Old House, Home

lisa August 29th, 2003

I’ve uploaded a bunch o’ pics to the gallery.

We are halfway done. We bought this house two years ago, and we’re halfway to finishing the main renovation projects. We celebrated last weekend with a big party that was well attended and a huge success. We’ll have an after party in another couple of years.

Since June, a lot of things have come together - we’re pretty much totally plumbed and electrified, although we still need the electrician to finish putting up the fixtures in the mudroom and the hard-wired smoke-detectors. The fire-sprinkler system is ready to be activated, I think. We’re going to have to hire some other electrician to put in the whole-house surge suppressor I want.

As for our labor projects, (this list is totally incomplete)
- we need to finish painting the stairs
- mudroom (thinking about wallpapering with nautical maps)
- our bedroom, the upstairs sitting room, and the servant’s bedroom all need a total cosmetic overhaul
- finish cabinetry in the kitchen

As for the outdoors, I have 55 bulbs to plant this fall, but I’m cool with the garden this year - not stressed at all.

Other things we need to do, short-term:
- Re-finance. We have an application in process with East-West Mortgage that looks like it’ll happen, but if it doesn’t we only have a few more months to take care of it before Mark’s student loans start showing up as a debt.
- Sandblast and re-paint the radiators and reinstall them, before it gets cold (we might start needing heat in … 3 weeks?)
- Tile the shower and floor in the upstairs bath
- Deal with whatever dip-tank stuff we should do for woodwork and trim we want to stain instead of paint
- Woodstove. We have to get the fireplace lined and buy a woodstove and build a decorative thing around the woodstove. I don’t know if we’ll do this before winter - it depends on whether we can find a reasonably priced, used, post-1996 woodstove to buy.
- Sand and refinish the hardwood floors throughout the house

Future projects include:
- The back deck, with a sliding glass door from the mud room (priority:1)
- A garden shed (priority:1)
- Refinishing part of the basement as a playspace, which involves lowering the floor(priority:1)
- Building a conservatory from the basement out into the back yard (glassed-in three-walled conservatory/ greenhouse) (priority:3)
- A garage of some sort (priority:1)
- A woodshop for Mark (priority:1)
- Re-finishing the attic as a master suite with bathroom (priority:3)

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lisa July 18th, 2003

Work has begun on the porch. Seth and John have been out nearly every day and the basic stuff is complete (see the gallery for pictures). Tonight Mark, Seth, John, Alex, Dave, and Greg put up the beam that goes across the front. It was a really heavy beam! We initially projected a two week timeline for the porch, but it’s going to end up taking more than a month. We have another two weeks to go.

We’re using ipe wood for the floor planks because it’s strong, hard, and fire-, rot-, and insect-resistant. Cool wood, especially when you buy it from an environmentally responsible company like we did.

Things in other parts of the house are also progressing. I’m working in the parlor this weekend (patching the walls) and hope to have it ready to prime and paint next weekend. Tuesday night I spent an hour sanding the walls. Last weekend I scraped the paint off of the heating pipes in two corners of the room, then primed them with a Rustoleum metal primer. They look pretty now - pretty for pipes, that is! There are five more pipes to do on the first floor. It’s not a hard job but it takes a while to scrape all the paint.

Mark is planning on doing some more cabinet making in the kitchen this weekend. And on the second floor, we finished gutting the “bird room” (the northeast bedroom) and putting up wallboard. The plasterer can’t make it out here for another couple of weeks, so unfortunately it won’t be ready for use as a guest bedroom when my family arrives at the end of July. So I’ve booked them a hotel room =(. At least the parlor will be done and we will have a nice comfy place to relax while they’re here.

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lisa July 7th, 2003

My garden is suffering from a lack of rain, so I’ve had to water all the new plantings quite a bit to help them through. I love this red beebalm. The tomatoes and cukes both have blossoms so there will be fresh veggies soon. Unfortunately, I hear that some tomatoes won’t set fruit when it’s over 85F during the day and 72F at night. Luckily it’s still getting down into the sixties at night. The daylilies on the east side of the house have started blooming and are putting on a good show. Those are just ordinary orange lilies that came with the house. The hybrid fancy ones that Dorothy gave me haven’t bloomed yet.

