Bogworts Restoration: Mid-Winter Update

The dust is clearing and we can start to see ahead, so it's time to give you an update on our progress. I arrived here in April 2025 to help manage some needed work on the farm and to see if the house could be made habitable. During the summer there were several large jobs that happened, plus, I spent several months helping out at YES Books, the Portland literary bookstore owned by my brother Russ.

In my few days each week on the farm, I started helping a neighboring farm get their market crops into the ground -- for a veg farmer, that is often the limit on how much you'll have available to sell later in the year. At Two Toad Farm, Marybeth organizes our County's major farmers markets, tends her cows, makes cheese and awesome yogurt, and helps Jordan in the field. Jordan grows veggies and pigs, helps Marybeth with the cows, and fixes the thousand and one implements and motors that keep the farm running.

Jordan helped me find tools and resources, and when we asked him about a team of horses that might twitch logs out of the woods for rebuilding the undercarriage of our house (more on that in a moment), he suggested we call Steve Collins of Belgian Meadows, right here in Lebanon. Jordan, who grew up in Lebanon, mentioned that Steve now has his childhood phone number, so he didn't even have to look it up. Mary thought that was a good sign, and quickly fell in with Steve when he returned our call. Mary drove horses in summers while attending Marlboro College in rural Vermont. Soon they were talking buckboards, vis-a-vis, cabriolets, and teams of four-in-hand. Steve told us he no longer had a working team, but we should come visit him anyway, so Mary could see all the carriages in his barn.

We went over to visit Steve and got a tour of his magically charming historic farm, where his wife Elecia gentles wild mustangs. Steve, older than me, has boundless energy, sparkling blue eyes, a thick mane of flowing white hair, and a booming voice. He wanted to know what I was cutting the timber for. I explained I needed an 8x8" beam to replace the old sill under our bathroom, and that I wanted it to be hemlock. He showed me his on-farm sawmill and pointed to a lone hemlock log sitting amongst a tower of white pine. The next day, he had milled the beam.

I drove back with Russ in the pickup truck and we brought home the beam and slid it out onto the field at the corner of the house. There it sat, for a week, as I got up the gumption to install it. We had learned about a ledgerboard technique from Mary's brother Tony. Restoring historic homes is a bit of a pastime in Mary's family. A few of her siblings counted up 30 houses between them. Tony's first project was a 1700s home in Amesbury, Massachusetts, also a plank-built home, for which he had done the very same thing of replacing sills using a ledgerboard, which holds up one side of the house so you can replace undercarriage timbers.

Our neighbor Jordan came over to look at it and gave his approval for using a ledgerboard and just doing it ourselves. He said he would come help when I got it ready. Russ came out again and helped me mount the ledgerboard on the side of the house and set the jacks. The next day, I was messing around by mysef and thought I'd just see about moving it into place. Minutes later, the new was sill was installed and I hadn't even called Jordan yet.

By now, it was late November and hitting single digit temperatures. Mary complained that I had the side of the house open. But this success in installing one beam gave me hope. During summer, prominent timber frame experts had priced the undercarriage work, but we didn't have the kind of money required. I called every carpenter I could find and no one wanted to do it.

Mary opined that houses like this one, built by farmers in the mid 1700s, were specifically designed so that a farmer could fix and replace timbers as needed, with trees growing on the property and the help of a few neighbors (there weren't many people around). The joists holding up our main floor are whole logs with bark on, with one side trimmed to a flat surface for laying floor boards on. Each end is hand-tapered to a square peg that fits into the beams for nail-free joinery.

I started talking to carpenters again, hoping to find someone idle enough in the winter months to take it on. I decided to proceed with cutting timber from the hemlock forest just across the pond, down from our front fields. I called Steve to see if he would help with cutting, hauling, and milling. He came over to scope trees and went down into the basement with me to look at the undercarriage. Impressed with my reckless bravado in installing the first beam single-handed, he offered to not only cut, haul, and mill, but also to bring his carpenter buddies and install the timbers with me. Farmer to farmer, we got the work done for a fraction of the quoted budget from the restoration professionals. We used modern tools, not chisels and hand saws, but the effect is very much the same. The work happened so quickly we are now a year ahead of schedule, with budget to spare for work that originally had to wait. We could start the chimney work to restore the main hearth in the center chimney.

Farmer-to-farmer networks can be incredibly helpful. Get to know your local farms. Help them. They may be able to help you when you really need it. Thanks to Jordan of Two Toad and Steve of Belgian Meadows -- and thanks double to their spouses who occasionally let them disappear for precious hours to help a neighbor farm.