When Jesus left this world after His resurrection, He made it clear that He was going to preparing a place for us, that He would come again to receive His own, and that His home will be ours. We will be there with Him also.

A place becomes a real home when it holds memories of times you have shared there with those you love. Ellen’s parents back yard at their farm was where we lived the first time we came back from Zaire, but the house-trailer was there no longer and the farm was being sold. Since we were able to borrow $25,000 from my dad, to pay cash to her dad, we were able to close the deal on the old Jouben farmhouse with no bank loan, no inspections, and no survey.

When we returned from Zaire the second time, that house was vacant. We had agreed to buy it, so her parents had taken several truckloads of trash to the dump, had cleaned it out, and gotten it set up for us. There were several paper bags of basic groceries that the First Baptist Church had donated as a welcome gift. We found the furniture and kitchen items from our house-trailer, a bedroom set from Ellen’s grandparents, plus a variety of pieces gleaned from the attics of the two old farmhouses. According to Ellen, our house was furnished in “Early Attic”.

After the long flight and the seven-hour time change from Africa, our five children were wide awake and hungry before light the next morning. Ellen served corn flakes and milk. They sat happily in a circle on the clean kitchen floor. Mom and Dad got the chairs. It was to be our very own home!  We were eager to find out everything about our new home. The kids wanted to explore the falling down barns, especially the great big three story barn.

I was thinking about the house, the missing window upstairs with the sagging floor beneath it. The rain had been entering for I didn’t know how long, nor could I guess the condition of the beams under the wide board floors. We had seen the house four years ago, and before that we knew it was very old, had built in cupboards in the kitchen, had nice proportions, a practical floor plan and was in a perfect location.

The water worked and it was even hot!  The drain from the kitchen sink, however, ended just beneath the kitchen floor.

The description of the property and our agreement together was formalized by a lawyer, and the change in ownership was duly recorded in the Otsego county record of deeds in Cooperstown. Ellen and I were land-owners and began paying taxes in New York. Our vacant farmland with old buildings in disrepair wasn’t assessed very heavily.

The kids found the barns fascinating. The fact that they hiked through grass and weeds higher than their heads didn’t deter them at all. I found a deep open ditch from the back of the house that passed the collapsing porch, to the side of the nearest barn. There in the weeds, was a coil of ¾ inch black water pipe. The house foundation under the porch was broken, leaning outward, no longer supporting the wall above.

Clearly, I needed to prop up the porch roof hanging from the back wall of the kitchen addition to the original house. The ridge line sagged down nearly a foot from the old mark on the wood-stove chimney. The weight of that unsupported porch roof had pulled the walls apart, letting the rafters spread, allowing the peak to come down in the center. I needed to pull the walls back together.

The kids were delighted to run around in our big old house, but I noticed the floor shook from their little feet. Ellen’s dad played “Touched you last” with them, and was often too quick for them to catch. I needed to put a post under the main beam under the living room. Why not build a fireplace on that wall?

Ellen’s dad was the one who had installed a new jet pump to the well and changed the water heater just before we returned from Africa. After completing his milk testing responsibilities for Cornell University he dropped in almost every day to help in whatever urgent repair project I decided to tackle next.

Ellen and her mom found the upstairs walls a mess, the multiple layers of old wall paper loose in many places. The last layer of paper had been painted, but kids had added their own crayon drawings and scribblings to the walls of their rooms, any way they wanted. The four bedrooms and hall, all needed to be totally redecorated. The lath and plaster work had been well done, more than a century earlier, and was still tight and smooth.

They found an old hardware store in West Winfield to be the cheapest place to buy wallpaper and paint. They were eager to get started. Our kids were soon helping their mom and grandma fix up their rooms. The family was all involved in making the ancient house, our new home.

Ellen’s dad knew I could buy windows salvaged from demolished houses at Pelnicks, so we got what we needed to replace the upstairs window plus glass for me to repair the broken windows on the front porch. We used the gravel bucket on his old Ford tractor, a Jubilee model 500, to lift up the back porch roof so it could be propped up with the cedar poles we cut in his swamp. I chiseled a hole through the rock house foundation for the water connection to the barn, unrolled the black pipe and laid it in the ditch Eric had dug. He used the Ford to fill the ditch.

To pull the walls together we stretched cables between long eye-bolts passing through the heavy top beams of the addition. The farm cable-jacks didn’t tension our cables sufficiently, so I added beams, resting on the cables, with posts to push up on the rafters above. This increased the tension on the cables and forced the ridge back up to where it belonged.

We needed to solve the water problem. Hot water came in and went out of the kitchen sink but drained into the crawl space below the kitchen. There was another more serious problem, however, the septic system refused to accept any more water. The ancient cast iron pipe led to a metal tank just outside the old parlor window, beside the front porch. The top of the tank had rusted through.

