A brick wall
We hit a brick wall today. Literally. They were gutting the summer kitchen and they peeled off the plaster (or drywall, I’m not sure) of one interior wall and found it was solid brick! We have no idea what it signifies, but it seems very strange to have a brick wall running halfway through a stone building. We’ll ask a couple of historians and, if we’re lucky, two of them will agree, and we’ll figure out the next step. Ah, old houses, gotta love ’em. Speaking of historians, I’ve mentioned that the National Register of Historic Places has a very — interesting — perspective on historic renovation.
To whit, anything not original but which has achieved historical significance (i.e. over 50 years old) in its own right must be preserved. Well, we ran afoul of that when we proposed removing the back porch, which was obviously a early 1900’s add-on. You’d think they’d be happy to let us strip that away and expose the building as it would have been 200 years ago, but nope. We have to rebuild it (the current one is completely rotted, which is why we were proposing to remove it) and we have to make the new one look exactly like the 20th century add-on. Please don’t look for logic or reason here; you will be disappointed. Finally, our appeal of the sprinklers also hit an unexpected snag — the township does not actually have an appeals process in place yet! The zoning officer is scheduled to take a class in May, and then they will figure out how to organize it. Oh yeah, I want to be the first one in there…