were going to sort out ventilation. Because this thing puts out a lot of BTUs. And I didn't want to smoke us out of the house every time I turned it on. 

Enter the awesomely retractable downdraft fan. Press a button, and it rises up from the island like the monolith in 2001. (one buddy suggested I hook up a speaker to have it play the opening theme song every time it was raised. My Bride vetoed this.) Press another button and it goes away again. And the thing is powerful enough to suck all the smoke down and out through the floor, avoiding the need for an overhead hood altogether. Hell - this thing could suck the color out of paint. And still somehow quiet. 

Technology is awesome. 

We turned a portion of the side entry around, and created a pantry space off the kitchen. (The window at back leads into the mudroom now). The color was a bold choice to contrast against the light wood we had in the space, and the shelves were designed with purpose.

The back shelves hold appliances - including the power to run them, without having to move them out of their spots - and the side shelves are sized for specific needs. The visible shelves here are intended for canned and preserved goods. The opposite side (out of view) is deep enough for a large cereal box. 

Anything deeper, and we'd lose things in the clutter. This works perfectly for us. 

This kitchen turned out to be everything we could have hoped for, and immediately turned into the heart of our home that we knew that it would. It's bright in the sunshine, and warm in the evening as the autumn turns to winter. It's practically laid out, with plenty of easily accessed storage. Yes, it used up an extravagantly large amount of the back of the house, but the farmhouse is a long, rambling building, with room to spare, so why not? And because of the choice of warm materials, it managed to remain somehow cozy.  

And we haven't seen the mice since we finished. So we love it. 

The insulating properties of rat poop

I realize it's been about six weeks since I posted photos of our new, er, old farmhouse in Maine. We knew that we would be stripping back the layers of additions, extensions, ad-hoc changes, and eras of personal choices and oddities that didn't quite fit our vision or the context of the house that were the end result of decades of use as a fraternity & then boarding house for the nearby university. 

The eight person hot tub in the first floor bathroom, for example, just didn't scream 'farmhouse' to us. 

But our first problem was where the heck we were going to stay while we made chaos in the house. Our goal was to move out by Thanksgiving. 

At some point in the last decade, the previous owner had moved a dilapidated barn from the center of town, and joined it up with an existing cattle shed and another small outbuilding on the property. The first floor became his workshop, and the upper floors were a mostly-finished 1+ bedroom apartment. 

An apartment right on the property had great appeal to us - a property with an in-law solution was a major plus. And the workshop is about as large & at least as well set up as the barn at the house in Massachusetts was. 

One teensy little problem: the water was shut off to the apartment. It wasn't well insulated. And Maine has a tendency to get a little cold in the winter. And when were we planning on moving in again? Oh. That's right. The end of November. 

(I walked outside the other morning and it was -15 degrees Fahrenheit. Which is almost 40 DEGREES BELOW FREEZING. It hurt to breathe. Why am I living someplace that hurts to breathe? Breathing is kind of important. I want to go on breathing. STOP HURTING MY BREATHING, MAINE.) 

So we backed Itchy & Scratchy up to the barn, ripped the ceiling and walls out to check all the plumbing (and electrical while we were rooting around in there), and sprayed something with an 'R' value approaching 1,000, I think, and moved in the night before Thanksgiving. 

We tossed the second-hand, rusty stove & fridge that had been in the apartment as placeholders and moved the large 6 burner/2-oven Viking range (with griddle) from the house out, along with the larger fridge. Which meant we also had to convert the heating & kitchen appliances to propane from kerosene. We threw the kids up into the loft area to share a bedroom, loaded the house with a few essential bits and bobs, and were set. 

When we cooked our turkey to celebrate the holiday, we had a lot to be thankful for. Everything except a dining table. There's room for a large 4-seater table on the porch off the kitchen. But see my note about the temperatures.  We made do. 

Now we were ready to start on the house. 

The last few weeks, we've mostly been pulling pieces apart to see what we have to work with. See the hot tub and sauna above? You want them? Too bad. We cut them up into pieces. Because that was the only way we could actually remove the thing from the house. It was that big.

In fact, this whole area (which used to be two rooms, the bathroom and mudroom. See where the shovels are leaned up against the wall? That was the mudroom) was a series of lean-tos-turned-house. When we pulled all of this out and looked at what we had left, these rooms were built on 4 different levels. (note the hot tub in its sunken position. That was a knee-shattering-and-mind-boggling 3 feet drop from the floor above.)

When we pulled it all back, we could see some evidence of how it had been put together. The outlines of original exterior windows that had been blocked up. (I'm playing pretty fast & loose with the term "original" here. I'm fairly certain that the dining room that's on the other side of the wall below was added about 50 years after the original house was built). 

We also pulled a ton of granite blocks out of this area. I mean that literally. About 2,000 pounds. Maybe a little more. 

We set them aside for later use. 

Then it was time to strip back the kitchen. Remember our hobbit kitchen? It came with bricks. Lots of bricks. Bricks that didn't match. Bricks that ran in different directions. Bricks held up by sticks. Bricks for no apparent reason. 

