More of Our Second Farmhouse

This house was a brute to heat.  The original part of the house was a square, 2-story log house that was covered on the outside with white siding and on the inside with the icky, old lathe. 

http://www.builderbill-diy-help.com/
One day, just after moving in, my one-year-old son reached through his crib, pulled off some flowered wallpaper (it had been a teen-aged girl's room!) and exposed the ever-lovely lath.  Behind the lath were the 12" X 12" logs that were kept about 4-5" apart by stones and mudding (mortar, chinking).  This mudding was long gone, presumably eaten by the large numbers of mice that we were constantly contending with.  Through the empty space blew the whole great outdoors, in spite of the siding.  Much to hubby's dismay, it became obvious that we had to start the renovating a lot sooner than hoped for, as this room was certainly not the worst one.

When we were first looking at the farm, we could see that the buildings were not in great shape but we were not too worried.  We were young(er), figured we could handle it and besides, with 5 young kids, ages 1 year  to 8 years old and our other farm now sold, we needed a place, like, yesterday.  We couldn't really afford any more time to look around.  I was just happy that there was an upstairs bathroom!  Yeah, excited!  I can't help but laugh when I watch all the renovating and relocating shows and everyone wants their own bathroom.  "Yes, I like this house but where's the 4th or 5th bathroom?  We'll just have to keep looking."  Sigh!!  I'm not laughing at the people.  Hey, I'd like my own washroom, too!  I'm laughing at the idea of any of these people having to live in any of our old houses.  You could easily run a series of "Survivor" in any old, not-fixed-up farmhouse and see how many contestants are still standing at the end of a week, let alone 11 years.

Well, the upstairs bathroom was there but was not a joy to use.  The bathroom was over the back stairs and a wooden box had been built over the headway space in the bathroom.  This space could have been better utilized as shelves but instead could not be used as anything except a seat.  Have a seat while someone else finishes using the toilet, perhaps?  I was excited to move in anyway and had one day only to clean without the kids so I went at the old cast-iron tub to clean it and immediately destroyed the cloth.  The finish on the tub was long gone, very rusty and impossible to clean.

http://www.valdosta.ebay/
This tub looks almost as bad as our tub except this one's for sale for $60.00.  If only we'd had internet back then - we might have known how rich we were.  Had no idea that we could possibly sell that old thing and maybe some other things, as well -  starting with the old sink as it was in the same condition.

There was a hole in the floor in front of the toilet that I was kind of afraid of.  The toilet was built up at least 2 inches and this worried me, too.  Some toilets are built up higher in order to help the elderly and handicapped and I chose to believe that this was the reason every time one of us had to use it.  But the holey floor in front...  It turns out that raising the toilet was actually an attempt to keep the toilet on the second floor!

http://www.accessibleconstruction.com/

The stink pipe was in the corner behind the toilet, completely exposed.  A bath towel had been neatly folded and stuffed in between the pipe and the wall.  We couldn't imagine what it could be holding up or keeping in but it was a strange thing for someone to do without a reason.  It was a strange enough thing to do WITH a reason!  We were quite sure that if we pulled it out, the stink pipe would fall down, fall through, fall over, fall somewhere so we left it alone until it was time to reno.  Later during renos, we learned that the stink pipe was fine and it's still in use today.  I guess they ran out of storage room for their towels?!  Because of all of these things, plus the fact that there was no insulation, we were convinced that this room needed to be done at the same time as our son's room - both way before we were ready to tackle them.

Sidenote*
This is the stink pipe in our 3rd farmhouse.  The photo was taken a few minutes ago and the reno was started right after New Year's, 2012.  I know, more renos, more lath, more dust.  Sigh!  But that's another story for another day!