Removing appendages

After almost two years of dreaming and planning, designing and re-designing, pricing and re-pricing, our farmhouse restoration project has begun.

On Monday, July 10, 2023, Josh and Alan from Crowell Construction got started by carefully taking down and de-nailing the weathered barn boards that lined the walls and ceiling of the screen porch. These boards had been salvaged from the old barn on the property which collapsed in the 1960s. Some of the boards were 24 feet long!

The interior designer who refurbished the farmhouse’s kitchen and bathrooms in the 1970s was a man named Russ Welch who had a business based in the old schoolhouse on the Waterford Road in Sweden. The vogue in those times was to give salvaged and weathered barn boards a more prominent position as items of historical interest in the interiors of residential homes.

Josh and Alan carefully placed the retrieved boards in the hayloft of the carriage house – returning them in a sense to where they’d come from. It is our plan to re-use these boards in the newly renovated farmhouse.

Workers carefully removed for salvage whimsical chandeliers, transom lights, and a cast iron kitchen sink while we owners worked in the barn, sorting through what has accumulated there over the years, including an odd collection of work gloves, not all paired.