We bought a 170 year old house in rural Maine! (House Tour)

so i'm natalie and this is dan and we just bought this 170 year old house in rural maine after living in boston for the last few years um we're new homeowners and so this whole adventure is definitely new to us and we have so many projects to tackle in this house to get it to where we want it to be so we thought that since we're noobs and this is going to be a whole learning experience that we would document some of our journey and starting with a house tour before we've done too too much in terms of improvement so let's go so here's our old farmhouse from the front it is 2 000 square feet 170 years old a little worse for wear in some areas we've got a lot of work to do before it's really in ship shape it's got some quirks uh some things that we love some things that we don't love quite as much that some of them we might just have to live with but right here is one of our favorite features of the house we'll start here going in this is our sun porch so we haven't really done anything to this space except put in our furniture a lot of which came from my grandparents house so that's stuff that has sentimental value to me and we really like the way this space is coming together really quickly and then this leads into our kitchen like all new england houses we're gonna go okay there's joey we have two cats right now albie and joey so like most new england houses the front door is not really the front door the side door is where you go in and this is our kitchen we have plans to do a lot to this kitchen a lot of it is going to revolve around this stove which is from 1954. i actually just replaced all the burners on here this morning because i think one of them was actually working and the others weren't and that color is beautiful but it's a lot so a lot of this room is going to revolve around finding colors that look good with that stove but so far it's functional and a huge upgrade from what we were living with before and we figured that we'll start with just some cosmetic stuff just to make it seem more cohesive before eventually when we have the money doing a full kitchen re-haul but some of the projects we have planned are going to be painting the cabinets um and then changing the countertops um probably doing an epoxy pour um just something that's cheap and easy just to update them since it's a little jetson z [Music] especially the countertop here is uh it's a little bit funky it's not the worst thing in the world but it's yeah it's not great and this is the view out the kitchen window which i love our chicken coop out back there we'll go visit them in a minute and then this front yard area isn't really being used for anything right now but we have plans to maybe add some fruit trees and whatnot right there so coming from the kitchen into the rest of the house we got this little entryway into this space here that right now isn't really functioning as anything obviously was at one point where they had their wood stove back in the day but i guess the problem with the wood stove is it overheats the kitchen because the chimney is right there so our solution for that was to get a really nice pellet stove i was lucky enough to find one on craigslist that hopefully is actually going to work properly but that right here will spit our heat right into our dining room i kind of like that layout so the center of the house is getting all this heat everything can kind of find its way upstairs obviously it's gonna be tough to get all that heat dispersed throughout the house so we might have to get kind of creative with that but that's our dining room down here the colors on the walls are actually pretty decent we haven't changed anything yet and then coming from there that leads into our living room but in between we have this funky little space here but yeah moving from in there here's our living room joey's making himself cozy uh my grandparents old couch which is falling apart hopefully will be replaced soon but we like this space a lot it's got great light we have this nice bay window complete with bird feeders cat tv as we call it and yeah some funky bookshelves the cats love to run up the corner there um it was like a little cat ladder but all of these different shelves are all spaced randomly and a lot of them are bowing so one of our big projects will be to redo the shelving in here so that it's a little bit a little bit more uniform and a little bit less sketchy and just better made too i mean none of this looks really finished in any way so yeah something a little nicer i think and then these i just want to show off real quick where this is some wallpaper that was taken out of the house at some point who knows 50 100 years ago i don't know it looks kind of art deco it's interesting and same with this lamp with this weird uh gold crusty stuff on it i think that was over in where i'm going to take you next which is from this door we've got our back stairway which i guess technically is a front stairway because that's the front door uh why anyone would ever want to enter the house this side i'm not really sure it doesn't make much sense to me but it's actually nice to get daylight in here but the problem is this door doesn't open all the way so old house stuff and then we got this funky back stairway i always call it the back stairway even though it's the front so that leaves upstairs where we'll go in just a second but first oh by the way that was where that lamp was the funky lamp was at the top there i'm not sure why there's no uh there's no fixture up there yet so this leads into our laundry room which is an odd space hey howie because