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lisa July 7th, 2003

This past weekend, we went to two cookouts and a bluegrass show, and did some hard labor. Cleaned up all the brick from the old fireplace that was in the driveway - sorted out the whole bricks for later use in a pathway and tossed the broken stuff into the dumpster. That was a three hour job. Then Sunday we demolished the northeast bedroom and took out all the old horsehair plaster. We had to rig up a chute out of the window into the wheelbarrow, which was complicated. And it was so hot all weekend that doing physical labor wasn’t easy - had to keep hydrated and carefully monitor ourselves.

We’ve hired Mark’s friend Seth and Seth’s partner John to work on the porch. With a little loan from Mark’s stepmother to cover our shortfall, we should be finished with that in a couple of weeks. Then we will try to refinance.

There are a few new pictures in the gallery.

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lisa June 18th, 2003

Well, we’re both back at work this week, feeling like we got a lot done. We got some of the cabinets built, but we have one small section left to do on the floor cabinets, as well as the laundry cabinet and all the wall cabinets. But look! The majority of it is done!

The countertops are mostly done - just need to finish a couple of sections and do the backsplash. I love how the cooktop area turned out. And even though I wish we could have afforded granite slab, I like the tiles and they turned out fine.

The plumbers came yesterday and hooked up all three sinks (kitchen, pantry, half bath), the fridge/icemaker, and the toilet in the half bath. I think they did the plumbing for the dishwasher, too, but it needs electrical before we can use it. And today, they’re working on the gas - the cooktop and the dryer. Woo hoo! I celebrated last night by doing dishes in our pretty new sink.

Boy, it feels great to see some progress.

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lisa June 11th, 2003

Mark and I took this whole week off from work to work on our kitchen cabinets. We’ve made a lot of progress, and should be pretty much done by Friday. This weekend we’re going to start on the front porch.

The process of cabinet-making is not rocket science, but you do have to measure very, very carefully. We’re only building the cabinets themselves right now - the doors and drawers will have to wait until we have the money to buy the maple. Luckily, Mark has already acquired all the tools he needs to make the doors, which will be an exacting and time-consuming process. But we’re saving a ton of money by building the cabinets ourselves, plus this way we get to make them exactly how we want. Custom cabinets, site-built to our specifications.

We’re in a period of great change. As we finish the cabinets, the woodworking equipment will move to the basement. Then the plumbers will come and finish plumbing the kitchen appliances and the two bathrooms. Then the upstairs sitting room will move to the first floor, and we’ll work on cosmetics in two of the upstairs rooms (sitting room and bedroom - strip wallpaper and paint, repair plaster, and re-paint). My priority right now is to get the downstairs more livable (paint, trim, clean) and to finish redoing one of the other bedrooms so that we have a guest room. We’re expecting family for a visit at the end of July. There’s a lot to do, but by then we should have a working kitchen, two working bathrooms, and places for them to sleep - I can’t guarantee the place will be totally clean, but at least it won’t be the chaotic mess it is now.

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lisa June 10th, 2003

The property was originally part of the “Brooks Homestead,” an area about 3 acres, from Florida Road to Nason Street, plus an orchard near the Stow line. The homestead was divided up in 1873 when Mrs. Thomas H. (Rebecca) Brooks died. On the 1875 map in the Assabet Mills book, the large area between the Assabet River and Summer Street is noted as belonging to T. Brooks and Mrs. T. Brooks (divided into three parcels). There is one house shown on the map in approximately the same present-day location of 50-52 Summer Street, belonging to Mrs. T. Brooks ? the rest of the property is shown as having no buildings.

Rebecca and Thomas had three (?) children: Mary Jane (Brooks) Reed, Luke S. Brooks, and Thomas H. Brooks Jr., who was living in Montevideo, Uruguay at the time. Mary Jane Reed gave her third of the inheritance to Luke in 1887 for one dollar. Luke bought out Thomas in 1888 for $3,750. It is unclear whether the house at 48 Summer Street existed at that time, but probably not.

Paul Boothroyd told us that 48 Summer Street was built in 1890. The story is that the two-family house next door, 50-52 Summer Street, was the main house and this was originally the barn, which was converted into a house in 1890. We found newspaper from 1888 behind the wall in the living room. On the 1879 Bailey & Hazen map shown below, there are two houses on the Summer and Nason corner (but the one to the east is the larger house, so this probably isn?t 48 Summer, but rather 50-52 Summer).

Luke’s wife’s name was Zipporah; after Luke died in 1914, Zipporah sold the house to Kate C. Goodenow for $2,500. Kate was married to Daniel Goodenow, but he is noted as releasing any claim on the property and Kate is the one who bought it.

