The Long family, well known in this area, probably built the original house on this property in the 1880s or 1890s. They still owned the house when it caught fire and burned about 1912. With the help of friends and neighbors, the present  slightly larger, taller house was constructed over the same stone foundation, which was raised to give the basement its unusual nine-foot ceilings. Three cast-iron stoves - one each in the kitchen, living room and dining room - heated the house, and every downstairs room had a door that could be shut as a way of conserving heat.

The house was surrounded by the Long family’s 100+ acre farm (the old barn foundation can be seen on the northeast corner of the property).  Like most farmers in this area at the turn of the century, the Longs rented rooms to New Yorkers escaping the stifling summer heat. The house had 5 bedrooms in that era; there was no indoor bathroom, only an outhouse in the back yard. Having all those bedrooms, and a newer, taller 3^rd floor attic with windows, which the original house lacked, probably substantially improved summer income for the Long family.

The first lavatory was installed in the house sometime before WW II, in a pantry off the kitchen. The pantry eventually gave way to a full bathroom, and later still, a second full bath was installed in the bedroom at the top of the hall stairs. Much later, we sealed a door opening in the center hall and cut a new doorway between the smallest bedroom and the largest, and created a new master bath. Five bedrooms became four; four became three.

Back to our story…

In 1971, two couples from Long Island, Rosalyn & Ralph Limmer and Kal & Betty Seinfeld, bought the house as a weekend retreat. Kal Seinfeld owned a sign-making business on the Island, and Ralph Limmer was a union leader there. When Kal died in the 1980s, Betty was less inclined to make the trip - and perhaps busy watching her son’s career take flight - so she and the Limmers sold off a hundred acres of the property to the resort down in the valley below, and the Limmers bought the house and 3 acres, outright. Betty, Rosalyn & Ralph eventually bought houses and wintered together in Florida; the house in Callicoon stood empty much of the time. We spotted the house online one summer day in 2001. We bought it from Rosalyn and Ralph in short order.

Then we decided to make a few changes.

When we bought the house it was encased in 2 layers of old-style siding. The under layer was a Depression-era faux-stone board, and the top, exposed layer was that 1950s-era asbestos tile - done in hues of pink and gray, that is still common to old farmhouses in the area. Underneath the layers of board and asbestos was the original 4” clapboard, which we carefully restored, then sanded, primed and painted. So weathered was the clapboard on the rear of the house that we had to replace it, entirely.

The porch was at that time supported using stacked cinder blocks, and ‘decorative’ cinder block encircled the porch in place of traditional porch rail. It is said that a man who ran a concrete business owned the house in the 1960s. Perhaps cinder block is beautiful to a concrete man. We took a sledgehammer to it, and put back porch posts and custom-made cedar railings. Next, the exceedingly drafty double-hung windows and architecturally unappealing triple-track storms were replaced with argon-filled, double-glazed windows that closely resemble the original, but created a much, much tighter seal. Full screens were chosen so that both the top and bottom of each window can be opened to take full advantage of the country air.

In 2002, all intersecting walls separating the living room, dining room, kitchen and original entrance hall with staircase were removed in favor of an open floor plan.  The central brick chimney, hidden within the walls for nine decades, was exposed and scoured down to its natural state. As it happened, a neighbor was in the process of dismantling his mid-19th century barn at about the time we needed a bit of wood to hold the house up as the walls were sent tumbling. The hand-hewn beams were retrofitted with steel elbow ties and bolted to every joist running across the width of the house. A series of matching posts - essentially other beams cut to smaller lengths - were then spaced and bolted beneath the beams to complete an extraordinarily rigid structural frame work and create a contemporary floor plan inside an old farmhouse.

Because of an earnest desire to have ambient light on cloudy winter afternoons, the ceilings were removed and some 30 recessed lights on dimmer switches were installed before new ceilings went up. We decided on a completely asymmetrical design for the lighting because we didn't wish the house to take on a 'contractor' look. The result? There are no standing lamps lit up in dark corners to leave you with an indication of just how cloudy a day might be. The house is bright and cheery all the time; rainy-day sunshine can be adjusted to suit - or lift - any mood. And at night, the house glows in soft hues; different spaces adjusted to any combination of light and shadow, all the more affecting when a fire glows in the hearth.