it's got a beautiful bay window uh but because the laundry's in here it's not like you could make this a reading room or something i suppose it could have been something like that in the past but the size of it is kind of odd it's just a weird place to have a bay window uh it's a lovely place to do laundry i guess but i don't know right now this is where our cats get fed this is probably going to be the room that we got to think about the most and probably needs the most work because we are not pleased with the way that it looks now but we don't really know how to improve it no aside from getting a more compact washer dryer unit i don't know that there's really much that we can do to change this because where else are we gonna put the laundry machines but we've also got this nifty little bathroom here which is the three-quarter bathroom it's got a shower crammed in there kind of questionable choice there and then let me get the light and then we've got a toilet but you'll notice that there's no sync there's not really room for much of anything in here so our plan is to put in some kind of integrated gray water back of the toilet sink because we've seen a lot of those things done it looks pretty cool and it'll make that a functional bathroom and then we also want to take out that shower stall and redo the sheetrock and then try to have it be just like a whole back and shower unit that goes straight to the wall as opposed to having a separate unit tucked inside of the room just because it's a small room oh also a fun thing i didn't point out before is we've got these built-in shelves here uh cabinetry obviously making great use of them now i don't even know what to put in there because i don't think we have any stuff nice enough to want to show off when you come from a small apartment right we don't have enough stuff right now so this stairway takes you upstairs this is what i would consider the front stairway because the closest to the front door and this will spit you out right into this zone where we've got a common room up there this bathroom right here i've made some changes too already it has always had this clawfoot tub which is natalie's favorite but it did have a shower curtain ring and everything all installed up there which was kind of hideous and then just in a bathroom this narrow having a bunch of shower curtains and stuff just didn't really make a ton of sense and then there was no way for that those curtains to go when you wanted to take a bath it was just it was not exactly situational so we just figured to make this a dedicated bathtub and not have a shower up here yeah since we have a shower downstairs i shower down there natalie takes baths up here because that's how we shower stuff yep so not much to say about the bathroom it's not amazing it's not bad but we'll probably make some changes there then off to the right here so stairway to the right we've got the music room so we're both musicians i once pursued a professional career in music but now i just play for fun in my own time and it's so nice to have a dedicated space to do that i've got my rig all set up in here alby likes it hey buddy and then out here again that view it's kind of right over that kitchen sink so we've got that view of the chicken coop down there and then this right here is probably our most used room this is where i do all of my work online this is our common space nice and open and we like keeping it open we like keeping it free of furniture for the most part makes it easier to use this room for yoga or working out that kind of stuff on the left here we've got a small guest bedroom which is the room that we kind of forget exists right now there's literally nothing in it except for a bed a dresser and some other stuff that we haven't gotten around to sorting eventually we want to get a full wall sized mirror there instead of those two small ones but it's really hard to find a really big hunk of glass especially for not a crazy amount of money all right and this brings us into our bedroom which is probably our least favorite room at the moment even more so than the laundry room even though it doesn't look quite as hideous just because we actually use this room and we want it to be some place that's cozy and nice and with that carpet and color it's just not there so we've got lots we want to do we want to tear up this carpet um and put in some laminate uh hardwood kind of situation and then paint the walls but we just cannot decide what color we want to paint the walls um not this not this pretty much anything but this yeah and we were hoping that we could tear up the carpet and there would be the same really beautiful wood that's in the rest of the house we gotta go we started to over up the corner and unfortunately i think that there's a reason why this hasn't been changed and that's because glued to it is this absolutely hideous isn't that laminate look at that glitter situation which is good and there's probably some asbestos or something under there we're not gonna take our chances so we're just gonna rip it out and put some laminate oh we won't even rip it out we're just gonna put yeah we're gonna put some kind of laminate wood yeah on there rip out the carpet there's our clean laundry and this is our uh i guess front stairway which i want to call the back stairway this is joey's favorite spot he pretty much spends all day every day right here he loves it he's a window baby going out through the barn right let's do the uh transition from upstairs into the barn which is pretty cool so we can access our barn through the kitchen and the downstairs and up here through the music room um so there is one