The "falling-down" farmhouse has (for the last ten or so years) been in a journey towards a cave-in. Remarkably, when the residents of the house re-shingled in 1993, they removed the top of the remaining chimney(the old kitchen chimney had been removed approx.1965) from the old living room fireplace...but just the top. When the furnace replaced the old fireplace(approx.1965, also) the old fireplace was boarded up and abandoned, left to crumble behind paneling. Crumble it did. After fifty years of crumbling...the cave-in was fast approaching....unless an intrepid Farmer were to step in and rescue the farmhouse. Insert Dear Farmer.
Dear Farmer will tell you, "I'm just a farmer." And while that is true, if you aren't already aware of what farmers do, let us clue you in to the job-description.
Farmer (n.): able to do electrical(both residential and industrial), welding, construction building, plumbing, mechanic, meteorologist, agricultural botanist, animal husbandry professional, customer relations, salesman.
Thankfully, Dear Farmer has learnt to do all of those well. He's stayed at the top of his game where building is involved...and the "falling-down" farmhouse is kinda like a hobby(that we happen to live in). So when we noted how much the slope of the house had increased over the past two years we also came to cross road: fix it, or start building a new house...this year.
Try as the Wife did, she could not finagle the new house this year. Dear Farmer has too much experience to just let the relic of a farmhouse die....
guess we're fixing it.
The plan was to chisel out the bricks and toss them out the windows to the ground below...from the attic first, then the second floor, then the living room...until all the bricks are out. The chisel workers would be Dear Farmer, the Shadow, and the littlest Shadow. The toss-er would be the Pied Piper. The stacker on the ground level would be the Keeper of the Flame. The Farmer's Daughters would be in there somewhere doing whatever was needed.
Dear Farmer was preparing to begin the work process as the family was all out of the house(thoughtful preparation works better when no one is around to tap on his shoulder, tug on his pant-leg, pester him with questions, and move his tools to remote locations). Dear Farmer chiseled at a brick to test the amount of work this would require...the brick needed no chisel. The mortar simply blew off...scary how little work this would require. Now, as near as we can figure...the farmhouse was built approx.1900-1910. So it stands to reason, the chimney was put in place at the same time. Which leads us to place the brick and mortar age at approx. 108-118 years old. Ouch! No wonder the mortar is non-existent and the bricks are crumbling!
Dear Farmer did the entire chimney by himself(with a couple moments of help from the Haus Frau Farmer's Daughter), in a couple hours. Three stories of brick, neatly stacked, outside of the house.
The rest of the family arrived home to a surprise! I am sure the relief and pleasure were evident on all the faces when we saw the bricks stacked and the job done. The boys didn't have to do any of it, Dear Farmer didn't have to have multiple hands helping, and the girls didn't have too much mess to clean up!
Easy-cheesy-lemon-squeezie!
Dear Farmer was all excited to show the Wife what had been accomplished! "Come on! Come see!", he said as he ushered her into the house, upstairs to the attic door. He opened the attic door(which the Wife has had to admit, just might be her one weakness to sentimentality towards the "falling-down" farmhouse) to show her the work accomplished from the top-down. The Wife, happy(but not really that excited about walking over and around decayed rodent carcasses), dutifully admired the work done, the lack of work required, and the empty hole that descended to the basement.
All the things that could be done with a ready made hole in the floor came to her mind: a dumb-waiter, a laundry shoot, a fireman's pole...all possibilities!
Alas, Dear Farmer looked at his Wife(almost pitifully) and told her it was getting covered up and nothing would happen with it. Then he descended into the basement to jack the middle of the house up a full five inches.
The Wife noticed something else, while up in the attic...the house was built with true 2x4s. Not like the lumber turned out today that isn't actually 2inches x 4inches, but rather 1.5inches x 3.5inches.
Those 2x4s are perfectly squared together, beautiful! Add that beautifully constructed attic to the hand-dug basement complete with logs for the support posts...yeah, I guess I can see why Dear Farmer wanted to save this "falling-down" farmhouse a bit longer.
It just seems a shame that we have to add new lumber to it...lumber that's has a name that's not true to it's size. Lumber that was purchased at a box store, not a lumber mill.
In it's hay-day I am sure the "falling-down" farmhouse was quite the modern home to behold.
Dear Farmer sees it...the Wife has to close her eyes to see it...and when the Wife closes her eyes she still sees the remnants of an old chimney, and the cost of new lumber.
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