For our new septic system there was no engineering study, no permit for home improvements, and no loan from the bank. Ellen’s dad had done this kind of thing before. A schedule forty PVC system replaced all the cast iron pipe drains and was connected to a low profile metal septic tank buried in the back yard. The drain field was PVC pipe in crushed stone, all covered over with what we had dug up to make the ditches. We ran the kitchen water into PVC piping down under the broken foundation and into a similar kind of gravel covered drain. We found any adaptor we needed at Anderson’s Hardware and eventually all the water that came into the house went back into the ground in the back yard.

Having no kitchen table or chairs didn’t make much difference that first morning we had corn flakes, but not being able to cook anything had to be solved. We went to the Fireman’s auction and bid on a Formica topped kitchen table and chairs. Somehow we got two tables and a number of outdated chairs with chrome legs and torn plastic covered seats. For $50 we bought a two oven gas range that had been in a fire. The heat hadn’t damaged the stove very much, but it was filthy. Ellen found new seats for the chairs at K-Mart and even got the smoke color off the glass oven doors of the range.

The Turnpike Penny Saver listed a two door fridge-freezer with an icemaker that ended up costing us only $150. Apparently no one wanted it, because there was a deep bullet dent in the right side. The accident scared the owner and he didn’t want to think of what could have happened. Ellen hung a decorative hot mat over the hole.

It was quite a drive to the place where a washer and dryer were offered for sale, but they were still there when we arrived. They wanted to sell a large freezer as well. The prices were so low; we were able to purchase all three pieces for only $50 more than what we had paid for the fridge. The young family had a beautiful house but no longer wanted to live together and were getting rid of their belongings as fast as they could. It was sad.

Ellen’s dad knew how much she enjoyed gardening and had given us a head start on the garden that Eric had used. The kids helped their mom keep ahead of the weeds. They picked potato bugs from those plants too, and eventually helped dig up the potatoes. They joyfully discovered even more zucchini and warm ripe tomatoes on the vines. She and her mom had always canned and frozen the fresh produce from the garden, so together they began preparing for winter.

The fall weather in New York is beautiful, the perfect time to paint a house, if possible. The weathered siding on the house had last been painted grey at least thirty years earlier. We wanted it to be white and clean, with blue doors. We were able to afford the cheapest exterior paint available at K-Mart, so, with the help of our Christian family from church, we completed the painting of our house. Fall is also the last chance to fill the cellar and half the garage with firewood.

We remembered the cold winter in New York from living in our house-trailer five years earlier. On a windy night, the oil furnace in that place couldn’t keep it warm, even though we had stacked bales of hay all around the house to try to stop heat loss from beneath our trailer. Those walls were so thin that a damp sheet next to the wall could freeze to it. We turned on the gas oven and left the door open when it was really cold.

There was a coal furnace in the farmhouse cellar, a Sears Indestructo, designed to last forever, built on the bedrock. The long levers at the side of the thick ash door rotated grates in the firebox designed to break up clinkers that could build up after burning coal all night. A heavy crank made of cast iron fit on the square ends of the firebox base to shake down the ash so it could be shoveled out. A heaped shovel full of coal could easily fit in through the firebox door. The fire dome was cast in such a way that the maximum exchange surface was available to heat the circulating air ducted to the house. The envelope of tin that surrounded the coal burning unit was completely coated with asbestos to minimize heat loss to the basement. The furnace dominated the cellar with the asbestos covered pipes reaching up like great arms to the hot air grills on the floor of the house, and uninsulated cold air returns ducted cold air to the base of the unit. The air was transferred by convection currents depending on gravity. Electricity wasn’t an option when it was installed. It was a coal furnace designed to burn anthracite coal. I added a booster-fan in the long duct to the kitchen addition. I bought a Woodmaster wood stove so I could burn fire-wood in the kitchen.

Coal trucks no longer delivered coal. The basement coal bin area had many years earlier been converted into a water cistern in which to store rain water for the house. More recently Eric had broken out a wall to increase wood storage space near the furnace. He had lost space when he made what had been a large wood shed off the kitchen into his garage. The Sears Indestructo coal furnace stood solidly in place with burning wood from the farm the only option to provide heat for my family.

I bought a used blue Homelite chain saw at Woodcutters Headquarters in Barneveld, and Ellen’s dad and I spent hours cutting and splitting firewood. We used the Ford tractor and a wood wagon Eric had built and hauled load after load down from the woods. Our kids helped stack firewood until every available space in the cellar was filled. I used my chain saw to cut a hole in the house from the cellar up through the roof so I could build the foundation on the bedrock, install a fireplace in the living room above, and run the chimney out through the roof. I used fans to boost the circulation in the Heatalator, so heat from around the firebox could be ducted upstairs.

We planned to be warm in our house together that winter.

Without God’s blessing the builder labors in vain. God was blessing our family even though we did get very cold that winter when the wood supply was gone.