Discoveries

 Discoveries

The first 2 weekends spent at the house, and working on it were filled of new discoveries.  Some were fun, a few are expensive, and one or two were kind of scary.  In reality, none of them should have been too surprising, considering it was a farm house built in 1915 and it had been vacant for the last 6 years.

My first discovery was electrical.  I had assumed that there would only be one outlet per bedroom, since it was an old farm house, but discovered that there were no outlets upstairs at all.  The electric is also very old, with insulators in the wall.  We decided very quickly that all the electric would be replaced. 

Plumbing was also a bit of an eye opener.  We live in a very rocky area, with yellowish rock everywhere.  It was a bit of a surprise, though, to open up the bathroom sink drain and discover sediment, the same color as all the rocks, had filled the inch and ¼ pipe to the point it was only open 1/8 of an inch.  We decided, again, very quickly, that all the plumbing would be replaced, and we would put a few inline filters on the waterline.

One of the fun discoveries was the wildlife.  We have a mama bird on the porch sitting on eggs,

                      we saw a mama deer and her baby in the field across the road,

       and we had a bat fly past us when were upstairs at dusk (Sorry, no pics of that. We left quickly.)

          

We had been told that our farmhouse was a Montgomery Ward mail order house.  Our research, though, showed that Montgomery Ward was not sending out mail order houses in 1915.  We had also been told it was a Sears mail order house, but we were doubting that also.  The answer came when we took out some of the molding around the windows and discovered that it was a mail order Gordon Van Tine home.

Gordon Van Tine was a company in Iowa, which is not far from the house, and started by supplying the materials for the Sears mail order homes.  When Sears got their own mill, Gordon Van Tine started their own Catalog.  Later, when Montgomery Ward got into the mail order house business, they also used Gordon Van Tine. Now we are in the process of looking for the catalog which shows our home.

Well, our discoveries will continue, along with our rebuilding, and we invite you along for the ride.

-Greg.