How old is the extension?
That’s a question I distinctly remember asking the realtor. She didn’t have an answer, of course, and nobody has really had one since. Histories of old houses are rarely documented in any formal way, and unless you know someone who may remember their stories you are just plain out of luck.
But, like everything else with this house, if I can’t discover an answer I somehow find myself transported back 30 years to the days when, inspired by Nancy Drew and Encyclopedia Brown, I used to set up my own “detective agencies” from the old schoolhouse desk in the little yellow bedroom I had at my parents’ house.
And, up until a few days ago, here is the evidence I had collected on the history of our extension:
Having one on an old farmhouse isn’t a rarity for sure. Many of the old stone farmhouses around here have seen some sort of extension added to them over time. Usually these are made with siding or barn board, and many are haphazardly added at best. That’s what initially intrigued me about this extension – it is made of brick and very solidly built.
Which brought me to my first clue. The brick is yellow. A colour that was mostly used in the first half of the 20th century.
And where the extension currently houses a renovated kitchen on the main floor and a cozy TV room on the second, I had heard rumours of the upstairs being used as the quarters for a live-in farmhand. Which would correlate well with the time period I had singled out by the colour of the brick — the property has not been used as a working farm since before the 1970’s.
Finally, over the winter, I had posted a picture of the parquet flooring in the TV room that sparked a conversation between friends on Facebook who had also renovated old houses. Oftentimes, parquet was custom made and was rather labour intensive. This detail would put the building of the extension even earlier in the 20th century, or possibly even the late 19th century.
But that didn’t answer the question about the brown stain on the brick outside the second floor window, or the two outside doors that have been permanently sealed — one of which has been bricked over with a resulting portal resembling something out of Harry Potter.
So, you can imagine how excited I was when Kevin finally started to work on the roof of the extension this week, secretly hoping he would be able to reveal more clues that would lead to a definitive date on when it was added to the house.
But what we ended up learning wasn’t what we expected at all…
It started with a knock on the door. Kevin and his crew had been working away on the extension for awhile. We’d heard about the lack of insulation (no shock there!) and the many skeletons of dead squirrels (sadly, not a shock either), but this bit of news was worthy of a face-to-face conversation, not simply hollered down from the rafters.
“Did you know this house has been through a major fire?”
What?!
We knew that there had been a fire in a horse stable still on the property, albeit mostly collapsed. It was hot enough to burn the side of the barn and remains an eye sore that we still have to demolish, but a fire in the main house?
Stone houses are mostly insulated with hay between the walls, so this bit of news called into question how much damage had been hidden by the piecemeal renovations that have taken place over the years.
Before he discovered evidence of the fire, Kevin had been puzzling over the age of the barn board that he had revealed underneath the old shingles on the extension. I had told him my theory about how old the extension might be, but he guessed that I might have been off by 50 years or so based on the condition and quality of the boards he had uncovered and the old square nails that had been used.
Now this called into question everything. When did the fire happen? How much damage had there been? And did anyone else know about this?
Lucky for us the wooden beams that were used to construct houses back then were significantly thicker than those used today. Jeff climbed onto the roof with Kevin to inspect the damage and reported back that the tops of them look like the charcoaled remnants of a campfire that had been extinguished early. But, the fire department had thankfully arrived in time and the remaining wood was still structurally sound. It appears as if the fire was extinguished before it had had a chance to spread to the main house.
As a homeowner, that’s great news! But, as a writer, this just begged for more answers…
And I finally got them from Donald.
Donald is our 75 year old neighbour across the street. He has lived in the same house his whole life. In fact, his grandfather built the house he lives in and it has been passed down for 3 generations now. I went over to see if he knew anything about the fire.
He can’t remember specifically when it happened, but he figures it was in the early 60’s. As a working farm, there was an outbuilding attached to the extension and accessed through the Harry Potter door. It was where they stored the buggies, and most probably, where the kitchen is now had been used as a working mudroom. Donald remembers a winter that was so cold that the owners had to bring the piglets into the mudroom to keep them from freezing. The stain on the brick outside the second floor was caused by the fire department as it battled the blaze that Donald said was seen shooting from the upstairs window.
And that old barn board that Kevin had found underneath the shingles?
Old Man Halladay (A name I have come to know very well by the stories neighbours have told me) was known for being cheap. Instead of fixing the roof with new wood, he tore down one of the outbuildings that had been a casualty of the fire, and used its barn board to repair the roof.
So, while I still don’t know the exact age of the extension, I consider this case closed. I’ve pieced enough of its history together to know that it was never intended to be a temporary solution to a space problem. It is as much a part of the stone house as its foundation.
For this reason, we had Kevin bind the two roofs together with enough plywood to permanently make it one for the generations to come.