Yesterday was the first day we had a crane on site to help dismantle the O’Kane house frame. I don’t think the day could have gone more smoothly, all thanks to a great crew, and crane operator Frank Donahue.
Thank you, Kendra, for all the pictures. Check back soon for more.
Over the past month, an injection of new blood has invigorated the dismantling process. Not only have we three new Maine Preservation interns; Dave Ewing, Andrew Cushing and Noah Kerr, but Jim and Kendra, two clutch workers, to boot. Brian Cox has been on site, managing the inventorying and dismantling of the windows (stay tuned for his upcoming window article) and Pete Dellea has been working his lull magic. The eager crew dismantled the entire cape ell one full week ahead of schedule. We can only hope that the rain stays away, and the house comes down as smoothly.
The Neat Stuff Update:
Dragon Spikes!
These spikes were used to pin the main house and ell frames together. There were seven spikes in all, one in a rafter, one in the front gable tie, and five distributed between a corner post and a beefy stud.
Using levers, and some brute force, the rafter, post and stud were able to be pried, preserving master smithery. The spike that did need cutting was in the gable tie beam, which needed to be lifted straight up, and could not be pried out. It took six sawzall blades, ground to nubs, to cut through that unlucky nail.
Half Doves!
For those non-timber-framers out there, a half dovetail is just like the first dovetail in a drawer, with one straight side, and one slanted one. The geometry that a drawer-dovetail employs in order to resist the outward pull of the drawer front is the same geometry that is used in buildings; the half dovetail in a tie beam is resisting the outward thrust created by rafters.
In most English barns, only the tie beams have a half-dovetail joint on the end, and the attic joists half-lap over the plate.
In this building, every one of the attic joists had a half-dovetail joint, which helps to explain why these buildings stayed so square and straight for more than 200 years.
Teasel tenons!
In an English tie joint, the tie beam cogs over the plate with the aforementioned half dove. The tie beam is also connected to the post directly below it, by means of a teasel tenon. The confluence of so much joinery at the top of one post, i.e. tenon into plate AND tenon into tie beam, results in most posts flaring at the top, to as much as 11 1/2 inches in the case of the O’Kane house.
One tenon runs parallel with the eave of the house, and inserts into a mortise in the plate, (pictured directly above), and the other tenon runs perpendicular to the plate, parallel to the tie beam, and extends from the interior plane of the flared post. This tenon inserts into a mortise on the underside of the tie beam. If that’s difficult to imagine, a few of the posts in the O’Kane ell were shaved back, revealing the innards of teasel tenon joinery (previous photo, above).
Interns!
We are fortunate to have been blessed with so many terrific Maine Preservation interns, as well as interns from North Bennett Street School and other interns with an unaffiliated, but unabashed interest in preservation. They are always eager to learn and participate, as well as share their varied knowledge and experiences. Thanks to interns past and present for your indelible contributions.
Please peruse the slideshow below for more photos of our process:
On Friday, Scott finished removing the trim from the Pink Parlor, pictured above. I had eagerly anticipated the joinery surrounding the fireplace, given our recent work on another fireplace surround. The displaced surround, turned upside-down, is below:
When I think about the era in which this house was built, in a relatively new country, with newly earned independence, it can feel very foreign to me. I struggle to understand the mindset of these post-colonial carpenters. But when I see the joinery detail below, and a fireplace surround constructed nearly the same way I’d construct it today, I feel much closer and more connected with our region’s history. I realize that we are still a young country, and in the context of the rest of the world, this is a pretty young house. The importance of preservation is emphasized not simply because the house is “old,” but because so much hard work went into constructing it.
Oh, and the stiles were buried deep, just like in the Blue Room.
For more photos of last week’s progress, click on the slideshow, below:
This is post about a persnickety process:
After a piece of trim is removed from an O’Kane wall, it is taken over to a photograph of that wall and traced with a fine tip marker. The dis-assembler then writes a description of the piece on the item list for that wall and assigns it an item number. The room number, wall letter and item number are written on a piece of masking tape, which is affixed to the upper left, backhand corner of the piece. The piece is carefully de-nailed, and then a final “acquisition” number is etched into a patch of white shellac using a Dremel tool. The piece is wrapped in shrink wrap with his cohorts, and tightly stacked in an assiduously organized, and mapped trailer. I have just finished re-tracing all the photographs of those walls which have been completely denuded. The results, below:
One of the first treasures we uncovered at O’Kane was a wall of horizontal featheredge sheathing painted in bright yellow. It was hidden behind plaster in the Blue Parlor, and had shadow lines delineating where once there were shelves. Where the boards terminate, on the left side, we think there was originally a wall, creating three rooms in the back half of the house. Two smaller rooms flanked the Blue Parlor with its large central hearth. The yellow paneling probably turned the corner, creating a pantry in what was originally the kitchen, given the large fireplace. Throughout the house, we have continued to find boards and shards in the same chrome yellow, used as padding and strapping. This helps to the date those walls, and solve the mystery of the house’s original layout.
Pictured above is the paneled wall that we uncovered in the room directly above the Blue Parlor. The right portion of the paneled wall is original, and you can make out the hinges from the original door opening on the second panel from the right. The door opening was filled with one wide, nondescript board and a board with the same chrome yellow paint and shadow lines. During one period of renovation, this yellow pantry board was probably taken from the partition wall downstairs and installed upstairs to create what became a UNH student’s bedroom.
We have found other pieces of this doorway elsewhere in that upstairs bedroom. In the closet, the head casing was being used as a shelf cleat, allowing us to determine the width of the original door. Time and again during the dismantling process, we are reminded to be thankful for that Yankee thrift.
