As promised, here are a few more of the old photos we inherited with the house. Looking at them really makes me want to go visit the local library soon (during one of the two days it’s actually open during the week) to see if they have some old newspapers that might feature the house or the family that used to live here…or perhaps if they have the book which commemorated the 1175th anniversary of our little town which was published in 1992 and unfortunately doesn’t seem to be in print anymore. It’s just so fascinating to be in a house this old and I just want to know as much about it as possible.

This first photo is said to have been taken in 1930 and is the first car in town. As you might notice, they are standing in front of our front door, inside our gates, so that makes us wonder if the family living here actually owned the car themselves or if they had some very wealthy friends. Because the ceilings are rather high in the front rooms, we were discussing that this could have been the home of a mayor or some sort of local official, and the fact that it sits on the main road also likely contributed to the height of the ceilings…which is part of the reason we don’t hear the traffic going by so much.

You can see here again that the glass awning was already on the house along with the hand rails on the walls. The front door is also the same one we have today and it’s possible that the shutters are also the same or at least have been replaced to be the same size. And the cobble stones in the courtyard have seen been replaced with pavers but there is a street near here where we sometimes walk the dog which still has stones just like these on it.

I do find it rather interesting that on the house behind this guy, you can clearly see the timber framing…but as of now, that has been covered up and the house looks much like what ours looked like in this photo. We are rather certain that at least half of the houses on the main street and in the older section of town are timber frames but that they have simply been covered over. Some of the houses which aren’t in very good shape are actually starting to reveal the timbers themselves so it will be interesting to see if people start looking to buy up and restore some of the houses around here. We’d actually love to start on a project like that as well but that is a lot more than we’re ready to take on right now lol.

For comparison with the photo above. You can barely see the house behind him which is a timber frame. It has the red roof but our neighbors have built a garage in front of it so you don’t see much.


So, moving along to the next photo, something that is really noticeable to us is that there is a peak on the building behind the main house…and we think I big sliding barn door. The PO wrote on one of the photos that this area was once a horse stall…but we’re not sure whether that was before or after they were renting the area to the neighborhood as refrigerator space. We still have a huge walk in cooler room which is currently storing a bunch of furniture refinishing stuff which was left behind.

You might also be able to see (you can click on the photos to make them bigger) that the entire structure behind the main house is brick. We figured this out when they started breaking through the wall and that’s how we ended up with what we hope is enough to pave part of the barn floor for gardening supplies.

Oh, and the granite stairs also look to be the same as the ones we currently have which makes me reconsider my plans to put a wider step on top and have exit stairs at the front and back sides…but we’ll see.


And of course, this is how it looked when we bought it…
You can clearly see that the roof line was altered and you can see that they put up several small windows along the wall when they took off the barn doors.


And this is how it looks now. We put in the windows and the doors and will eventually put in a permanent step outside the doors because it’s just a bit too deep at the moment – hence the brick in front of the door. And we are very much looking forward to the spring and drier weather so we can paint outside. At least then the house will look normal and not all battered and bruised like it does now.