Stone House-Strange Findings

[Baba]

A few strange things we found at the Stone House
http://babasfarmlife.blogspot.com/20...-findings.html

[mommagoose_99]

Aren't old houses fun? Our house was built around 1860 and had loads of surprises. The house had been abandoned in the winter time and broken water pipes caused many of the ceilings to colapse. Several rooms had old newspapers from the 1920's glued to the walls. IN the kitchen we found a cheese knife in the wall. My daughter was afraid we would find a walled in corpse but thankfully she was wrong. The front porch needed to be rebuilt and we found many generations of toys under there.
Our barn needed a new foundation and when the one corner was jacked up there was an old grist wheel under there. It was about 5 feet across the middle. The barn also yielded a very large stone with a wrought iron ring for tying up the horses.
In the 1860's the farm was where the horses lived that pulled the local stage coach. We are always finding horseshoes. On windy stormy nights both my husband and daughter have dreams that the horses are loose . Hubby even jusmped out of bed one night yelling for me to help him catch the horses. WE DON"T HAVE ANY HORSES!
Linda

[Baba]

Wow! Sound wonderful to me. I think the house's previous owners are still talking to you. What a fun adventure this is.

[gone-a-milkin]

Baba, your blog is very good.

Maybe somebody dumped those concrete pieces there to use them to make a patio? Big concrete slabs can be used for building walkways, etc..

If you aren't going to use them, you can break them smaller with a sledge hammer. Smaller pieces=easier lifting.

[Farmerwilly2]

Might the wallboard just be pegboard? Might the pipe have been gas pipe? I vote for wood floors. Replace what can't be salvaged.

[Callieslamb]

I once built two 60 foot curved planting beds along the curving slope of a hill with concrete pieces - a dump truck dumped them over the edge of the hill and I busted them up with a sledge hammer. They made a terrific-looking wall.

As for the flooring. If it can't be saved for floor, maybe the wood can be salvaged to make something else? Shelves or cupboards? DH and I were going to use a hardwood floor to make kitchen cupboards once. We ended up not buying the house, but we had a good design for the cupboard doors.

[Common Tator]

I have seen smaller concrete pieces used like stacked stone for planters, etc. You might try breaking them up to make yourself some raised garden beds!

[cfabe]

There is a wall plastering method that uses a prefab backer board with holes in it that is plastered over. It was an alternative method to using wood lathe. I would guess it was used maybe in the 30s-40s time frame. So if the wall is hard plaster (not drywall) and the plaster looks like it is flowing out the back of the holes in the board, maybe that's what you have.

The pipe, who knows. See where it goes to.

[Cygnet]

Could the pipe have once belonged to a radiator?

[Baba]

The Radiator sounds like a great possibility. And I am sure that is the type of wall board we had in the one place. As for the concrete slabs the raised beds sounds good to me and maybe a wall too. Thanks for the great ideas!

[blufford]

Lots of neat ideas for broken slabs.


http://www.the-artistic-garden.com/r...-concrete.html

http://landliving.com/articles/0000000515.aspx

http://www.wikihow.com/Use-Pieces-of...o-Build-a-Wall

[Jan in CO]

Baba, in doing a search of Wiley to see how far you are from us ( we live in Ellicott), I found the town was named after a man named Wiley, head of the Holly Sugar Company. That large slab of concrete looks like it was part of the 'trough' that diverts water from a windmill to cooling troughs in a dairy or milk building. If you go to the county assessor, they should have records back to when dirt was new on the property, who owned it, what remodeling was done, etc. Some have pictures, etc. Get to know the people there and they'll let you make copies of the abstract. Neat find! Jan in Co

[Macybaby]

We had a lot of old pine flooring in our house. Unfortuanly we had to rip it all up because the underlying structure was not sound. Didn't have enough salvaged to put back down so we saved it for our kitchen cabinets. It's really nice, straight tight grain, almost no knots. Have not got to the point of building the cabinets yet, but we are almost there. BTW0 the oldest part of our house was built in 1875. DH says we will NEVER do something like this again LOL! I don't feel the same, so he says I'll need a different husband, but he did say I can have all the tools, as he'll never need them.

Cathy

[beowoulf90]

The concrete has many uses, so use your imagination and see what you can come up with.
If you can save the floor do so. In our old house we have random width and random length pine floors. Some we could save some we couldn't..

Good luck in your endeavers..

