On April 27 iFarm will be hosting a workshop for homeowners to learn about energy-saving renovations (that’s this Saturday, folks!) A working farm with lovingly restored buildings, iFarm combines 19th-century knowledge with 21st-century innovation to create a model for sustainability in agriculture. With the effects of manmade climate change now apparent, it is more important than…
On Friday, East Derry First Parish Church will be hosting a celebration in honor of the 300th anniversary of Nutfield, a Scotch-Irish settlement that was the precursor to today’s Derry, Londonderry, and Manchester, NH. The crew at East Derry has been hustling to finish the belfry in preparation for the event. For a bunch of…
Frames rot from the bottom up. Water condenses on the foundation and rots the sill from below, or enters at the eaves and runs down the wall framing, rotting the sill from above. Some sills are sunk by splash back. In the dead of night, sill rot can haunt you; it seems catastrophic. But rotten…
The Barn at Bondgarden Farm has been the talk of Eliot all summer. Nearly a hundred feet long and roofed in slate, the barn was always a stunner, but in July, Rick Geddes lifted the barn 6 feet in the air, and neighbors and news crews took note. Geddes threaded four 50 foot, 12 inch H-beams…
At East Derry, we knew the lantern was in bad shape, but we couldn’t know the full extent until we had it on the ground. Brian Cox was the job lead. He says, “The will of the church was holding that thing together, many layers of lead paint, and band-aid flashing details.” It was chilling…
The East Derry crew has been hard at work completely rebuilding the belfry, lantern and upper lantern. The framing is complicated, and heavy. Each lantern is a separate, eight-sided tier, connected by a sweeping skirt roof. Below the lanterns, the belfry may only have four sides, but the bell itself is supported on a hip-roof…
This blog leaves a lot out. We can’t give our projects their full due here while giving them their full due out there. I’ve been especially remiss with regards to East Derry. The First Parish Project has been in progress since 2012 and includes the replacement of the undercarriage, moving the building onto a new…
For me, it was not love at first sight. The Dummer House, built in 1786, is the oldest in Hallowell. Tucked onto Dummer Lane, the building had already been moved once and was languishing under a pair of overgrown maples, awash in eau du restaurant dumpster. It’s a plank frame building, which means that the…
It is never a pleasure to break the news that a steeple should be removed to ground. It usually indicates a catastrophic level of deterioration and a total budget in six figures. We only make the recommendation when it is the best approach and the most economical. We remove a steeple when it is the most assured path…
To the crew at least, the most impressive piece of the French frame is the roof system. The roof has a very low pitch: the apex of the ridge is little more than 4′ above the tie beams. There are two continuous ridges, each about 30′ in length, that meet on top of a short…