Welcome...

We’d like to welcome our new newsletter subscribers who joined after seeing us in the January issue of Country Living magazine in the women entrepreneur column.  We’re very flattered – a bit non-plussed, actually. Even when the professional photographer appeared to shoot pictures of us at work, the reality didn’t really sink in.  We’ve received emails and phone calls from folks all around the country - great fun!

We’ll be seeing Country Living magazine again when the Pierce homestead has been finished and they arrive for an interior photo-shoot.  We’re not sure when the house will be featured – hopefully sometime in ’08 – but we’ll keep you posted.  In the meantime, our newsletter will carry pictures of the work in progress – but not the final finished interior until after the magazine issue hits the newsstands and your mailboxes!

We’ll post slide shows of the home’s reconstruction on our website so periodically check the site. 

As we’ve said before, now is the time to look around for land and work with us to re-create a colonial era home capturing all the charm, grace, and sturdy simplicity of pre-Victorian architecture.  We have enough unused beams and posts from our three 18^th century projects sitting in Sherrill’s barn that we can design and build a home with all the authentic materials you expect from our company.  This is the easiest and least expensive option, as the cost to dismantle an old home is avoided.  Otherwise, wait and see what endangered homes we find that need to be dismantled if they are to be saved.  We’ll post pictures on our website and announce them in future newsletters.  If you see something you like, our best advice is to jump on it if at all possible.

May we remind you that one design is already set to go – the Heald cottage.  This lovely brick cape is quintessential New England; the attached kitchen ell and barn are very much part of the rambling add-ons of country homes – and identical to what we found with the original Heald homestead in Wilton, NH.  We rescued many of its interior architectural details before some kids lit a match to the old house.  You can see pictures of the house and its rooms on our website.  If you have any questions about this design, or would like more information about it, please call or email.

The Ebenezer Pierce update:

As you know, we’ve been reconstructing the Ebenezer Pierce homestead this Fall and are now  - happily - inside, where it’s warm.  All the mechanical systems are installed so now it’s on to the finish carpentry, including sanding and squaring up all the old floorboards and exterior sheathing that will become floorboard after we’re done.

Here is what the house looks like from the outside. 

The homeowners chose a wonderful historic color offered by Benjamin Moore called Bryant Gold.  The clapboards are quarter-sawn and square edged with the traditional 3.5” reveal.  The siding has been pieced together using short and long lengths just as they did hundreds of years ago.  To add to the home’s charm, we’ve nailed the clapboard rough side to the weather.  It looks great and the paint absorbs and adheres better.   Our clapboard is western hemlock, but spruce and eastern white pine is also commonly used in our area. Folks have their own opinions as to which wood is more UV resistant but with today’s exterior paints it seems to us you can choose your clapboard based on price and availability.  Let the paint do the rest – but you might want to remember rough to the weather.

We wanted to minimize the amount of exposed foundation around the walk-out basement entry so we applied cedar shakes around the back door to match the dormer and kitchen bump-out.   The home is just as lovely from the rear as it is from the front!  That’s important, by the way.  So many builders ignore the backside of a house – have you noticed?  The front looks great, and then you walk around the back and wonder – where are all the windows?  Just a thought…

Cemetery Symbolism:

In our last newsletter we showed pictures of the concealed shoe found in between the stairwell and chimney when taking down the Pierce homestead. (If you want to read about concealed shoes, visit our website and click on our archived newsletters.) Finding the shoe and knowing that it was worn by one of the Pierce children made the family more real to us. So we went to visit the local Pepperell cemetery where several generations of the Pierce family are buried.

It was typical of the times that many children never reached adulthood and, sadly, this was true of the Pierce family. In the spring of 1788 Patty, Abigail and Ephraim died within 6 weeks of each other. Young Patty’s headstone is the most clear with the symbolic figure of a child standing in a doorway to signify her passage to heaven. Next to her appear to be seedlings while at the corners of the headstone are leaning trees with their tops missing. Truncated trees commonly indicated a life interrupted by death.

The children’s parents, Ephraim and Patty, are buried alongside them. Patty’s headstone has lovely symbolism and a wonderful epitaph. The columns on either side of the gravestone are the entrance or doorway into heaven. The urn in the center signified immortality while the tree, with its arching branch over the urn is probably a weeping willow – the symbol for mourning and grief. A beloved mother, her words impart sorrow and hope:

“Friends and Physicians could not save
My mortal body from the grave
Nor can the grave confine me here
When Christ shall me to appear."