And that was only the beginning. I got married not just for better or for worse, but for masonry, carpentry, flooring, tiling, painting, and staining. Well, it’s true that nearly everybody in 1950 could paint a room if they had to. The rest — maybe not quite so much.
We ended up living in that old house for most of our children’s growing up. It was built between 1810 and 1867 in three sections joined together. It had ten rooms and a full attic and basement (with a dirt floor). It had a lot that needed updating or repairing. By the time we had moved into it ourselves, we had two boys, and I was a lucky stay-at-home mother.
I have to admit that we didn’t need to buy a pony for the kids that led to a couple of horses, one of which we bred. So we had to build box stalls. Then there was the rotted sill where one of the doors led out in the back. Roger replaced the doorframe, bought a bluestone slab, and set it for the threshold. Then together we laid a slate floor where the old hardwood entry had been. That was when we learned the hard way how important it is to clean up after finishing the grout.
The kitchen of that house was a 36-foot-square saltbox. The floor in it had been replaced, probably in the thirties, with narrow pine boards that were worn and very uneven, and impossible to clean properly when (by then) three kids were spilling regularly at mealtimes, and I wasn’t the world’s neatest cook. Roger said it was time for a new floor. There were three windows under which stood cast iron hot water radiators. It was clear that half the kitchen had joists running in one direction, and the rest of the room had them running at 90 degrees to the first set. Besides, the old floor was like a miniaturized version of a corduroy road.
We couldn’t take up the old floor because we had to live there. The answer seemed to be a good underlayment and commercial grade vinyl tile (twice the thickness of that used in homes.) That was a lot of tile. Not only did we have to remove our large table and eight chairs, the settee in front of the fireplace, the hutch — well you get the picture — but we had to get all that floor covering under the three cast iron radiators.
Simple, just use lever and fulcrum, and away we go. The fireplace was built end to an outside wall, and bisected the room. This limited the possible length of the lever which, given the cost of the lumber, was probably not a bad thing. Roger got everything set up, and told me to stand on the end of the board. I did. The radiator shuddered, but its feet didn’t leave the floor. We looked for something to add to my weight, and our dog came over to check on progress. “Pick him up,” commanded my contractor, and I did as he told me. The radiator lifted enough at one end to get the underlayment started. We repeated the process five more times, and then eight more times to lay the tile. The dog never could figure out why he had to be picked up if he got into the kitchen while we were at work on that floor. We spread mastic and laid tile until we had a washable, smooth, modern floor in our kitchen. I could mop every inch of it when I needed to.
I learned what I didn’t already know about using carpenter’s tools, I learned how to use mortar and spread mastic and grout, I learned to drive a tractor (and so did our daughter when
Roger and our sons built a fieldstone facing around the 14-foot culvert that took our driveway across the brook later on). The whole family learned to be nearly self-sufficient with ordinary tools.
Roger doubled the storage capacity of our water supply by adding two well-tiles stacked one on the other in the basement, added a bathroom, installed heat tape to prevent ice dams in winter that caused major leaks, and we painted and hung wallpaper for 18 years. I haven’t mentioned the garden, fencing, mowing, and all the ordinary maintenance chores anyone wholives in the country knows.
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