The main house is around 4,500 square feet. The lower floor comprises a large entrance lobby and four principal rooms, plus the kitchen, pantry, laundry and mud room. One room at the back has its own bathroom, so we use it as a guest bedroom. We use one of the two rooms at the front as the living room, while the other is currently my workshop, and will become a formal drawing room once I move the tools out. Both rooms and the lobby area can be opened up into one large area. Behind the living room, through a wide archway, is the formal dining room, in turn leading to the kitchen. Off the kitchen, we have a laundry room, two pantries and a mud room, plus stairs leading down to the basement. A back staircase leads upstairs to the old servants quarters above the kitchen. Most of the rooms on this floor have eleven foot high ceilings. There is also a large enclosed wrap-around sun porch that runs along the west side of the house, and half way around the south side up to the front door, where there is an open entry porch. It is over fifty feet long and twelve feet wide, and is one of our favorite parts of the house. It needs a lot of work as it has been allowed to fall into disrepair.
House & Home
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Deborah & William Hillyard
Deborah & William Hillyard
Deborah & William Hillyard
Deborah & William Hillyard
Deborah & William Hillyard
We have just under an acre of land, about 0.375 hectares, a couple of minutes walk from the center of the village. There used to be much more land, but it was subdivided at some point in the past, we believe in the 1940s or early 1950s. We receive visits from a variety of critters including chipmunks, squirrels, ground-hogs, foxes, rabbits, wild turkeys, deer, raccoons opossums and various birds of prey including, occasionally, eagles. In the summer of 2008, the deer ate the flowers from nearly half of my day-lilies; while they did not repeat that trick in 2009, it happened again in 2010 and 2011. The ground hogs seem particularly to like tulips and lupins (US: lupines). While charming in many ways, there are several health hazards from wild critters here. Ticks can carry Lyme disease, Mosquitoes can carry West Nile Virus and most animals can carry Rabies.
Most of the garden is left au naturelle, mainly because we do not have enough time to do extensive work. Thankfully, we inherited hundreds of Daylilies and Hostas that do not require loads of maintenance. On the other hand, we are plagued with Locust trees and Sumacs growing wild all over the place. The Garden page has lots more detail and pictures, and the Fauna page has details and pictures of the animals that visit the garden.
Most of the garden is left au naturelle, mainly because we do not have enough time to do extensive work. Thankfully, we inherited hundreds of Daylilies and Hostas that do not require loads of maintenance. On the other hand, we are plagued with Locust trees and Sumacs growing wild all over the place. The Garden page has lots more detail and pictures, and the Fauna page has details and pictures of the animals that visit the garden.
Upstairs, there is a large landing, which is of similar size to the entrance lobby, that leads to four large rooms. We use these as the master bedroom, another guest bedroom and our two studies. A somewhat narrow doorway provides access to two additional, smaller bedrooms above the kitchen, which are also accessed via the back staircase from the kitchen. We use one of these rooms as a library, and the other as a storage room. We had planned to open up the two rooms, and the corridor that provides access, into one large room, but the work would have been extensive and very expensive. Quite advanced for its time, every room upstairs has at least one built in closet, some of which are walk-in. The ceilings upstairs are nearly ten feet tall.
Behind the house we have a "Gentleman's Barn", as it was called. Today, once it is restored, we would probably call it a Coach House. This is on two floors totaling approximately 3,000 square feet. Probably when the house was first used as a boarding house, the upstairs had been subdivided into eight bedrooms and a bathroom. This has all been removed; including the ceiling, so it is down to the studs, and beams. Downstairs, at the back, there used to be stables, although the stall dividers are long gone. You can still see the evidence of horses having kicked the main support posts that remain, and there is a small wall mounted water trough in one corner. I use this area for storing wood and moldings. Later in the Spring of 2012, I plan to start to move my tools out of the house and into the lower floor of the barn.
The house and barn are both wood framed and have wood siding, while the porch has wood shingles. On the main house, apart from the porch, the wood was covered with white vinyl siding at some point. The previous owner had painted this bright yellow. I have re-painted it white. The cost of replacing the siding is prohibitive; the cost of removing it and restoring the wood siding is unspeakable! The original double-hung windows had deteriorated badly from age and neglect. We are replacing them with modern dual pane (double glazed) equivalents. It is a big job with 45 windows on the main house, and another 20 on the porch. The roof is a very complex structure, which is not really apparent in the pictures. It rises to a central point, with four peaks; one on each side. This creates eight very vulnerable valleys, a few of which had failed and been patched. We had the entire roof replaced, and the valleys done in copper, so they should outlast the roof itself! We also replaced the barn and porch roofs.
Downstairs
Upstairs
The Barn
Exterior
Land
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