WayneKnazek

Until we purchased the house, it was owned by . . . for almost 180 years . . . by only 2 families! The latter let if go badly. The owner lived there into his 90's. Mainly lived in a couple rooms. The closet shelves and kitchen cabinet shelves were lined with newspaper. Common at one time. When we started cleaning the shelves, we pulled up the newspapers . . . . they were the Zanesville Times local paper. Dated July 1975! So obviously no one did any major cleaning, etc. for over 38 years! The basement was a shallow swimming pool. Two feet of water! Sump hole, with no pump. Many sources of water dumping into the basement. (Which was loaded with decades of stored junk. Furniture, freezer, tools.) Horrendous! We had a 7 man crew working full time on the house for months. Plus a 4 man crew worked outside for a few months. So we're actually the 3rd family to own the house in 186 years.

Written in retrospect: I finally got the pix to load! 🙄 No idea why some are flipped sideways. The actual pix are not. ~ I purchased one of the historic homes shown in the pictures above. I'd like to show some current updated pix and maybe post a bit of info about how the restoration is going, if there's any interest. I should probably do this as a separate post or thread but the picture of the home is in this post/thread. For now I'll just post a coupled updated pix. If an interest develops I can go over more details about the restoration and post a bunch more pix. Below is only a teeny bit of info about how the restoration is going. We purchased the home in 2013. Spent a lot of time and money getting it livable, and comfortable. Moved in, and continued working on the restoration. It is a massive project! Our goal is not to 100% restore the home to "as new" condition. But we want to help keep the home stable and in good constructed condition for many more years. Here are a few "before and after" pix. The outside is FAR from finished. We need to completely re-point the house. Windows are being redone. As the pix will show, we took down the 11 sets of window shutters and restored them. Lightly sanded down the back of one shutter until we got down to the original paint color. Computer matched the color. Then repaired, and built some hew hinges, And re-hung them. Restoration is incredibly expensive as you might imagine. It's SO much cheaper to just "replace with new". EX: The shutters cost about $3000 to restore, slat for slat, hinge for hinge. I could have easily replaced them with new for under half of that. So we have a long ways to go. I'm retired. 72. And getting it done as time permits. We just spent a couple weeks on the front. It's coming along nicely. Replaced all the super-crap hedges! LOL They were actually 5 plants all grown together into a massive tangled mess. Buried under the ground, covered with grass we found the old original brick sidewalk! Uncovered it, carefully pulled up all of the over 400 bricks. Scrubbed every one. Filled in, re-leveled the ground, and replaced the bricks in as close to the original pattern as we could. (Using pix we took before pulling the pricks out of the ground.) The previously posted picture is from a distance. Hard to tell, but the porch was crumbling, unstable and dangerous to walk on. It's now stable and safe. But we still need to build the stone facade using original stone. But you can see the slats in the shutters are badly warped. You can't see the broken hinges. And some shutters were nailed onto the bricks so they didn't fall down. All shutters now open and close as they did when first installed. And they are the original color. The plan wasn't to make a pretty, new looking brick sidewalk. The plan was to end up with the original 186 year old sidewalk. It looks 186 years old! Trust me!! LOL But it looks great! (IMHO of course!) Much more to do. But plan to keep on keeping on! If you'd like to see more pix of the front project, and/or would like info about the rest of the house project, let me know. I'll post it. Wayne (Reed) Knazek PS: If you're a music lover, drop over to my site. www.thewaynereedconnection.com Drop me a line and say "Hi!"!