Prologue

This is the story of Jonathan Hill, a builder-contractor who specializes in restorations.

Jon was born in South Alabama and grew up on a small farm. He learned about basic hand tools there. By age 18, he was very accomplished with his hands.

Jon’s father worked winters as a propane delivery driver. The family grew feed corn and a few pigs and chickens to get by.

Now 33 years old, Jon thought he had found a gem when he looked up at the 1700s-era house. It is three stories tall and sits on a five-foot-high red brick foundation.

The house is just five city blocks from the waterfront tourist area in Newport, Rhode Island.

The house foundation’s ancient brickwork has been redone many times. It looks a patchwork of repairs that had been done over centuries. It seemed it was often done by sloppy brick layers. The brick and repointing ( outer mortar work ) have a messy appearance. That he can fix.

The house is only 25 feet wide by 45 feet deep. Houses in 1700 were tiny by today’s standards. The first impression it gives is of an austere look. It does look normal for a pre-revolutionary house.

The house has three stories and a half basement. This house would have been considered well-to-do in its era.

The front door is a dirty yellow. The two top floors of the house have been divided into four small apartments. The previous owner rented the small efficiency apartments to college students.

The ground floor was where the latest owner had lived; she had recently passed on. That apartment was in decent shape and required very little work on the interior. The almost 1100 square feet bottom floor is just comfortable enough for one or two.

The house’s front door hides a small vestibule; one inner door goes to the bottom floor. The other door leads to a small stairwell that goes upstairs to the apartments.

The bottom floor originally had three bedrooms. One wall had been removed to make a large master bathroom. That was an illegal modification that was done some time in the past. The city had no record of it. The other bedroom has a desk and chairs.

The owner had rented out the four rooms on the two top floors. The apartments are close enough to a private Catholic university to be useful for its students. The antique furniture remains on the ground floor. The four apartments above have modern, sturdy furniture suitable for college students.

They are quite small apartments. They provide a better option than the dorms. They are in close walking distance of good shopping, restaurants and trendy bars.

From the front of the house, you see the main entry and two windows on the ground floor. A cement set of steps leads up to the front door.

The second floor has three windows, one for each apartment on that floor. The third floor has one window. It is a converted attic. Most of the third floor is taken up by eves in the sides. The eves are too short to be used as living space and the usable area had been walled off.

There are windows on the back side of the building that provide circulation.

In the era when the house was built, it had narrow alleyways on the sides, those remain today. The building’s sides are plain and barren looking.

In the back, it has a postage-sized yard with a small empty garage. A steel stairway is attached at the back of the house. That stairway is not period correct but required by city code.

There is a small setback in front between the sidewalk and the house. It has cement pavers with an iron picket fence around it. There are clay pots scattered around with flowers and small bushes in them. Jon is considering if it needs to go or be redone. A project for later?

Inside the front door is the tiny vestibule with two doors, The left is the main floor entry for the owner’s level. The other door is the access point to a narrow zig-zag staircase that goes up to the other two floors.

Outside, the dirty-looking white exterior is a layer of old vinyl siding. It was a cheap way of covering what Jon thinks was the original shiplap siding. The vinyl siding has to come down, it’s old, cracked, and just plain ugly.

It is also not historical. He had dealt with the historical society when he got involved with the purchase of the property.

Due to changes in the city laws, if the siding comes down, it has to be replaced with a period-proper exterior in an appropriate color that was used in the late 1700s.

The house is reported to have been built at the turn of the 1700s. The original owner was named Captain Peter Crisswell. That is the name of the house in the city records.

It has been written that Captain Crisswell had gone on one of his many voyages, and his ship had not returned. There is nothing strange about that; that was a common occurrence in the early 1700s.

After Captain Crisswell failed to return, the town took over the house and resold it. At this time, it has seen its better days.

The brick foundation hides a half-height basement. The house’s services are located in the basement. The half-basement does not go all the way to the back. Jonathan went inside the basement and inspected the house’s bones and the services there.

On top of the brick foundation, he found the main foundation footers were made of 16” X 16” cedar. They are in excellent shape. That’s a surprise. Huge floor beams go across the width of the house. They look to be of red oak. The bones of the structure were probably all red oak.

The services in the half-floor basement currently have two squat hot water heaters for the house. One water heater goes to the owner’s apartment. The other feeds the apartments above.

There is a boiler for heating the house. The 1950s-era boiler supplies the home’s old cast iron steam registers.

Soon, after moving in, he will tire of the ancient boiler and the hot summertime temperatures. He will replace the current heating system with two Mini-Split systems from Mr. Cool.

Jon sees from underneath that there is no insulation at all. He is also looking up at the underside of the original wood flooring and the house’s wiring and piping. The original floors were some type of pine. Jon is not an expert on the colonial pine available in this area. He uses his fingernail to decide the pine is very hard and dense.