Breeze Way New Gate and Repairs

 This is a comparison of original nails to Home Depot nails made in Taiwan. Makes it tough to do repairs.

Before the gate...

Built a new gate out of mainly original wood from the house. Mainly for Max and Lady our dogs.

Ready for painting....

Finished product!

Rotten wood on the breezeway. I figured out how this happened....crossing of the roof where the rain comes down. Original timber almost totally rotten.

Took original timbers from the back of the house for repair work.

Cut the rotten part of the cover board and put another together.

Final product!

More rotten wood on the back side of the house....had to take off boards and replace.

Ready for pudy....

Had to cut about an inch underside...more rotten wood.

Final product again!

Second Guest Bedroom

This is a second guest bed room above my office. It was in pretty good shape except the corner by the fire place. There was some rotten wood from rain damage over the years. After several months the room is done all except the floor.

This shot is how the room looked when I bought the home.

Before I got going on the room I had taken the fire place mantel off and found some interesting items. You can see on the right side the rotten boards I had to replace.

            

Took time to repair this section.

     

Had some more bat problems in the window dormer. Had to cut the ceiling and remove the stuff.

Window side of the room. Originally had to take all the bottom boards at the base of the ceiling slanted boards off due to the bat poop that had piled up.

Repair work shown. Had to sand the walls, caulk and do repairs to some parts of the wood. Then primed and ready for the top coat of paint.

Door area before start of all the hard work

Finished with the room at this point except the floor!

Lizzy hard at work on the restoration

Took off the door hardware and restored it too!

Now for the floor restoration

One side done

When the sun hit the floor beauty

Now enjoying a beautiful office for Lizzy

Before the Purchase of the House

The Hardy Smith House was run down and in danger of being torn down. Luckily the Captain Hardy Smith Camp #104 Sons of Confederate Veterans got together and became the lead force in Dublin, Georgia to preserve the home. The purchase of the home from the remaining members of the Smith Family occurred circa 1995.

Lynard and Dynard Sanders twins who did the fine craftsmanship on the restoration pre-purchase. Here they are on top of the roof of the front part of the house with the rebuilt chimney.

Side view of the house facing the Methodist Church.

 

This is the other side.

Leaking roof almost ruined the house.

Back part of the house where the kitchen is.

My office located on the right.

 Front view of the house.

 Another front view.

 Back view of the house.

Root Cellar

In 1873 there was no air conditioning, in-door toilets or electricity. So how to store your vegetables? A root cellar! Root cellars are for keeping food supplies at a low temperature and steady humidity. They keep food from freezing during the winter and keep food cool during the summer months to prevent spoilage.

The root cellar at the house was apparently not used after the kitchen had burned down around the turn of the 20th century. Soon thereafter electricity and refrigeration were in use taking the place of the need for root cellars.

Upon purchase of the house it was apparent that the cellar was used to dump trash and it flooded. Here is a shot of the flooding before anything was done.

It took a couple of months in 2010 to dig out all the trash, bricks, rocks and some treasures found. It was probably about two tons of materials removed.

This shot shows the room cleaned up all the way to the original floor. The original floor was completely covered by river rocks. A few are shown here.

 

After a couple of years we had to find a way to utilize this room. So we had some stairs built. The flooding is still an issue so this is treated wood.

Next step.....gravel to coat the floor.

 

   Here is an example of the type of flooding with heavy rains. Lucky we have a good pump.

And finally a good work shop is now in place. Everything is up on boards or bricks to keep from being ruined by the flooding.

From the outside new shutters for the root cellar. The wood for these shutters came from 100 year old timbers.