Oh I forgot to add; As to the walls with "pegboard" they would have used anything they could find on hand to patch or repair a wall, especially if it was going to be covered in plaster... We've found all kinds of stuff behind some of these types of walls...
Unfortunately no gold yet

[Baba]

LOL Macybaby that's so funny!
Jan - HI Neighbor! We will visit the county assessor a lot I'm thinking.
Thanks Beowoulf90 - I will try to use the concrete for something.

[clovis]

I agree with the others; the pegboard may have been used as a lath system for the plaster.

Save the old wood floors. They could be a wonderful selling point if you ever sell. Can you patch one room with boards from the 'pit' room? We did this on a rehab, and it worked perfectly. A belt sander might take off the old paint if neccessary, and at least the wood will match better.

Just curious if the old pipe is a gas line? Maybe used to supply gas for a single light fixture or room heater? Maybe a Griswold gas burner??? Maybe a gas line for a hot water heater of some sort??? (Often called a tank heater.)

Any evidence that part of the house had been used for an apartment or tennent use?

In my town, there is not hardly a house that doesn't have remnants of a WWII era apartment. There was an army base nearby, and apartments were scarce.

Clove

[Baba]

We are now thinking that the pipe was for a centrally located radiator. It is a water pipe definately. And that makes the most sense for it's location.

We will certainly try to save all the wood flooring that we can. I can hardly wait!

[Quint]

I was planting some shrubs for my mother when I was a kid and we found a large concrete structure in the yard of the house in town we were living in at the time. It may have been an old cistern or similar device.

It was a large concrete box about 20x20 and about 6 ft tall. One opening about big enough to walk through on one end. It was completely bare inside other than some dirt which had seeped in from where the one opening had been bricked up. The top of the structure was about 4 feet under the lawn behind the house.

I was helping dig some holes for some shrubs and trees when I hit concrete. I thought it was just a concrete slab and figured I could bust it into paces and haul it out of the hole. After considerable beating and chiseling and prying with a crowbar I discovered it wasn't a slab but the top of a big concrete box. Made a hole and slid a ladder down and was really shocked to see how big it was. We never did figure out what it was. Nothing in it.

I wanted to open it up and use it for a clubhouse or something but we ended up just covering the hole I'd made in the top and planting the shrubs somewhere else.

[Cygnet]

Coulda been a cistern -- however, you said it had a bricked-in entrance?

I'm having a Nancy Drew moment here, but I'm wondering if that might have been a shelter. Depending on the age/location, you may have stumbled across an old bomb shelter. They were fairly common in the 1950's. or a storm cellar/root cellar.

OTOH, I often wonder what archeologists will make of the cistern in the back yard of my grandmother's old house. I dunno how deep it is (too deep to see the bottom through the water when you shone a flashlight into it), but it's about 20X20 in dimension, and has a lacework of copper pipes through it -- Which are probably still there because it was full of water when they sealed it up, so no easy to way to get the copper pipes out.

Grandpa had solar mirrors, see, for heating and that cistern was full of water used as the heat sink. The mirrors heated the water in the cistern (via some wizardry that I never quite followed as they weren't pointed at it) and then the copper pipes full of water were used to transfer the heat to two houses for subfloor heating and hot water (at near boiling temps) for both houses.

It's long sealed up now, and the last time I drove by there, someone had a car parked on that "concrete slab" ... looks like they never got the memo about there being a cistern under the slab. Hope it never falls in ... splash!

(I can remember during the 1980's my folks occasionally talking about draining the cistern and making a bomb shelter.)

-- Leva

Originally Posted by Quint

I was planting some shrubs for my mother when I was a kid and we found a large concrete structure in the yard of the house in town we were living in at the time. It may have been an old cistern or similar device.

It was a large concrete box about 20x20 and about 6 ft tall. One opening about big enough to walk through on one end. It was completely bare inside other than some dirt which had seeped in from where the one opening had been bricked up. The top of the structure was about 4 feet under the lawn behind the house.

I was helping dig some holes for some shrubs and trees when I hit concrete. I thought it was just a concrete slab and figured I could bust it into paces and haul it out of the hole. After considerable beating and chiseling and prying with a crowbar I discovered it wasn't a slab but the top of a big concrete box. Made a hole and slid a ladder down and was really shocked to see how big it was. We never did figure out what it was. Nothing in it.

I wanted to open it up and use it for a clubhouse or something but we ended up just covering the hole I'd made in the top and planting the shrubs somewhere else.

[Baba]

Quint sounds like you found an old bomb shelter for sure.
I haven't noticed any pipes in the cistern. So I'm sure its not connected to anything, but we will be using it!