Work Begins

Finally owning the house was a huge relief. Ryan had moved specifically for the project and we had certainly put a lot of time, energy, and emotion into acquiring it. A birthday present for me a few days early, my birthday's the 16th, Ryan began work on the house early Friday the 15th of September.

I'm a rowing coach, and if you know anything about rowing coaches, you know that I work more than full time, so it was hard to finally be able to start the project, but not really be able to be a part of it right away. I will be putting in some evenings, weekends, and days off throughout the year and will of course be the primary blogger, but I won't be doing the labor day in and day out, which will be tough, but after all, I am the financial stability of the project as Ryan will be working on the house full-time.

I headed to work Friday morning feeling a little bit let down that I couldn't jump right in to the project, but I knew it was in good hands, especially that first weekend. Before I finished work that evening, Ryan's parent's Mike, a carpenter who taught Ryan everything he knows, and Marcia arrived and dove in. I was off to work again on Saturday, as Mike and Ryan headed for day two of demolition on the second floor and Marcia resumed her efforts to sort through the boxes of stuff, there's really no better word to describe it, that had been left in the house for more than ten year by the previous owner. Finally my weekend arrived and I spent Sunday morning on the second floor taking down lathe and plaster walls and making trips to and from the dumpster to clean up the mess that tearing down an entire second story can leave. It was tough, but satisfying work. The second floor had three existing bedrooms and a full bath, the home's only. By the end of the weekend, the two front bedrooms that spanned the width of the of the house and faced the front were one huge room. It was already easier to start to invision new layout ideas. On Sunday afternoon, I joined Marcia on the first floor to finish off sorting the junk in the house and the garage which required some aggressive pruning before the door opened freely. The garage is large, probably two and half cars wide. There was a workbench that had seen better days as well as a many doors, windows, screens, and some old furniture that we decided to tackle another day. The most interesting find in the garagw was what appeared to be many of the parts, interior and exterior trim along with engine parts, to a 1965 Ford Mustang. Mike was excited about these and we're hoping we may be able to get some money for them. More on that later. Most of what was in the boxes on the first floor was nothing more than a person's old stuff, not of much interest or value and the most intriguing thing we unearthed was the story of the previous owner that we began to piece together. We had heard all sorts of rumors from the neighbors about him and how he came to own the house, but we found a very different story.

It seems that he arrived in Lewisburg in the 1992 a graduate of the University of Virginia and later its medical school. He spent quite some time in the army as both a medic and pilot prior to that, but in the early 90's took a job at Geisinger, the large medical center in a town called Danville, about 20 miles away. It seems that he, as well as the man who owned the house from '90-'92 intended to renovate the place, but both ran into major financial trouble, as evidenced by paperwork throughout the house. Before he could renovate or sell the house, he was called back up to active duty and it seems that he left one day, probably in November of '94 and possibly never returned. The closets had clothes hanging in them, still in plastic with stapled bills from the dry cleaner and it seems that the contents of this man's life, from high school, we found cards from his 1978 graduation from Deerfield Academy, through his stint at Geisinger, there are plenty of medical books, even patient files, have been collecting dust in an empty house for over a decade.

So Sunday the 17th was my first day working and I have to say, based on my limited experience, that the early stages of home remodelling are quite satisfying. Ryan ripped out the bathroom on Friday morning before his parents even arrived and by Monday afternoon when his parents left town the second floor was opened up and ready for fresh ideas. With the contents of the house sorted, the front room on the first floor was prepared for a garage sale that would include anything interesting form the house, extra doors, windows and some old furniture not worth saving along with the cast-iron sink that we found to be too shallow to keep and the cheap, ugly kitchen that was installed in the early 90's, but clearly never used. We placed an ad on craigslist for the Mustang parts and the first weekend was over.

I resumed work on Monday and Ryan continued to work hard at the house all week. Removing the second floor ceiling proved to be more time intensive on cleanup duty than anything and by Thursday, less than a week into the project, the third twelve yard dumpster arrived.