I finally had time to sit down and find the pictures I was looking for! These will be my final "catch up" of the taking down trees photos/yard work prior to starting on the inside of the house during Summer 2015... Blake and Connor hard at it! The guys Back yard. Anyone who knows Phil, understands that this isn't a great situation! :) Samantha taking down the fence in the front yard. Great helper! Not my best side, but all I had for proof that I helped too. :) A sign I found in the garage with Great Grandpa's name on it.
0 Comments
Before all the tear down began, I mentioned previously that we worked on cutting down trees, trimming overgrown weeds, etc. I thought I would include some pictures tonight. There are more to add, but I'll have to try to add them another time...
October 10, 2015 We spent a great deal of time at our house this weekend. It was the first weekend we had some available time in awhile. Yesterday, we started after lunch and worked into the evening. It was a nice, cool day to be working; much cooler than the other days we have worked here! We began by cleaning up the main floor southeast bedroom floor. The plaster and lathe were much easier to send down a chute into the trailer from the upstairs bedrooms than carrying by the bucket-ful outside from the main floor bedroom. Phil readied the living room for us, so that we could work on tearing down the plaster and lathe after we finished cleaning up the bedroom. Connor and I tore out much of the plaster and lathe as far up as I could reach in the living room, while Samantha worked on getting off the rest of the woodwork. She had an exciting discovery...on the back of the trim around the southwest living room door she found my great-grandpa's signature (George Buescher), along with his age (61 and 11 months), the date (October 28th, 1961), and the day's weather (60 degrees, cloudy). :) Later, she found another piece of trim that my great-aunt Charlyn had signed with her age (16) on it and the year 1961. She must've been helping her dad with that project! Finding the handwritten signatures are truly a treasure, and add to the neatness of this entire project. I wonder what Great-Grandpa is thinking from above as we go through this... Once again, the date on the trim board is very close to today's date. Kind of neat how the dates we keep uncovering are so close to the dates that we find them. I also found an old metal cheese grater in the wall in the living room. Not sure how it got there, but maybe it got dropped down from upstairs? However, why would there have been a cheese grater in the upstairs bedroom? Connor stepped on a nail, so he went to my parents for the remainder of the day. Mom had his foot soaking in Epsom salt and water when I left to go back out to work. While we tore down, Phil was busy upstairs tearing out the plaster ceiling in the southwest bedroom. It was a very dirty job. Phil said he was covered in 114 years of dirt, and he certainly looked like it! The floor was completely covered with plaster, lathe, and lots of black dirt. Samantha and Phil cleaned up a good portion of the floor. When leaving for the night, we couldn't help but notice the pretty sunset. This is one thing that I am looking forward to; the view! After a hard day's work, it was a sweet reward... October 11, 2015 We started back to work on the house after lunch today. I had left a pile of lathe in the middle of the living room, with plaster on the outer edges. We began by cleaning up this floor, and taking off some final pieces along the bottom of the walls. Phil's sister Sara, her husband Travis, and their boys Carter and Caleb stopped by to check out our progress. Carter and Caleb were eager to do some tear down, so we let them and Connor knock out some plaster in the hallway near the bathroom. After we cleaned up the living room, we moved on to clean up in the upstairs southwest bedroom. What a mess! Black dirt everywhere! While working, Phil's aunt Brenda stopped by to take some photos of the board with Tom Friend's signature on it. He was a friend of her family's on her mother's side. Before leaving for the day, Chris (our builder/my cousin) stopped out to finalize our house plans. Sounds like he will be ready for us in March. Although we were originally thinking it would begin this Fall, the extra time will be nice to get what we need to get done finished up. No exciting discoveries today. Connor, Caleb, and Carter
September 20, 2015 It has been a few weeks since we have had time to work on the house. School, work, and kids' activities keep us very busy! Today we had an opportunity to work for a few hours in the afternoon. We were surprised when my brother Russ showed up and helped us! The kids, Russ, and I worked on the southwest upstairs bedroom again. Russ had the dirty job of tearing out the plaster walls and ceiling in the closet. He said he was covered in dirt from the Dirty Thirties! Phil readied the southeast bedroom on the main floor for tear down, by taking off the trim boards. Connor and I tore down the plaster and lathe in no time! We left the mess on the floor, as we ran out of time to clean up. There were no exciting discoveries today, but we made some progress. Both bedrooms upstairs and the one bedroom on the main floor are mostly done, except for the ceilings. Blake and Russ (southwest upstairs bedroom)