We saved the bricks we ripped out as well. 

We turned around and started pulling down more walls, stripping everything back until we could see the original post & beam structure. 

Except it was only partly post & beam. 

I was fascinated by the connection of this part of the house - it used to be a barn. Actually more than one.  The layers and levels made that obvious. The ceiling in the kitchen that had been several inches lower than the area around it was an artifact of construction. The external beams were post & beam construction. The ones used as joists were original 10"x16" beams, notched for joists and support. But they didn't start out there.  They were reclaimed from elsewhere (probably the barn whose stacked-stone foundations were still standing in the backyard). They were twisted up on their sides and toenailed in every couple of feet. 

No wonder the ceiling used to bounce & sway like a trampoline.

We very carefully pulled these beams down and set them aside. And hey! Look! You can see up into the next level now! 

When we got up to the next level and pulled the interior walls down, we found evidence of the fire that had turned up in our pre-buying inspection report. Lots of evidence. Lots and lots of evidence. 

Not the best picture, but all of the upper timbers here are charred. Many of them all the way through. 

There was no smell of ash - the fire had been decades ago. But instead of repairing, whoever addressed it just built up around it. 

Because, you know, building codes were a bit more like 'suggestions' back then, I guess. 

By the way - the piles of dust on the floor? That's what's left of the insulation. Our contractor crew described it as "about 20% insulation, 30% squirrels' nests, and 50% rat poop." 

I wonder what R value rat poop has? 

My favorite part was jacking up the ceiling. My Bride called me one day to tell me. 

"They think we should jack up the dining room ceiling a bit." 

What do you mean a bit? Did it fall down? Holy hell. I'll be right there. 

It was fine. The house was just that out of level, and this secured things better to get let us get at more of the layers. See, right above this floor was where the master bath and rental bathrooms had been put in. And to do that, they had to insert some plumbing. Which they did by cutting large holes through the joists. 

Because that seemed like an ok thing to do? 

They haven't all been unpleasant surprises (thankfully). We pulled down the tired drop ceiling in the back of the barn extension (one of the rental areas), uncertain what to expect. 

We found these. 

Nice, eh? 

Once we opened up the walls, and pulled things back, suddenly, the whole interior of the house had more light, and even more potential. 

See this? This is the look that says "I am going to ignore the pile of rat poop at my feet, and focus on the potential." 

We haven't really begun much construction yet. The work so far has been focused on pulling things out, looking around, and drawing up plans that fit the space. We've bought appliances and started jigsawing them together on paper. Picked out tiles and doors and had innumerable conversations about what kind of floor we will one day have. 

We only managed one real construction task pre-Christmas. We backed a concrete truck up to the house and filled in the hot tub pit. 

Progress. 

This is the house that made us lose our minds

When I first got the call from what would become my company, I told my Bride, "I'm going to take the interview. But just to be nice. I'm pretty sure that nobody actually lives in Maine, other than a few stray Canadians and uncountable moose."

I had one conversation. And that led to another. And a third. Soon, I was having conversations with them along the lines of, "Look. I like you. And I like the people I've met. And the role sounds cool. But I don't know anything about Maine other than this is where people go to get a good lobster roll. I mean, I read We Took To The Woods a couple of years ago and I enjoyed it.  But I'm pretty sure that's not the book that'll convince my family."

"Come on up. Bring the family. We'll sort you out and you can check out some schools and neighborhoods." 

We've done this before, a couple of times, the last time, moving from England to Massachusetts. This time, the kids were old enough to be aware & kept in the loop. We gave the realtor a couple of basic parameters. 

1. Don't show us anything less than 100 years old. 
2. We prefer something with 2 or more acres. 

That's pretty much it. We started getting the listings. And running the searches ourselves. And prepping a list. 

I found this one listing that I kept coming back to. It wasn't on the realtor's list. The pictures caught my eye, and the description was just... odd. 

"1780's farmhouse. Greek Revival," it said. That part I liked. 

"Greenhouse and mature, formal garden," it said. Also in the 'win' column. 

"Period details, fireplaces & a lovely front room library," it said. Yes, yes and hell yes. 

"11 bedrooms, plus apartment," it said. Well, I suppo--  wait. What? 

I google-snooped it. Is that a parking lot?

That's a parking lot. 

What the hell is this house? I had to see it. I began lobbying my Bride. She was unconvinced. I asked the realtor about it. "It's been on the market for more than a year, and I've never shown that house before, if that tells you anything." 

But this was the lead photo. Seriously. I had to go see it. 

I had my bets on what the house was. I figured bed-and-breakfast. The listing photos showed the house staged with plenty of antiques and custom pieces. This house ended up being the first one we saw in our tour of Portland-area properties. 

It was gorgeous. My bride and I wandered around the 6+ acres, looking at sculpture and old outbuildings (there are 5), and kept speculating as to what the heck this house was. 

