Tractors and wood! Show your pics

[WinterDeere]

Wow! Can we see a pic or two, or do you have a thread on your historic house?

Hah! How many stand around taking pictures of their own house? Not me! I just hunted, and the newest I could find was from 2011 or 2012, when I had several shutters off the house for window repairs. I guess I was debating whether to reinstall them, so I snapped a photo.

So, here's an old photo from about 12 years ago, but it's a good one that shows all the various stages of construction:



Lower left foreground, the walk-out basement, is from 1730's. The larger stone house built over that is 1775. The beige stucco addition is late 1800's, and then the last addition in the distance is 1990's. Since then, we've added more patios and a pool out back, and rebuilt and expanded the 1775'ish carriage barn, not shown.

Funny how few and small the trees were, then. The oak on the far right is pretty large now, and we've added a few more that would be obstructing this photo, which was taken from just inside a grove of 8 walnut trees.

 

[Runner]

Hah! How many stand around taking pictures of their own house? Not me! I just hunted, and the newest I could find was from 2011 or 2012, when I had several shutters off the house for window repairs. I guess I was debating whether to reinstall them, so I snapped a photo.

So, here's an old photo from about 12 years ago, but it's a good one that shows all the various stages of construction:

View attachment 1694397

Lower left foreground, the walk-out basement, is from 1730's. The larger stone house built over that is 1775. The beige stucco addition is late 1800's, and then the last addition in the distance is 1990's. Since then, we've added more patios and a pool out back, and rebuilt and expanded the 1775'ish carriage barn, not shown.

Funny how few and small the trees were, then. The oak on the far right is pretty large now, and we've added a few more that would be obstructing this photo, which was taken from just inside a grove of 8 walnut trees.

Bravo! Absolutely stunning. Nice job on the additions, the stone work on the 1990 addition compliments the original building perfectly.

 

[WinterDeere]

Bravo! Absolutely stunning. Nice job on the additions, the stone work on the 1990 addition compliments the original building perfectly.

Thanks, but the prior owners get nearly all the credit for that. The stone in that addition was pilfered from the remains of the large dairy barn that used to stand in our front yard, unfortunately dismantled by a prior owner, so it was dug from the same fields as the rest of the house.

Some of the corner stones in the house must weigh as much as a small car, and a few of those in the rubble pile left over from the barn are even larger. It must've been a half-day's work for some farmer with his horse to extract some of them from the earth, and move them to whatever pile or wall upon which he collected them, prior to building the house.

 

[Runner]

Thanks, but the prior owners get nearly all the credit for that. The stone in that addition was pilfered from the remains of the large dairy barn that used to stand in our front yard, unfortunately dismantled by a prior owner, so it was dug from the same fields as the rest of the house.

Some of the corner stones in the house must weigh as much as a small car, and a few of those in the rubble pile left over from the barn are even larger. It must've been a half-day's work for some farmer with his horse to extract some of them from the earth, and move them to whatever pile or wall upon which he collected them, prior to building the house.

That is even more amazing. Can't imagine the work required by the stone masons to take all that stone and re-use it on a new building. Imagine all the cutting and fitting to make that happen.

Was any of the timber from the barn used in the addition?

In another life I worked with an architectural firm that specialized in forensic architecture. Their clientele would hire them to oversee restorations of old buildings to original appearance and using original materials to the extent possible. They would go to the level of scraping layers of paint to determine original colors, etc.

 

[Gordon Gould]

Yes truely amazing. That is a classic beauty !! And a testament of the craftsmanship and hard work of the past. Thaanks for posting!!

 

[BnRidge]

The stone in that addition was pilfered from the remains of the large dairy barn

If you get a chance, look closely at those stones. The markings on stones taken off virgin prairie would show a line of iron stain where it lay at the soil level, with lighter color above ground, and darker parts that were below ground. The tea colors are similar to desert varnish, and last centuries, impervious to the weather. And maybe by chance, there are scratch marks where the early tillage tools etched that dark band.

Oxide layer with crossing tillage marks.

 

[WinterDeere]

Was any of the timber from the barn used in the addition?

Yep. And even more-so to shore-up various parts of the older parts of the house, and carriage barn. My daughter's room has what must have been an old soffit beam set atop her wall, as it still has the rafter notches in it. Some of the large beams in my living room and basement ceilings show old unused knee brace mortises, meaning they were taken from other locations.

Even more amusing, some of the beams used in the carriage barn are clearly re-use... taken from some older building in the 1770's. When everything had to be made or transported using human, animal, or water power, I suppose re-use was much more attractive than re-manufacture.

Our basement ceiling beams (first floor joists) are all hand-hewn, and mix of various hardwoods, including a few black walnuts... likely whatever was growing straight and close to the house. People always think they must be older than the milled joists of the floors above, but they just don't understand that builders would still hand-hew beams whenever they needed something longer than the local mills could handle. Even in cases where there may have been a large mill a day's travel away, the cost of moving a house's worth of joists that distance by ox cart may have been high enough to make hand-hewn less expensive.

If you get a chance, look closely at those stones. The markings on stones taken off virgin prairie would show a line of iron stain where it lay at the soil level, with lighter color above ground, and darker parts that were below ground.

Wow... that is really cool. It's pretty rare for me to learn something new about old houses anymore, I've spent my whole life living in old houses that have been handed down thru my family since the late-1600's. But this is one bit of information that's new to me!

What I see in several of the stones used in the addition on this house is drill holes, maybe 3/4" diameter x 2" to 6" deep. I am not sure if they were part of some cleaving operation, or some bit of iron was set in them during the barn construction (these were taken from old barn), but I've always been curious about them. I also see the same holes in a few of the stones in the rubble pile left over from the old barn, which now separates my firewood processing area from the rest of the back yard.

 

[CalG]

If you get a chance, look closely at those stones. The markings on stones taken off virgin prairie would show a line of iron stain where it lay at the soil level, with lighter color above ground, and darker parts that were below ground. The tea colors are similar to desert varnish, and last centuries, impervious to the weather. And maybe by chance, there are scratch marks where the early tillage tools etched that dark band.

View attachment 1697517


Oxide layer with crossing tillage marks.
View attachment 1697518

All the wood appears to have petrified in this thread's wanderings.

Stone ?

I have lots

Wood? that too.

If I were younger, I would build something more.

 

[WinterDeere]

All the wood appears to have petrified in this thread's wanderings.

I brought it back on-topic.

... the stones in the rubble pile left over from the old barn, which now separates my firewood processing area from the rest of the back yard.

 

[Sawyer Rob]

Today was another pretty decent day out so I decided to mill up some cherry logs for a guy. This one needed some trimming, so I got that done and then got started milling it,

Once I took the boards off, I put them on the pallet forks and then trimmed them to "pretty them up" a bit,

I kept the short cut-offs to use around here, mostly to make toys for my grandson. Anyway, most of the boards had really good color and good figure in them,

There's some really nice cherry lumber in that pile,

That's it for today,

SR