"Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower ..."

Today was a perfect autumn day in western Indiana in the midst of Fall Break at DePauw.  The temperature hovered around 70* and reflecting on & documenting six months at Butternut Hill seemed appropraite.  The title of this posting comes from Albert Camus, and is my second favorite prose on the season.  The first:

l(a
le
af
fa
ll
s)
one
li
ness
-  e.e. cummings

 In this spirit, here are some captioned photos of the hill exactly one year from when we first viewed the home!

Side View



A Fantastic Tree



Another ...

The tomb of a 'neighbor'

Leaf Covered Driveway

The Interior "Before"

When Butternut Hill was built in the 1830s, it was a one and a half story structure, but a second generation of the original owners converted this into a two story home with additions 1901.  The main house has approximately 4800 square feet of living space, including a parlor, kitchen, dining room, library, mudroom, with butler's pantries and ice room on the first floor, and five bedrooms on the second floor.  There are two staircases: a formal staircase near the center of the home, and a back staircase from the mud room area/laundry room area.  When the home was sold in 1996 by the descendants of the original owners, the new buyers converted the house into a bed and breakfast, which required the addition of several bathrooms.  In fact, there were 6 bathrooms in the house when we purchased it -- two of these were downstairs, four were upstairs.

This description sounds lovely ... and I hope some day that it will be ... but right now every house in the room needs restoration work.  The house was empty for nearly five years, and during that time there were several water leaks; some were from the many, many DIY bathrooms installed by the prior owners, while some were from poor outside water runoff from gutters.

Here's a partial tour, beginning with the kitchen  ...   





The kitchen ... when we moved in



After Chad's demolition work ...




Three smaller rooms are attached to the kitchen, including two pantries and what will become a mud room.


The first pantry
(with some fresh paint)



... and the butler's pantry
 [water damage],



This back stairway comes off the mudroom .... 



decorated with these angel stickers :)



Here are some other rooms, both upstairs and down, all in pre-restoration condition!

This is the main dining room with french doors!



The front staircase, upstairs.




Upstairs Bedroom 1




Upstairs Bedroom 2



Although these pictures only begin to reveal some of the damage that we have to reverse, we think they also reveal the great structure we have with which to begin.  I will save tours of the basement and attic for a future post!

Our first major project is the original "ice room," a 1901 wood-frame addition to the house that was once used for ice and food storage.  This room had been converted into a bathroom, and as one of six in the house, we decided to use the space as our laundry room ... the topic of my next post!  

The Dogs of Butternut Hill

We currently share our lives with four canine companions, all of whom have a unique connection to Butternut Hill.  They will undoubtedly be reappearing characters in our homestead narrative, so we believe that they deserve introductions.

Maggie

Maggie Dog is the first dog in our pack.  She was born sometime in June 1995 in Albuquerque, N.M. and she joined my life in August 1995 while I was in NM pursuing my master's degree.  We have been inseperable ever since, and Butternut Hill is her retirement home and park.  She still enjoys running with the other dogs and hates squirrels as passionately as when she was a pup. 

Next is Pandora, who has simply become known as "Dora."  Dora joined the family in September 2005 at about 18 weeks.  We were told she was a lab/border collie mix, but she never really grew, leading us to believe she is actually a rat terrier/border collie (or a "brat" as they are affectionately called in agility circles).  She is snarky and hates just about everything, but is a fantastic athlete and loyal friend to those close. 

Franklin

Third in the pack is Franklin, by far the largest dog on Butternut Hill.  He is a rough collie that we adopted in February 2009 from Tri-State Collie Resque after he was rejected by breeders for poor colors and ended up in a shelter in Alabama.  I had volunteered to do a little grant-writing for this group after losing our first collie, Sam, and this puppy needed a good home. He loves everything and everybody, and is a very stereotypical collie.  As a hobby, he enjoys hunting toads in newly planted gardens and he also loves laying around in piles of recently overturned dirt. 

Elsie

The latest dog to move into Butternut Hill is Elsie, who is a stray dog who joined us in June 2010.  We feel pretty certain that she is about a year-old mix between an australian shepherd/border collie mix.  We are just getting to know her, and shortly after her arrival she made a quick escape and was able to evade capture and crossed the highway both ways, amazingly uninjured.  She was the inspiration for the installation of the Invisible Fence that we are currently installing around the permimeter of the main house!

Below you will find some action shots of the canine fun on Butternut Hill.  I hope you will look forward to reading more about their antics as our homestead takes shape!!

The Black & White Ones

Maggie among the weeds

Welcome to Butternut Hill

 Johnny Swalls

In March 2010, we moved to the property known by the National Register of Historic Places as "Butternut Hill."  The property is one of the earliest settled in the Wabash Valley, and the home was built in 1835.  After remaining in the same family for many generations and undergoing additions and alterations, the homestead was divided up and sold in the 1990s. While much of the farm land was sold to developers, the house and 5.5 acres of the farm were donated to the Indiana Preservation, who placed it on the National Register, added covenents governing changes, and sold it at auction.  It was purchased by a local couple who converted it into a Bed & Breakfast.  By this time, the farm had not been active for at least 20 years, and the new owners continued to allow the land to return to nature.  Unfortunately, they were unable to maintain the home and allowed significant damage to occur to both the interior and exterior during their stewardship.  Their family decided to sell the home in trust at auction in 2009, and hired auctioneer Johnny Swalls to conduct the sale.

In October 2009 on his commute to work, Chad noticed that this property was to be auctioned, and we immediately began considering the possibility of purchasing it.  Doing so would put into action a dream we had  to live a more self-sustaining and sustainable existence.   We were charmed by its location on the National Road (US 40) next to Highland Lawn Cemetery, which just happens to be the resting place of one of our favorite Socialists, Eugene V. Debs.  We also thought that 5 plus acres would be about the most we could reasonably handle, but that we could certainly do a lot with the space to accomplish a more green lifestyle.  Also, at the time, we had three dogs who required daily walks in the park, and we felt that having some land would make exercise easier for both us and the dogs.  Despite some very real concerns with the property and our ability to manage the financial shortfall we would experience until our own home sold (in a *terrible* market) we decided to buy the property, and haven't looked back since!  I intend to chronicle in this blog our successes and failures, hopefully more of the former than the later. 

The house is located on more than five acres of land near the eastern edge of Terre Haute, Indiana.  Access to the house is by a hand-laid brick driveway of about 200 yards that winds upwards from the National Road and many trees and bushes cover most of the surrounding land.  Here we are dragging our gigantic trash recepticals up the driveway in March 2010, soon after moving into the house.

In addition to the house, there is a two car garage, an 800 square foot cabin, the foundation of a small barn, and a dilapidated corn crib.

I will leave this post with other photos of the exterior.  Next time ... the interior !!!

Back of the house

West side of the house