End of September 2011 Update

Last Friday, Eric had surgery on his ankle. The good news is that the breaks were much simpler than expected with no other damage and no bone grafts. The bad news is that he will still be on crutches with no weight bearing for 8 weeks. He's doing pretty well although he already feels house bound. After returning to the Dr. next week, we're hoping we can begin getting him out of the house for a little while at a time.

Meanwhile, things at the family business have picked up somewhat. It appears many people & businesses need to have a survey before the weather turns bad. We're not complaining because the really slow season always comes too soon. We need to stay busy as long into winter as possible and hope for an early spring. It is amazing, meanwhile, how much Eric has been able to accomplish in the past 10 days while keeping his leg elevated. Not to mention the pain levels he has been tolerating.

As for Toad Hall, the structural engineer has decided he can move forward with the plans for stabilization of the back wall without the survey, thank heavens. Once he submits his plan, we can send it to the contractor to be put into a plan. We're still hopeful we'll get the back wall stabilization and maybe some additional work completed before winter sets in. Another priority will be to get the plasterer in to save moulds of the crown moulding on the ground floor before the cold weather destroys what is left. These mouldings are incredible and we want to be sure we can replicate with the restoration work.

While we're not able to move forward with much in the way of actual improvements at the moment, Amanda & I are concentrating on putting together a detailed project plan & assigning priorities. It gets pretty discouraging when the plan is pretty high level and still has over 1000 lines/tasks and it seems everything is a priority. We're also working some more on the history. We've found some pretty amazing documentation over the past several days. It's sad to say we were digging through the documents while Eric was in surgery. We're trying not to be obsessive but we're trying to keep it all in balance. Once we have more details and have confirmed our sources, we'll be sharing it with all of you.

What kinds of posts are you enjoying on our blog? Do you enjoy learning the history of the house and owners? Are you only interested in the preservation work? Let us know either here on the blog or on Facebook if there is anything in particular you're interested in seeing. We want this blog to be helpful to others interested in preserving old houses as well as a diary of sorts regarding our adventure. Let us know if there are questions about the processes/resources we are using to do either the restoration or history work. And thank you for following our story.

Mary