After purchasing Carter's Tavern the fun began.  The bathrooms were a colonial nightmare from the 1970s.  Linoleum crafted to look like wood planks, Formica counter-tops masquerading as stone and those wonderful one piece plastic shower/tub combos.  The kitchen was a one piece metal unit with a built in refrigerator, stove, oven and sink complete with overhead storage.  Perfect for a camper!!!  But not a historic structure as this.  I understand the original restorers intent on doing these things because they wanted to make the least impact on the structure and its integrity.  However, to live in it even on a part time basis, those items had to be changed and done so in a manner on the same level as the original builders of the tavern.

One day I was in Halifax wandering through an antique store and asked the lady at the front desk about a cabinetmaker.  She pointed to one right next door to the building we were standing in.  I walked up the hill to a weather beaten, clap board sided building that had the artisans name engraved on a shingle hanging over the front door.  He was open to my surprise and I walked in and immediately started the laundry list of items that I needed done.  When he realized what house I was talking about he said "you don't need me, but my son instead".  Come to find out his son, Barry Thompson, was trained in carpentry at Colonial Williamsburg.  The creative juices started to flow since I found the perfect person to create cabinetry that looks as if it could have been there at the beginning.

Before we could get to the fun stuff of cabinets, kitchens and baths, we had to clean the house and work on, the 30 plus year old HVAC system that was hardly ever used.  More on that later and yes it has been replaced with a new high SEER system.

Since the house was empty, our painter refreshed all the white washed plaster (now two layers of sheetrock) with gleaming creamy white paint.  We rented a commercial floor buffer to clean all the floors with TSP.  That would horrify most house museum curators that we were removing dirt, maneuver, and God knows what else that was drug into the house over the past two plus centuries.  Especially since George Washington himself partook of refreshments in this very public building on his way to see a friend in the northern end of the county.  Whether that is true or not, that is what local history states.  The floors were dirty and we were not going to live in a house with dirt encrusted floors.  So over the Thanksgiving holiday and a subsequent two or three extra weekends we completed the floor washing duty.

Since I was designing and building houses in North Carolina I had access to many trades people that could do odds and ends for us on the house.  The next chore was the back porches and to some extent the front ones as well.  The decking was rotted and all the posts were starting to penetrate through to the sill.  So I brought up a couple of my weekend warrior type carpenters and started tackling those areas.  I had a local sawmill in NC mill bevel decking boards for me to replace was what there.  In old house fashion, one the brick piers decided to fall over while the reconstruction was happening.  After the mason had righted that wrong, the carpenters could continue their job. At the same time I was having the outside stripped and readied for paint.  That's another can of worms!!!!

Neither my spouse or I agree on much when it comes to the house(s).  He has his ideas and I have mine, but I'm right.  Normally!!!  What we agreed upon, amazingly enough, is to paint the house one color except for the windows and doors.  That was a very prevalent practice back in the 18th and early 19th centuries.  The color was a dark gray, with black sashes and red doors.  The porch flooring was another story.  We thought the red would be interesting on that, but we were wrong.  That was quickly changed to black.

We are now into the spring of the following year and all the above work is taking place.  What was I doing other than coordinating everyone was re-glazing windows!!!  That was like being sent to hell.  I can imagine that's what it must be like, repetition.  I had done enough re-glazing in New England for a lifetime, but here I was doing it again in the hot, muggy South.  Mind you there is only fifteen windows in the whole house along with two swinging single sashes above the kitchen in the loft.  However, this is a Georgian-Federal home with multi-pane configuration, 9 over 9 to be exact.  So each window, times 2 sashes, takes a little time and patience to complete.  By the fall of that year the exterior envelope is complete and only the shutters remained to be restored.

I will leave you with a bucolic image from the front porch of the Tavern.  The view is like stepping back in time over two hundred years ago.  I doubt it has changed much from then to now.