Once Upon an Old House - Part 1

I live in what most people would call the country and there is one thing I have learned about living in the country. You are either an old house person or a new house person. It’s like being dog people or cat people, apple people or android people. There is no gray area, it is totally one or the other. 

Like I have previously written, I live in a 100 year old house, so there is no doubt where my love lies. I am truly an old house person. I love everything about an old house that is exclusive to the people that built and created a home. I am not discriminatory, I love all styles of old homes. From the castles of England & Scotland, old southern plantations, centuries old shotgun houses of the French Quarter right down to the dilapidated and abandoned farmhouses that litter the NC countryside. Old homes have so many stories to tell just by walking through them.

The resurrection of an old abandoned farm house is one of my very favorite things to witness. It is a slow painstaking process, not for the timid or weak minded individual. It takes someone with the gift (and it is a God given gift) to see something so neglected, see the potential - and give it life.

This is will be the multi- part story of one such abandoned and neglected farm house, the man with the gift and the vision, and the process of restoring a once beautiful home that was, for all intents and purposes a condemned dwelling. This was a home that would have been destroyed had he not seen what once was and could be again. Bless his heart!

I have lived in my home for 14 years, I drive the same stretch of highway several times a day going to work, delivering and picking up children and running errands. These woods have looked the same for as long as I can remember.

Look carefully… it is there. Only a few feet off the road. I never knew there was a house hidden under all that growth. But someone else did! And so it begins….