September 7, 2015 Today was our second day working in the house. We continued to work on the two bedrooms upstairs, with the help of our nephew Carter again. It was another HOT day! The tear down seemed tedious and time-consuming. Phil's brother Brad and his wife Natalie came by to check things out and get a quick tour. Brad showed me a much faster way of tearing down the plater and lathe, with the use of a long medal bar. Thank goodness! Wish we would've been doing that all day the day before as well! This day was very exciting, as Blake found the lead builder's signature on a wall in the southeast bedroom, near the east window. It included his name, Tom Friend and the date Sept. 3th, 1902. Yes, it said 3th, not 3rd! It was exciting to find this, and now we know for sure when the house was erected. It is also kind of neat that today is Sept. 7th; very close to Sept. 3rd, although quite a few years in between! Blake and his "find" for the day: Builder's signature and date! Connor and Carter
![]() September 6, 2015 It is Labor Day Weekend. Although we spent several days at the farm working prior to it officially being ours, today was the first day that we actually began working on the house itself. [This summer Phil cut down close to 20 trees in the yard with the help of his dad's tractor and loader. These were Chinese Elms and Cedars. It is a shame, but they were dead, so they had to go. The kids were a great help; they pulled a trailer behind our golf cart to haul branches in to our tree pile. Samantha and I spent a lot of time taking down the fence that went around the west and south sides of the house. Phil and the boys helped as well. Mowing, and cutting down big weeds with trimmers along the fence line south of the barn was a job also. Ice cream cones from the local ice cream shop were a great treat at the end of a hot day's work!] We started tearing out the plaster walls in the southeast bedroom upstairs, with the help of Phil's dad, Ron, his sister, Sara, and our nephew Carter. We weren't for sure if we wanted to tear out the plaster walls, feeling guilty for destroying something that presumably took much time and labor to construct by my ancestors. However, we knew it was what we preferred. This was a very slow-moving task, with crow bars and hammers. Phil set up a chute out the window down to a trailer on the ground. Discarding the plaster and lathe was much easier this way! We had to tear down paneling, ceiling tiles, and burgundy floral wallpaper in the southeast bedroom, before getting to the plaster. Having no experience with tearing down plaster, I was intrigued to see the horse hair throughout all of the plaster. Phil explained that it was used to help hold it together. These people were truly intelligent and resourceful. The southwest bedroom was our next room to "tackle", even though we were no where close to being done with the other bedroom. This was the "blue room" that was my FAVORITE when I was a little girl and visited my great-aunt Colleen! This room had blue floral paneling. Samantha discovered the cursive alphabet in orange crayon written about knee level on the east wall. Colleen had told us that her father's brother had done this, as she had seen it before. Very neat to see! We left that wall in hopes of figuring out a way to keep the plaster that the letters were written on. Not sure if this is going to be possible, though. Sara found a perfume label between the floor board and the wall, which I will attach a photo of.
Horse hair in the plaster
September 2, 2015
Today it is official...my great-aunt Colleen Buescher, Phil and I signed the papers that make our "new" home ours. Connor came along and we all met at the lawyer's office in Sutton, NE on this warm September day. It was exciting, but definitely emotional as well. Connor picked up on this also. After we signed and Colleen gave us some special gifts, we walked to our separate vehicles. Connor said, "Mom, did she really want to sell this to us?" He could tell that Colleen was sad. I felt bad that she was feeling sad, but I understood that this was a very big deal to her. This home is a large piece of her life, including memories of her parents, grandparents, sisters, and other family members. As we drove towards our home in Clay Center, I unwrapped a special gift that Colleen asked me not to open until we left. It was a photo book she created that included the history of our "new" home and our ancestors who built and owned it prior to us. It was neat, to say the least, and finally I was able to put faces to the names I had heard about from Colleen. Connor spent the remainder of the ride home taking pictures of the pictures in the book :) with his new ipod, so he could send them to his grandma Kohmetscher (my mom). It was finally all making some sense to him, as well! |
AuthorI'm just your ordinary small-town type of gal. My family is my world. Gardening, running, camping, and boating are my hobbies. Teaching youngsters is my career. Archives
July 2017
Categories |