I mean let’s be honest…farmhouse floors can make or break a farmhouse. Refinishing the farmhouse floors at Sixty-One Park was such a huge job but it was all worth it because of what they look like now! I love this finish:

I can still remember when the guys were still redoing the foundation and putting in new floor joists:

New flooring where the new joists were put in. The cool thing is Jaime said the milling of the new floor matched up exactly to the old flooring.  2.25″ red oak is as timeless as you can get…100 years later and it’s the exact same: 

Some of the floors downstairs dated back to 1911 and a few floors had been added over the old at later dates. There was a drop down transition from the kitchen to the dining room so Jaime made a large wood threshold:

Remember that strange master bath that had been added where the dining room had been? They had drilled holes into the old wood floor….boo. We had to plug those holes and most were just filled with dowels but the easiest way to plug the larger holes was to just take out the old strips and add in new ones:

Any old wood floor we took out from somewhere we used for patching.  The old had to be de-nailed….that took a few days just on its own:

All the downstairs were sanded down to remove the old finish and then stained. Here’s a time lapse of Jaime staining one of the floors:

 

A post shared by Sixty-One Park (@sixtyonepark) on Apr 10, 2018 at 1:51pm PDT

We used Minwax Jacobean because it was the closest to the original floor color:

A funny aside to this stain…I’ve always pronounced this color similiar to Jack-o-lantern. JACK-o-bean, but that’s incorrect. It’s actually Jack-oh-BEE-uhn. It refers to the Jacobean era which was the reign of King James I. But then I had to figure out why it wasn’t called Jamesobean. Ready? According to the Oxford Dictionary the word Jacobean is derived from Jacobus, which is the Ecclesiastical Latin form of James. Anyway, the Jacobean period, roughly 1600–1690, was known for its medieval dark finishes. 

Here’s one of the old wood floors after sanding to compare to the new wood. Looks very similar, right?

After a coat of Jacobean:

What I love about our floors though is the final finish…an antique flat varnish…specifically Antique Flat Ultra Max Oil Modified Polyurethane by ZAR:

I wanted to keep the original farmhouse floor look and anything too glossy would have ruined that idea. On most of the downstairs floors the varnish could just be poured out and spread with a brush:

The varnish only needed 2 hours of drying time between coats and it’s low odor:

The upstairs floor didn’t require a lot of prepwork but they did require a week of cleaning.

I scrubbed them by hand Cinderella-style:

Every single crack had to be cleaned out from 100-years worth of dirt and grime:

Literally on my hands and knees:

I think I found 6,000 bobby pins, stick pins, earring backs, beads and two vintage GAME OF LIFE people:

The upstairs floors had so much farmhouse character that I was almost afraid to do anything to them:

We lightly sanded areas where there were splinters forming or where boards had chipped:

Upstairs it was easier to apply stain using an old mop:

And once it was dry three coats of the same antique flat varnish was applied:

Ahh! They look so good! 

Now I feel like things are moving so fast. Trim is going on and doors are going in.

You can read more posts about the Sixty-One Park Farmhouse here and follow more progress on Instagram here (@sixtyonepark) and here (@lilblueboo). 

When you take something completely apart it’s inevitable that you are going to have to put it back together again. My last post was about how we updated the floor plan of the farmhouse. This post is all about putting the farmhouse back together – finishing the inside. Once all the framing was completed plumbing and electrical started to go in:

There was no insulation in the old farmhouse so we had eco-foam sprayed into every possible nook and cranny. I’m pretty sure that it’s holding together the house now. Here’s the foam in the new dining room…and the awesome new floor supports:

Once the insulation was completed the guys started putting up ceilings and walls using reclaimed wood we had been collecting. This is the dining room ceiling:

This old shiplap was also reclaimed, from an old house. Cleaning, sanding and priming all the shiplap took at least a full week!

Brett and Jaime made all the window frames in Jaime’s shop:

Before the window trim:

After the window trim:

The ceilings are white pine that the guys made from local milled wood…it’s light weight and looks great:

All of the old beadboard that was removed during demolition and was used in several places, including this small bedroom:

Beadboard on the ceiling of the porch:

Remember when we found the labeled pieces of beadboard from the 1920’s?

At some point I stained the new front door:

Once all the shiplap walls and wood ceilings were put up it was time to drywall! The downstairs looking from the living room towards the kitchen and dining room:

From the master bedroom looking into the master bathroom:

The upstairs landing:

Me vacuuming drywall dust:

We had our first snow at the farmhouse earlier this year!

I made this chart a while back to visually show our progress…so this gets us up to end of January (click for larger version)! Catching up!

 
You can read more posts about the Sixty-One Park Farmhouse here and follow more progress on Instagram here (@sixtyonepark) and here (@lilblueboo). 

Thanks so much for reading! Sixty-One Park will be a historic Airbnb starting this summer for those visiting Bryson City and the nearby Great Smoky Mountains National Park. I hope to have a calendar up soon!