On Friday, we peeled plaster from the walls of the Blue Parlor, in the O’Kane Farmhouse. Scott was Bill and I, Ted, as we traveled in our proverbial telephone booth through layers of plaster, lath, wallpaper and time.
There were clues to some of what we might find. Surrounding the door openings were wooden strips, wedge-shaped in profile, that served as plaster grounds. They were a little over an inch thick, and were nailed four inches away from the opening itself, creating a border around the door opening that looked like a recessed casing. The application of these plaster grounds became popular in the mid-18th century, and allowed the plasterer to create a flat wall plane within the borders of the ground (Much of this initial dating information comes from James Garvin’s A Building History of Northern New England, pp 65-71). In most cases, the chair rail, baseboard, and door and window casings were applied directly to the frame, and served as the plaster ground. In Shaker buildings, for example, the casing is nearly flush with the plane of plaster. But in this wall, the plaster plane was an inch proud of the recessed door border, due to the applied ground, and there was a vertical, beaded joint between the side sections of the border and the top. It looked like a larger section of beaded paneled wall was peeking through.
As we carefully peeled the plaster from the lath, we paid attention to the composition of the plaster. Older plasters have a higher concentration of goat hair, and regularly one will uncover a multi-colored tuft that was was never fully mixed in. Older plasters were applied in three coats, a base coat, a straightening, or “brown” coat, and a skim coat. The base coat is thickly applied and creates the keys that lock the plaster onto the lath. The base coat squeezes through the slits between the pieces of lath, and droops behind. A skilled plasterer will use the right amount of pressure to create an even pattern of keys, enough pressure to create a key big enough to hold, but not so much that the plaster breaks off and splooges into the wall cavity. After the base coat has dried to a leather hard consistency, the brown coat is applied, and the plasterer drags a long straight-edged board, or screed, over the surface, flattening the wall plane between the grounds. The brown coat is usually where you see the most goat hair. The skim coat is the last, thinly applied coat, devoid of hair and leaving that hard, cured, eggshell finish. On the first two sections of wall, we found sawn lath behind the plaster, hung with machine-cut nails. This dates the added plaster surface to sometime after the mid-19th century, as we suspected (Garvin, p. 67).
Behind the lath we found beautiful, psychedelic wallpaper. The profile of beaded paneling telegraphed through, and punched vertical lines in the wallpaper at each panel’s joint. On the wall, one could see three different periods all at once. The horizontal shadow lines left behind by the lath, the lively geometric pattern of the wallpaper, and the vertical beads poking their noses through the surface.
So I liked that, but the most exciting discoveries were yet to come. So far, all we could determine in terms of dates was that the plaster was applied before the advent of wire nails during the late-1800’s, leaving no real indication of the date of the beaded paneling. Farther along the north wall, to the west, was a section that appeared to have once been partitioned off into a different room (according to a long joint in the floorboards). When Scott began dismantling this section, the wall cavity was different. There was a void behind the lath, and in its depths he could see the horizontal, bevelled profile characteristic of feather-edged paneling, and shiny, chrome yellow paint. The paneled wall he uncovered was was hung horizontally, and it had a feather-edged profile, where the edge of the board is beveled to a thin tongue that slips into a groove on the adjacent board. Conversely, beaded tongue and groove has a bead with an edge perpendicular to a quarter inch tongue. The joints in such boards are typically tighter. Both styles were used and re-used during the first half of the 18th century, but the feather-edged stuff is reminiscent of an earlier era.
Across the face of the older, yellow paneling, we saw the regular shadow lines of shelving, leading us to believe that this section of wall had been obscured by pantry storage and left alone when the rest of the room was upgraded. The wall plane of the beaded section is sufficiently proud of the feather-edged wall plane that the beaded paneling could be hiding more yellow feather-edged paneling–but this is only one of a number of possible scenarios. The beaded paneling could be contemporary with the feather-edged paneling; the feather-edged paneling might have been recycled from elsewhere, or simply used to delineate a different room in the house. In most homes, we’d never know the answer to these queries, because we wouldn’t dismantle the wall any more than was needed to make repairs, but the O’Kane house will be completely dismantled, and it is exciting to know that as we proceed, some questions will be answered, and even more created.
Adjacent the feather-edged paneling was the most exciting section yet. A section so exciting as to make the author flap her arms in an improvised, peacock-like dance. Behind the plaster Scott found accordian, or split board lath, hung with wrought nails. Accordian lath is hung using a wide, rough, knotty board. The first edge is nailed to the studs, and then the board is split along the grain and checks are stretched open and nailed, creating voids for the plaster to “key” into. This kind of lath supplanted the use of split, or riven lath around 1800. It was used until the mid-19th century, with the introduction of sawn lath.
Wrought nails were used until the advent of machine-cut nails, invented in 1790. So we were finding a relatively newer lath style with an older nail technology allowing us to date the wall to sometime between 1790 and 1800 (Garvin, p 66). Dating a building without recorded documentation is a fuzzy practice. Often, the invention of a technology allows us to bracket a building’s date into “well, we know it wasn’t built before such-and-such,” and this is an unsatisfactory conclusion. Most technologies were in favor for at least fifty years. We use all these time brackets, and the popularity of certain styles throughout the house, to come up with an approximate date. It is unusual, and thrilling, to uncover a wall that so neatly falls between the advent of one technology and the extinction of another–and that was why I found myself flapping my arms, wildly.
Please peruse the photos below for more information about our process, and stay-tuned for more exciting discoveries.
A few months back, we disassembled a barn in Lebanon, Maine. Since then, we took the pieces back to the shop, repaired what we could, and re-designed the rest. This Spring, we assembled the frame using original and remade pieces, and Shawn and his crew have been busy hanging the cornice.
For more photos, explore our Flickr album.
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