The Main house and kitchen ell
I have been extremely busy the last few weeks working on the house. It's a never ending project. The house is over 200 years old and had been empty for ten years before we bought it. When we purchased the house and land in 1985 I intended to do a full faithful restoration of the house. The house is built on the traditional Maine pattern, all one extended connected structure, big house, little house, back house, barn. Reality, however, has a way of smacking you in the face. The wide pine flooring was punky. The beams underneath were rotten and had to be replaced. I dreamed of baking loaves of freshly made bread in the Quebec style bake oven. But firing the oven to 700 degrees almost started a house fire. The flue at the oven's front getting so hot that the chimney surround started to smoulder. On the bright side, the brick mass of the chimney stayed warm for three days after my aborted attempt at baking. Finally the layout of the house was wonky by modern tastes.To give an example, the twenty foot square kitchen ell, shown in the picture's foreground contains a large chimney mass with built in bake oven, eight, yes that's right, EIGHT doors leading off into other parts of the house, a pantry, mudroom, and as an after thought, the kitchen. My sense of 1800's contracting practice is that builders preferred to put in a door opening where ever possible to save on plastering. As I re-read this post this morning I should note that the mud room alone has four doors, only one of which made it into yesterday's count. As you come in the front door, to the left is a papered over opening into the now torn down summer kitchen. Turning right, you enter the kitchen. Looking directly to the front you find a door leading to a well opening into the cistern in the basement.
So dispite my love for old history and traditional architecture I let Ann talk me into replacing the drafty windows on the rear of the house. We hired a friend to put the windows in. To keep costs down I agreed to I do all the interior trimwork. In the old days only the front, or public rooms, were trimmed with fancy molding. I think the builder of this house owned only a single molding plane, because everything else is trimmed with a simple cove detail. I installed fancier molding to match the front rooms. That took a week or more. All the time I was working, Ann kept reminding me that her brother and his family was going to arrive that week end. OK, I get that, but fitting a wide molding profile made up of several layers couldn't be rushed. Saturday morning found Ann frantically painting the new trim in the room where I am writing this evening, We finished re-installing the cherry work surface in front of the windows just as Paul's family pulled into the door yard. Talk about cutting things close.
After all this, Ann and I spent a week hosting family, celebrating my mother-in-law's 82d birthday. Cooking, cooking, and cooking. Other than countless trips back and forth to the shop making small tweaks to way to many pieces of window molding, not much of note happened in the shop.