In 1918, the house was deeded to Lucy A. Newton; since no money changed hands, I assume this was an inheritance. Lucy owned the house for 24 years.
In 1942, George E. Newton (Lucy?s brother? Nephew?) sold the house to Mary Mabel Holly for $7,500 (the equivalent of about $90,000 today). Lucy is not listed on the 1942 transaction, so I assume she had died before then.

Mary Mabel Holly was a widow with five children. When Mary died in 1973, the house passed to Mildred and Virginia, who at that time were in their fifties and had never married.

Mildred died in 1999 at the age of 78. She willed everything to her sister.
Virginia died in 2000, also at age 78. She didn’t leave a will, and so her estate went into probate. Their brother John was the executor; we bought the house on August 31, 2001 from John Holly.

Questions that remain:

1. When was the house built or converted into a house?
2. Why is the house a mixture of balloon framing and post-and-beam?
3. Who lived in the house from 1914-1918? Just Kate, or Kate, Daniel, and family? What is known about the Goodenow family?
4. How was Lucy Newton related to Kate Goodenow?
5. Who lived in the house from 1918-1942? Was Lucy Newton married to George Newton, or was he a relative?

If any readers can help with these questions, or if anyone knows more about the house at 48 Summer Street, we would love to hear from you. We would also be very interested in pictures of the house from any era, and maps or aerial photos of Maynard which show the house. We can be reached at 48summer@linesdesigns.com.

See also:
Rough Chart/Timeline (Word Doc)

Assabet Mills, Maynard Massachusetts, by Paul Boothroyd and Lewis Halprin, 1999.

1879 Bailey and Hazen map of Maynard

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lisa May 27th, 2003

This weekend, being a long weekend, meant we had an extra day to work on the house. We got a lot done. The biggest accomplishment was the pantry cabinets. Have a look at the photos! They turned out great - of course we still need to build the drawers, doors, and shelves, but that’s not the difficult part.

The sink was a great find on Mark’s part - he found it on Craig’s List, a local bulletin board website that has come in really handy recently (he got our chipper from the same place, and we used the list in our roommate search, too). The sink, which you can buy at Home Depot for $300, was only $45. It’s white, which wasn’t my first choice, but hey - it matches the washer and dryer. (The other appliances are black or stainless, so it won’t match the rest of the kitchen, but that’s okay - we saved $250!)

The other big accomplishment this weekend was that I planted most of my seedlings - tomato, foxglove, cupid’s dart, lavender, and spurge. I didn’t get the cucumbers in - I need to buy a bag of gravel to put in the bottom of the tub I’m using for a planter, first.

Last year I put my tomatoes in on May 25th, too, and didn’t get my first tomato until August 15th. This year I’ve planted Early Girl, which might be ready sooner - time will tell!

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lisa May 19th, 2003

We had a very productive weekend. We, and our new roommate Peter, worked on Peter’s bedroom. It used to be the Rose Bedroom because of the wallpaper, but since the wallpaper’s all gone now, I guess we’ll just call it Peter’s room. We stripped the paper and put up wall board on one wall where the plaster was shot, and we repaired the existing walls and put up a new ceiling. Now it just needs to be painted.

We also had the electrician here on Saturday, doing some finish work. We now have a temporary kitchen set up in the mudroom, and we have lights in the great room and kitchen. Mark did a beautiful job on the track lighting in the kitchen and recessed lights in the great room. I was very skeptical about using such modern lighting in this house, but I have to admit, it looks really good.

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lisa May 19th, 2003

Have finally finished transplanting all my seedlings to larger pots. I am pretty tired of seedlings at this point. I don’t think I want to do this next year - if I have the money, I’d rather buy plants. The amount of work that goes into seedlings is just too much for me.

Anyway, I’ve started hardening off and hopefully next weekend will be the big planting weekend.

This past weekend I laid out the irrigation for my vegetable bed and planted some carrot seeds. It’s really too late to be planting carrots, since they are 70 day vegetables and they spoil above 80 degrees or so. Maybe I can rig up shade cloth or find a cool spot for them and make them work anyway. We’ll see. The second crop this fall will probably be better. I’m not exactly sure how the fall crops are supposed to work, but I’ve got the rest of the carrots, some lettuces, and broccoli for the fall. Will have to calculate carefully in order to get them in at the right time.

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