220202 The Old Farm House

We had many happy years in the old farm house.
We eventually met every owner prior to us owning it.

We met the original owner not long after we moved in there. He was a kind old man that was nearly blind by that time. He was living in an old folks home and his pastor brought him out to see the place one more time before he passed away. They pulled into the foot of the driveway and stopped when they saw me working there. The pastor got out of his car and asked if they could walk around for a few moments. I went to the passenger side of the car and helped the old man out. I took his arm and led him all over the outside and then over the inside of the house. He was delighted to be there for one last time.
The house was built in 1921 by his family who lived there. There were initially 80 acres there. The farmers were just that and not professional carpenters, but they did a good job. The wood was all cut and planed by them. It was all oak from the property. The stucco exterior I am not aware of where it came from or how it was put on the building.
The Wyrick family lived there with their grandparents. People in town still called it the old Wyrick house though it had us as the fourth owners. There were at that time, 2 heating sources in the house. One was a big fireplace (that we used a lot) and the 2nd was a small wood stove in the back downstairs bedroom that the grandparents slept in. All the kids slept in an unfinished attic with no heat at all. Originally there was a small back porch with stairs that went north for easy access to the outhouse that was 15 yards beyond the house.

The next owners came in and added a large deck, a patio and moved the steps to the south. They also added on to the back of the house with an enlarged bedroom and put in a septic with lateral lines. Then they put in a furnace system that could heat with gas or wood in a separate fire box. It was a poor installation. We met that owner years later in a furniture store where he was working. He seemed like a nice man, again just not a contractor. or a carpenter.

The last owners before us were nice people. He was a contractor and a plumber. He replumbed the entire house with plastic pipe that was much better than the old rusted iron pipes that he replaced. He put in a beautiful Jacuzzi and an enlarged bathroom. He put in all the wall to wall carpeting, but never got around to tacking it down everywhere. He had some electrician rewire the house. The electrician was obviously not a licensed electrician. The electric company had replaced the old electric pole in the middle of the driveway with a new one on the north side of the house. I used the old electric pole as a flag post to fly the flag that was my father's given to the family by the Veterans Association. The electrician that did the work on the house did not install a grounding rod on the north side of the house and we ended up with 2 fried TV sets and one fried laptop and a blown up well pump during electrical storms there. I had another good pump and electrician replace the well pump and he knew enough to ask where our grounding rod was? There was none. He told me how to put one in and after that we had no more problems. The contractor we bought from never had time to do everything with finishing trim and other things in the house, so that fell on Joyce and I to complete. Joyce had experience back in 1974 working with a contractor on our first farmette. She was well qualified to repair sheetrock, and to paint walls and put up wallpaper, while I struggled to cut and install trim around windows and such, none had ever been done in all the history of the old farmhouse.

Joyce and I put a tremendous amount of money and labor into finishing the house as best we could. We had a 1.5 acre garden there, each of us worked jobs in Springfield. We also worked cow calves and sheep and canned our leftover produce and finished the house by the time we sold it. Joyce was no longer able to do those things and neither was I. So we moved to an apartment in town and that is where I am today. Those were good and bad times for us. The good thing was we had so many guests that we entertained in that place. The bad was we couldn’t keep it going at the end.