thing that we've actually changed in this house and that's this type of pass-through room um originally it was all this horrible brown color same color as the door yeah uh everywhere and so what we did was we whitewashed everything um and this is kind of matzo there's dan's music zone and this is my art zone so i have all my sewing stuff the dress form that i kind of bootleg together my easel i have all of my art supplies in here um so i mean there's still more work that i want to do in here i'd love to get some plants eventually i'd like to put an actual floor in because we just whitewashed particle board to limited uh effect yeah because we ran out of paint so this is just kind of a way to make this nice in the meantime um but eventually you know trying to fix some of the wonkiness in the walls there was a little bit of a leak in the ceiling when it was raining really hard which we've somewhat fixed but yeah the insulation is an issue in here so it's a nice space but it's only insulated around the walls right so there's no heat source in here so the only way we can get heat is by opening the door to that other room so in the winter when it gets really cold in here um it's going to be a bit of a cold challenge so this will waste a lot of heat until we can get it more insulated yeah so this room has work so it goes from here into the barn so yeah the barn is an adventure really it right now i mean these are empty boxes we're still kind of in the process of moving out of this but a lot of this junk was left behind by the previous owner old crappy furniture and such there's a lot of remnants from previous owners through the years so there was a ladder salesman who lived here at one time and so there's a bunch of really old ladders there was an antique store in this house and so there's a lot of old like antique sewing machines and suitcases um there was also a lightning rod salesman so there's like seven lightning rods on top of the house that are kind of pretty that don't really serve a purpose we'll maybe point out some of that stuff in the future but yeah this this whole section here you can kind of see is like a new addition onto the house and the original part of the barn starts right here at this wall so coming into here we made a little bit of a mess of it because we've already been doing some work to restore it and make it more stable but you can see that the structure of the barn is pretty cool nice and open it looks like they were probably throwing hay up in here at some point the floor is pretty wonky it's uh covered in plywood because the original boards are quite thin and yeah it's a little sketchy up here but this opens right up over the driveway which is just kind of fun so our plan is to turn this space here into my workspace and natalie's climbing space well both of our climbing space really so we'll put in a bunch of um rock wall like bouldering rock walls and then have all of dance work out right i'm a personal trainer we didn't mention that but my goal here is to turn this into an actual business space so that i can bring clients up in here once kovit has calmed down a little bit so it's a long-term plan because i mean right now everyone's doing gym stuff virtually anyway and it's november so we're not going to be getting good weather for any of that for a while anyway so what we've already been doing is trying to reinforce the floor which we'll show you downstairs in a second yeah you can see the light through there where we've been messing with it yeah um but we'll have to even out the floor sheetrock insulate and do quite a bit of work in order to make it a four season barn at least in that particular room of the barn coming down the stairs this is all pretty sketchy again this newer part of the barn is really not being used for anything it's just kind of a junk storage zone which i'd love to change in the future we've got some of our uh storage of food out here which is going pretty well it's nice and cold out here yeah right now it's pretty oh it's a warm day today but it's been pretty chilly so we got things a little bit messy here because of the stuff that we've been doing in the main part of the barn uh but we'll come back through this way in a minute through this newer part of the barn but coming into the original part of the barn again this is where eventually we're going to park cars through here so we got that open and this all in here is where i have been working with my stepdad the past few weekends to reinforce this span of of beams here which is what 24 feet something like that i don't remember exactly but it's a little bit too far for these old beams which are actually older than the structure itself that could be 200 years old for all we know the barn itself was probably built 150 years ago conservatively so these beams could easily be another 50 years from some other repurposed barn yeah we had a barn expert guy come in and said that based on the way that they've been hand hewn and some of the little rivets in it it was quite obvious that these were repurposed from an older barn when this barn was built so yep so we've been building up this new support beam in pieces because doing it all in one piece would be kind of impossible unless we had a huge team of people and even then snaking it in here and getting it up and supporting everything would be a real challenge so this beam in particular was a problem and we're doing the same thing here we haven't quite finished but we're going to be building together compound new beam that's gonna join these two sides together and then there's the back door at the barn which i think we'll go through now there's not much