Newtowners: Craig and Shirley Peterson

My wife and I had always talked about buying an old house. We rode by our current house and picked up one of the " for sale" pages they place in the front yards, looked at the house the first week of December and signed the contract to buy it on Christmas eve of 2000. It all happen so fast; if we had thought about it, we would probably would not have bought it after living in a subdivision for 30 years. But we didn't think about it, we just bought it!

Our plans were to work on it ourselves and be in it in ninety days. You see, we didn't have a clue about old houses.

Our first experience was with our insurance agent who nearly had heart failure when he saw the electrical system, so we completely rewired the house, the only job we hired out. The next job was the kitchen. After pulling out paneling, layers of wallpaper and all the plumbing, cabinets and sink and counter top we were ready to begin. It always seamed like we were waiting fore something to come in, or something to be ordered or reordered, or just the right this or just the right that, so we moved on to the other rooms in the house. We stripped wallpaper, we stripped paint, we patched plaster and patched floors, we sprayed in insulation, a job that cannot be appreciated unless it is done in the middle of July by the way. In our spare time we painted, glazed windows, stripped doors, shimmed what needed to be shimmed, shortened what was too long, added on to what was too short, replaced what was rotten, and straightened what was crooked.

When we weren't working we were looking for something we needed, and couldn't find, but more often finding something we didn't need.

As time went by the hard jobs got easier, the impossible jobs got finished, the big jobs got to be fewer, the small jobs went faster, and the whole house started to look like something.

We didn't come close to getting into the house in ninety days like we thought we would. Actually it took a year and a half. All of a sudden things began to come together. The kitchen was finished, new cabinets took the place of the tin cabinets that were there, tile replaced linoleum squares, and all the plumbing worked. Newly painted and glazed windows replaced rotten windows with broken or missing panes, new clean bright colors replaced grimy discolored paint, light bulbs hanging from cords were replaced by new fixtures or ceiling fans.

The last big job was the floors. They were in horrible condition, untouched in eighty-five years. Luckily our older son had experience in sanding, and he jumped into the job.

All of a sudden the whole thing started to come together. We were ready to move in. What was a dilapidated, run down vacant old house, had become a home again. What was, over the years, apartments, had been returned to what it looked like in 1914 when the house, originally built in 1792 had its last addition, and major restoration.

You just can't imagine the pride we have, in the old house now. The house originally built by a revolutionary war soldier has been given what we hope is another fifty or one hundred years to be home to us and those who come after us, before the next restoration will be needed. We have been lucky enough to have been chosen, if only by fate, to be caretakers for a time, to be part of the history of the house, called the Smith Thompson House, after the original owner.

Our next goal is the restoration of the neighborhood. We know we will not be doing it alone, but we do know we can be part of the whole picture.