If you’ve been following the Sixty-One Farmhouse on Instagram you know that we are finally in the stage of putting the house back together! It’s been a long road and I’ve been looking through photos from the end of 2017 to see how far we’ve come. Last September we had just finished most of the exterior of the house and finally had nailed down what we wanted the interior of the farmhouse to look like. Here are some photos of demolition just to remind everyone of what that entailed:

Never forget. 

It’s amazing what you can uncover about the history of a house during demolition…and sometimes there are more questions than answers. If you remember, I was able to track down a photo of the farmhouse from 1925 from the family of Grace and Vascal Williams:

I’m not even sure that the staircase was there yet because there used to be a doorway right into it:

The Downstairs Floor Plan:

Based on all the layers of the house we uncovered it was evident that the farmhouse had undergone many changes. Here’s the farmhouse 1st floor layout when we purchased the house:

There were a few changes we wanted to undo and a few changes we thought the farmhouse needed to modernize it:

1. Removed the “dining room” bathroom: The farmhouse originally only had one small downstairs bathroom and the floor was rotting out from under it. Either to account for that, or to add an additional bathroom, the dining room had been converted into a large bathroom and laundry. Not only was it an odd location for a bathroom, it also resulted in awkward hallways and door locations. We removed that entire bathroom right off the bat.
2. Moved the kitchen and dining room: The small awkward den between the old master bedroom and master bath resulted in a lot of dead space so something had to be rearranged. The centered picture window in that space was the perfect spot for a kitchen sink, it would just have to be reduced in size. Everything else fell into place after that. Having the kitchen, bar, dining room and living room all together made the perfect open floor plan. 
3. Created a master suite: We were able to move the master bedroom to the other side of the house where it still adjoined with the bathroom. We also added a small closet which was huge because there were no closets downstairs before. 
4. Added a laundry, small den and 1/2 bath: By rearranging rooms we ended up with much more space and were able to add a laundry room and a half bath. We also added a small den off the master bedroom where we can put a pull-out couch for renter’s with small kids. It also adds a second living area to the downstairs.  

The guys had an overall plan but they mostly just focused on one room at at time during the framing process. Jaime owns a local custom home building company (Perkins Enterprises) with his brother Erik so he’s an expert at this type of thing. The downstairs framing was well underway by the end of last summer…this is the new master bedroom and bathroom:

Mr. Plott (who grew up in the house) said that he remembers there being a cast iron stand-alone tub in the old bathroom but eventually it was changed to a shower:

We kept the downstairs bathroom in the same place just re-arranged it to work with the new location of the bedroom:

I should mention here that the guys also had to reenforce all the ceiling and floor beams to ensure the structural integrity of the old farmhouse! You can see the new ceiling joists in this photo of Jaime and Brett installing the new smaller window for over the sink in the new kitchen area:

The Upstairs Floor Plan:

With three potential bedrooms on the second floor we really wanted to add a bathroom upstairs if it was possible. The guys basically started took it down to the bare bones because that was the only way to do it right:

Once all the walls were opened up the guys were able to find additional space: 

Here’s the original upstairs floor plan:

And here’s the new one with a new bathroom that opens up to the upstairs bathroom as well as the landing so it can be accessed but the two other bedrooms:

Framing in the new upstairs bathroom:

Looking up into the old roof, just for fun. That’s old wormy chestnut…very rare these days but plentiful back in the early 1900s because of the chestnut blight:

Sometimes I wonder if some of the wood from the this house came from the old house that sat on the property before the farmhouse. Some of the wood in the farmhouse is REALLY old. You can see an old house in the bottom right of this photo that sat right where our farmhouse sits now. And that amazing house in the background? That’s J.H. Everett’s huge Victorian house! He’s the one that built the farmhouse back in 1911 and sold it the next year. That amazing mansion doesn’t exist anymore…the First Baptist church sits there now. Can you imagine tearing that thing down?! Makes me want to cry. Anyway, the enormous mansion was built for Everett as a wedding present from his parents. According to The Heritage of Swain County it was built between 1875 and 1880 by Rufus Summerrow. I wish I could go back in time and chain myself to it when they decided to tear it down. I would. The hill in the background is where our current ranch house sits…so much coolness in one old early 1900s photo:

(Photo from The Heritage of Swain County 1988)

I’m jumping forward a bit but we did redo the roof of the farmhouse around October and it was at that point that we could really see the old roof vs. new.  You can see how the screen porch was converted into the kitchen in the 1940’s (Maybe I’ve missed my calling as a house detective…I kind of become obsessive about it.):

Here’s what the house looks like patched together from the inside…the insulation you see is the only insulation in the whole house…and I’m guessing it was added in the 1940s as well. That’s the old kitchen stove chimney which we sadly had to take out because it was crumbling:

I’m just going to share one last photo for now because this post is getting a little long. My favorite from this past year…Jaime and Brett taking a break from rebuilding a floor. They are the hardest workers I know! And I think the photo looks so timeless (except for the McFlurry and ShopVac):

You can read more posts about the Sixty-One Park Farmhouse here and follow more progress on Instagram here (@sixtyonepark) and here (@lilblueboo). 

Thanks so much for reading! The most often asked question we get is what we are going to do with it! It will be a historic Airbnb starting this summer for those visiting Bryson City and the nearby Great Smoky Mountains National Park.