Sculpture in the sitting garden

"It used to be a fraternity house." We were just down the road from the University of Southern Maine. 

"For the last 30 years, the couple that owns it has been renting out rooms to students. The couple works at the university's art department, and host gallery showings here."  Hence the sculpture. And the fact that the home had been cut up into so many individual spaces. There was a 1 bedroom apartment on the second floor, and a number of individual rooms sharing another, separate mini-kitchen. And an in-law style apartment above the barn. 

We didn't care. We turned the corner and saw the giant chestnut tree in full bloom. I've always wanted a chestnut tree. My Bride knows this about me. She knew the house had me.  Then we walked to the back, of the house, down a ways from the cutting garden, a few steps past the three-season sun room, and saw the sunken, secret fern-lined garden in the foundations of the old barn. And I knew the house had my Bride. We ducked behind a stone gate (seriously, you guys. A stone gate!) and looked at each other, whispering urgently. "Holy shit. I love this house." And then we had to do that jinx-owe-you-a-coke because we said it at the same time. 

The side path

We looked at several other houses, but we kept coming back to this one. It spoke to us. It said "buy us."

So we had it inspected. Because we're not complete idiots. 

"It's not square." It's an old house. I expected that. 

"The student apartments are sub-par." That's ok. In our heads, we've already ripped all that out and returned it to a single family home. 

"There are old marks of fire on some of the rafters." Well, it was a frat house at one point, so I suppose that's sort of understandable...

"I don't think the chimneys have been cleaned in the last century. Many of them need to be rebuilt from scratch." Ouch. 

The kitchen was built for a hobbit, with low ceilings and an oddly cut up layout. There is a hot tub in the bathroom on the first floor. A full-sized, honest-to-goodness 8 person hottub. INSIDE. And the house overall had not made it unscathed through the wallpaper-years. Oh, the wallpaper. It is plentiful and abundant in our new house. And none of it matches. Except for being mostly in the "Large and Flowery" category. 

Hobbit kitchen

See that lamp in the middle of the kitchen counter? That's so you can see into the sink. Because it's that dark in the kitchen. And yet somehow? There are 4 different light switches in the kitchen, each of which operate a different set of lights. 5 if you count the under-the-cabinet fluorescent. 

It was all character. The house had a name - it was owned and substantially renovated by Isaac Dyer, a prominent local attorney in the 1820's or so. It was his estate. The house has its own facebook page. It has a personality and a presence. A little 'quirkiness' is to be expected, I suppose. 

All of this got fed into the negotiations. And we knocked the price down to something we could be comfortable with, knowing we were going to start a pretty hefty renovation & update. 

We finally moved into the house about six weeks ago, and started exploring every detail. There were two rooms that we had never actually seen in person (they were student occupied when we walked through the first time). We had visited with the sellers a couple of times to share stories and sit on the front porch with a cup of coffee, but we had been negotiating through proxy, sending our inspectors back through, but never actually having walked the the whole house again. Does that sound insane? That's because it is.  Did you see the part about the INSIDE giant hot tub that we had already chosen to overlook? Besides. The sellers had let me move my pigs in a week or more before the actual close date. We had a trust thing going. 

We got moved in, and started separating the boxes we absolutely had to open (underwear) from those we didn't (paintings). We didn't really want to unpack anything that would be in the way of the renovation. Two of the rooms and one of the outbuildings became big storage lockers. And the answer to every question about where something is ends with "...it's in a box."

We started figuring out what needed to be fixed. There's a hallway light fixture that the sellers had asked to take with them. "Sure," I said. I can replace that, I figured. So a few days after we moved in, I ordered a light fixture I liked, switched off all the switches in the area, and pulled out a ladder to hook it up. (Unlike the kitchen, most of the house has high ceilings. What's up with the kitchen? I have no idea. I'll let you know when we rip apart the room to figure it out). 

The light came on. That was good. But I had switched every switch to 'off' that I could find. I climbed down from the ladder and searched for another switch for an hour before giving up. I finally called the seller and asked him. "Oh. That's a live circuit. I had the light on a pull chain." 

Oh good. That's a fun little surprise that I'm glad I managed to avoid finding out the hard way while I was installing the light. 

Remember: this is fun. Right my love?

Much of the renovation we're going to hire done. We've found a Maine-based contractor team that specializes in antique homes - they've already started on the barn/in-law apartment to give us a place to stay during the peak of the renovation crazy. But some of it we'll be taking on ourselves. The fun parts that we enjoy. Either way, I'm sure I'll end up with a few stories to tell. 

We like Maine. We like the area, the company I've joined, the people we've met, the schools the kids are in. We like the pace & the interactions. We miss our friends in Massachusetts. But when I talk about having pigs in my backyard, Maine folk either nod as if that's totally normal, or shrug as if to say "Ay-yuh. Well. That's a thing some people do."

But mostly, I moved the whole family to Maine so I could finally justify buying a pair of overalls. 

Et voila.

Note the Giant & Flowery wallpaper.