Random musings on my vagabond existence in the Endless Mountains of Pennsylvania and wherever else life takes me.
My older brother has taken on the daunting task of modernizing the more than 200-year-old farmhouse where we grew up in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania.
The house has been vacant since my mother moved into the senior living community two and a half years ago. My brother, who is a real estate lawyer, is hoping to keep the treasured Kerr homestead in the family, and he’s working on a master plan of subdividing the six-acre property and renting out the house until such point as one of the nieces or nephews might want to move in.
But to be rented out, the house first needs to be brought up to modern-day standards, and that is no easy job. When the original part of the house was built around 1800, it consisted only of a living room, parlor, and hearth on the first floor and a couple bedrooms on the second floor.
Before my folks bought the place in the summer of 1965, the house was gutted and a two-story addition put on the back, complete with a kitchen and another bedroom upstairs. Whoever did that work lacked certain construction skills, for the addition was constructed on a foundation of old fieldstones held together with a sloppy mortar slurry.
They also didn’t bother putting any insulation underneath the floor. As a result, the water pipes tended to freeze during the cold Pennsylvania winters, necessitating emergency action by our always-busy father to crawl under the floor and thaw out the pipes with heat tape.
We also noticed over the years that, because of the poor foundation under the addition, nothing in the kitchen was level. Lay an egg on the counter and it would roll in the direction of the windowsill. It was one of the many imperfections that we grew accustomed to.
Soon after buying the house, my folks added a detached two-car garage. Twenty years later came the next big project when the house and the garage were joined by a two-story addition that gave us the big family room my father always dreamed of.
Meanwhile, the main part of the house remained status quo. Small rooms. Tiny closets. Drafty windows. No air conditioning. Holes in the wall where the plaster was peeling away. Floorboards that buckled in the heat of the summer because of moisture coming up from the basement below.
With six kids to feed and put through college, there just wasn’t the money to take on those fixup projects. And it wasn’t like any of us were complaining. When you’ve never had modern conveniences in the first place, you don’t miss them.
Who needs air conditioning when you have box fans? Who cares that the kitchen counter isn’t level, or the floorboards creak when you step on them, or that there are holes in the walls? As long as we had food on the table and a warm bed to sleep in, all was fine in our world.
But today is a different age, and after nearly 60 years of being lived in by a raucous family of eight, the old homestead was in dire need of updating before a new family moved in. The first order of business was to clear the house of six decades of stuff. That process took the better part of two years.
When that was done, my brother brought in a contractor to do the work of fixing all the issues my folks had put off for lack of money. It didn’t take long, however, for the work men to see that more than a superficial makeover would be required. When they tried to spackle the holes in the walls to prep for painting, the plaster crumbled to the ground.
So, the decision was made to gut the house and start over. What a job. The two-story addition at the back of the house was jacked up so that a new, proper foundation could be laid beneath the kitchen. Out went the old cabinets, the crooked Formica countertops, the scuffed linoleum floor that my mother used to scrub on her hands and knees.
In the main part of the house, the ceilings, walls, and floors were taken down to the studs. That process revealed two interesting things: first, that the house was solidly built with oak joists and studs (albeit not always on 16-inch centers), and second, that there was no insulation in the walls, just as there was none beneath the floor of the old kitchen.
No wonder the house was always so cold and burned so much oil during the winter. It all made sense now.
It struck me that I have lived in this farmhouse for a good part of my life, but I had never seen the ancient oak studs and header boards that lay beneath its skin. For more than two centuries, these bones have given the house strength and integrity. Even without insulation, they have provided shelter against storms and wind.
The old house has good bones. And yet, those of us who lived inside those bones never gave thought to them. We took them for granted.
Isn’t it the same way with our bodies? We live in the outer covering of our skin, not giving much thought to the world within, until something goes wrong, in which case we pay a visit to the doctor to take tests and have a look inside. Only then do we really appreciate the unseen network of organs and bones that makes us tick. No wonder they’re called “vitals.”
Like the old farmhouse, I am fortunate to have good bones. I got them from my parents, who got theirs from their parents, and on and on into our past. Genetics plays a big part in our fortunes in life.
But even with good genes, things eventually fall apart, and I’m seeing that now. I’ve already replaced one arthritic hip and the other one is giving me trouble. Likely, I’ll be paying a visit to the orthopedic surgeon over the next year or two.
This old house, this old body. They’re both in need of a remodel. Life is a journey of continual reinvention, if only we have the courage to take a look inside.
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