Downtown with only two streets
I thought I'd tell you how we came to be living in an 18th century house in the country. My husband Rick and I were living in NYC and had been searching the suburbs for 5 ' years looking for the perfect antique house to no avail. We had quite the list of wants and weren't willing to settle. After one particularly disappointing day my husband brightened up and said time to go farther out and made a call to an old childhood friend who was in real estate.
Autumn in Our Town
An hour later our fax machine started humming away spitting out house listing after house listing, talk about excitement! The house listings were in Rick's childhood hometown up in New Hampshire and one house in particular caught both our attention and Rick couldn't figure out why it seemed so familiar so time to take a drive up and have a look.
Front of House at first meeting
Rick had driven up alone to see the house and called that night telling me I needed to hop on a plane and get up to NH pronto, he had found our dream home. Meeting our home for the first time took a bit of imagination to envision what it could look like when brought back to life. Upon arrival to our house you couldn't see it sitting up on the side of the mountain from the road since the front forest was so over grown. But once up the drive there she was'''a cape built in 1790 sitting looking very blank and forlorn just waiting for someone to love her.
Side yard looking into the back
The property was blank! No shrubs around the house, no gardens, no nothing except what Mother Nature planted. Those 'shrubs' you see at the back of the house were actually invasive weeds called Japanese knot weed or bamboo and were next to impossible to kill off.
Back of house
The property in general was an absolute mess! The side field weeds had grown part way into the side yard and calling them weeds was putting it mildly. There were huge wild rose bushes the size of a vehicle, poisonous sumac trees and giant weeds taller then a man. The only way around that mess was walking around on the road because you couldn't go through it.
Rick told me while we were touring what we termed 'the mess' that he finally knew why this house seemed so familiar, it was his old pediatricians house. My husband was born and raised right down the road from this house, talk about going full circle. Another surprise from our realtor, the old gal is buried right out back on the tier. I guess she really loved this house!
Yes, as far as you can see this is our mess!
The interior turned out to be as dismal as the outside, the whole house had white walls, not semi flat painted white walls but the white of primer paint. Yes, you read that right, everything was painted with primer white paint! While almost every trim throughout the entire house was painted that strange blue/green. Take it from me people white is not neutral it's shockingly bright!
We had seen our house on a rainy day so found out first hand that the roof needed help since it was raining on the first floor of a two story house. See the rain coming down the window shade? It's was flowing steadily from the ceiling as well. Despite the fact we were going to need a bulldozer and every surface in the house needed help the structural bones of the house were perfect and ready to stand for another 200 years.
Front forest after we cleaned and thinned it out
We found everything we wanted in a property and house even if it was going to take a very strong back and many years to put right. So after nearly six years of searching we took the plunge and bought our home. Welcome to our dream!