Restoring in Less than a Year 
THE BEFORE-AND-AFTER CONDITIONS OF A SMALL NEW ENGLAND HOUSE AND THE INTERVENING 
PROCESSES—WHAT THE COMBINATION OF ENERGY, GOOD TASTE AND RESPECT FOR THE PAST CAN 
ACCOMPLISH—AGING A GARDEN 
Caroline B. Hale 
I F anyone has any doubts whatsoever in regard to restoring 
an old place in a short time, let him lay them aside with joy 
and bend his energies to the desired object and work with a will. 
I know whereof I speak, for it has been my happy privilege to 
have remade an old house, and made a garden that defies any 
one as to its age. and all in less than a year. 
The house had stood many, many years, in an old New England 
fishing village with apparently no thought given it by its owner 
or tenants; it was built; that was all that was necessary; no 
thought of the ravages of time and the elements, and no kind 
of repairs ever wasted upon it. It was splendidly built, however, 
and therefore had withstood the wear and tear of almost a 
century, much of that time being unoccupied. It was large and 
roomy, many windows of many panes of glass, 
the floors of broad boards, eighteen or twenty 
inches wide, beautiful hand-wrought woodwork, 
a few fine old mantels, simple in design and 
well suited to the style of the house. The fire¬ 
places, however, had been bricked up and the 
walls marred by unsightly stovepipe holes. The 
stairway is quite a feature. The sweep of the 
wall was really most graceful. The wainscot¬ 
ing is another evidence of old-time joinery, 
being made of very wide, solid boards extend¬ 
ing horizontally along each side of the walls, 
one board occupying each space, surmounted 
by a simple hand-wrought moulding as a chair 
rail. There were many other interesting features, 
such as little closets in the chimneys, old lustre 
knobs and a few iridescent ones. 
The question of restoring the house was not 
so serious, as one needed to change only a few 
things to make it livable. The first and most 
important change was the opening of two 
“blind” windows in the front of the house— 
one on the first floor and one above it on the second floor. 
The installing of bathrooms, lavatories, linen closets, butler’s 
pantry, etc., was then undertaken. This we did by dividing one 
of the rooms on the second floor—half of which was made into a 
thoroughly up-to-date bathroom, the other half a closet room, 
containing a linen closet with protected shelves, a blanket and 
store closet, and two dress closets. At the rear 
of the house, over the dining-room and kitchen, 
was a very large room, a sort of tucked-away 
place, only half a story high. The roof here 
was raised, giving us two splendid bedrooms. 
The original kitchen, not being adequate for our 
use, was changed to a butler’s pantry and a 
lavatory, the pantry opening into a large new 
kitchen, which we built, with a splendid cement 
cellar under it. Opening from the kitchen and 
pantry was a large porch, cement floor with 
drain, with an extra sink and laundry tubs, 
the whole fully screened, thus making service 
a delight. The old back, or ratber side, hall 
and stairway were impossible for present-day 
comfort, both being very narrow and dark. 
Here we took out a partition, throwing the hall 
into a room, removed the solid boards which 
closed in the stairway, replacing them with a suit¬ 
able balustrade; by replacing the narrow door, 
which had led into the old yard, with a repro¬ 
duction of the original front door, it changed 
the side of the house quite a little, and yet kept the spirit of the 
old place. At the foot of the three steps leading from this door 
into the garden we placed an old millstone, which had lain for 
nearly a century at the back of the house, as a kitchen step — 
it was a little more than a semi-circle and contained all the 
little grooves and roughness necessary in the old days, when it 
had ground the corn for its owner. So with knocking out a 
414 