else to see out here the toilet oh yeah we didn't go to the very very back so this is going to be kind of kind of dark oh yeah you can see so lots of junk back here some nice old insulation that yeah yikes so this is kind of an interesting feature this is an outhouse this is a four-seater outhouse luxury [Music] attached to the house probably a really big deal and then they got little ones for baby buds yeah the baby hole so the whole family can poop all together at once which is the dream really and you get a view i mean what more do you want yeah okay it's a little creepy in here let's go kind of afraid of falling through the floor okay so now we'll take you out through the back of our barn actually you know what's more interesting than that let's go out the side here so this side again this is the same direction that the kitchen sink was facing we got this little extra space here my bike is back here just because of the work we've been doing so it's kind of a little storage shed at the moment so there's our chicken coop there's the front side yard which i've already cut down a few trees that were kind of crowded in there and chickens came with the house actually yeah we asked for four they had they had another four kind of show up as a surprise and we were like no thanks uh four is good because we're vegan we don't really need chickens they are pets they're like you know just hanging out but eight chickens just seemed like a little too much of a commitment for us so we're good with the four and this is richard uh richard is our guest rooster he technically lives at the lot behind us but he pretty much stays here all day every day scoping the ladies yeah they like him too so here's our house from the side it's pretty long it's pretty monstrous i'm actually keen to kind of shorten that back bit of the barn that isn't really being used and just have a little more space back here especially with the size of this big maple tree and i've been in the process of cutting down extra trees on the lot and that's why there's that big pile of brush there that i'm gonna take to get burned tomorrow now this is nice our giant apple tree but it's not very nice right now because it needs a little tlc the apples coming off of it are kind of small and sad and not really edible so we're hoping maybe we can restore it to a tree that produces good fruit and this will be our garden so this is a whole well i would say it's probably three quarters of an acre from this apple tree back and that is where we're planning to put in some raised beds to grow as much food as we possibly can and we'll probably put in a hoop house or a greenhouse back here as well just to extend the season since we are in maine um and our growing season is fairly limited there were a lot more trees back here probably seven or eight and i've cut down all except this one maple uh because it did have a nice look to it in the fall and i thought what what harm can it do to have one extra tree back here even if we do have our gardens so i'm kind of excited about this very back area where we could put a greenhouse a hoop house in the summer it wouldn't get too much sun but i think judging by the way it's thinned out it would still get enough sun in the winter but yeah outside of some of the things we pointed out some of the bigger projects that we have in the house are updating the electrical because it was probably last done in the 50s and we have had issues using our power tools and shorting out the circuits so we definitely need to update that some of the plumbing definitely needs to get worked on you know there are some places where the floors are sagging that as we're ripping into things like to update the kitchen we'll kind of fix whatever we find but then we have to be in a really good position when we start those projects because we never know what we're going to open up when we rip into 170 year old house so you know and so far a lot of what i've been doing around the place since i work from home and i have a lot more free time in the day i've just been trying to pick up all the junk that was left behind from the previous owners and i don't just mean the people we bought the house from but you know going back 150 years so as an example i mean there's you can see all this scrap wood and whatnot i've already called out a lot of that we've got an old ride-on tractor which to be honest isn't really my thing i'm more of a push mower kind of guy but yeah here we are back in the barn and that's pretty much it that's all there really is to see i think do we miss anything here's my new pellet stove by the way that i mentioned we're just waiting for a guy to come in and install it nice harmon p68 with the mirrored finish i'm i'm really excited to get this thing in there we got it for basically half what they are new so fingers crossed it actually works and yeah that's about it so thank you for watching our walk through tour sort of awkward and spur the moment but it is going to give you an idea of all the things that we are going to change and hopefully it will be fun to look back and see what we've done yeah so you know stay tuned we're planning on doing um some videos on the updates that we're making and then also some about you know gardening and trying to manage um growing food in such a cold area so um so all that will be will be coming in in the coming months see you again soon i hope

Channel: Ravenbrook Farmstead

Views: 55,703

Rating: 4.8993864 out of 5

Keywords: farmhouse, farm, house, old house, historical, vintage, tour, 150, 100, 1800's

Id: CuLVimFFPng

Length: 24min 6sec (1446 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 03 2020