Very early in the process, the nearly windowless rear wall of the downstairs – formerly lined with a stove, sink, radiator and a dozen 1960s-era kitchen plywood cabinets - was cut open, framed out with a series of 4x10 headers and support studs, and installed with 16 running feet of double-glazed glass, 8 feet high, to open the house to the panoramic views largely hidden for ninety-two years. To allow for future outdoor expansion, custom Pella 8-foot sliding doors were incorporated into the design. It was important to us that the aesthetic of the outside of the house be preserved. From every angle but the back yard, the house is absolutely traditional, which makes it great fun when first-time visitors come through the vestibule door and suddenly find themselves floating above the valley.

During the next phase, the interior of all exterior walls were demolished both upstairs and down, and we had the house completely rewired. The original ca. 1912 2x4 studs were overlaid with 2x2s, widening the wall cavities, which were then stuffed with R-19 & R-21 fiberglass insulation, stapled into place just like in brand-new construction. The walls were reconstructed using 5/8" sheetrock, not the hollow-sounding ½ inch variety, and every window frame in the house, now each nearly 2’’ deeper, was reconstructed. All the original window sills and original trim, which had been numbered and stored during the gut job, were reinstalled.

Most farmhouses in the Catskills do not contain a fireplace. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, fireplaces were costly to build; 19^th-century farmers could not afford such amenity. Secondly, as these farmers well knew, a fireplace does a terrible job of heating a house; indeed, most designs actually draw existing heat up and out of the house. 19^th century farmers used wood stoves. They were cheaper and far more efficient.

To create a warm winter ambience in this old farmhouse, where all the wood stoves had long since been removed from around the central chimney, we selected and installed a full-sized, glass-front, steel convection wood stove with brick lining and placed it on a base of bluestone obtained from a local quarry. With the old brick chimney already wed to the central heating system, a dedicated, triple-insulated chimney was run up through the interior of the house and out the roof line. Once again, we sought to maintain the visual integrity of the house's exterior; no boxed out clapboard-faced chimney so often seen in new construction.

The convection-style wood stove was chosen over traditional radiant-heat cast iron so that the stove could sit closer to the wall, and so the living room seating area can be arranged comfortably around the fire, even when the stove is burning high. By comparison, a cast iron stove burning high is very difficult to approach, and furnishings must be placed farther away. It must also sit forward into the room or have a fireproof brick or stone-face placed behind it. We believed that would look artificial in this farmhouse.

The wood stove heats the entire house, even on the coldest days. And with the door securely closed a fire can be left burning day or night, even when no one is present.

When the major renovations were complete all that was left of the dirty work was to restore the floors.

Upstairs, the floors had been covered for decades by carpeting, and underneath the carpeting we found old linoleum lined with newspapers from the 1940s. Beneath the linoleum we exposed the solid, bare, completely untreated long-leaf yellow pine floors edged in oil paint. The floors in the bedrooms were quite smooth, but the flooring in the center hall and on the stair treads were – and are – a bit more rough-hewn, with a nice raised grain. In every room but the hall bath, the floors were lightly sanded, treated with a clear sealer, and layered in three coats of satin-finish polyurethane. To preserve the grain in the hall flooring and on the stairs, and for contrast with the other rooms, an oil-based medium-gloss light, neutral gray paint was applied. Only the flooring in the hall bath was so distressed that it required replacement. We used red oak and stained it medium dark.

Downstairs, the floors were covered in more ancient carpeting and old oil paint over a dark finish that we discovered in tiny areas where the paint was peeling. The kitchen floor - by then the dining room - had been covered in a crumbling ceramic tile, a layer of old plywood, and an additional three layers of linoleum beneath. The original kitchen wood floor underneath all of that was distressed, but not so much so that it couldn’t be brought back with some time and patience.

As a part of the floor restoration downstairs, we laid red oak in the crevasses created when the walls went away. All the floors were sanded, then stained a custom color mixed (and mixed and mixed) to closely match the original color under that old peeling paint. Four coats of satin-finish polyurethane completed the look. We made no effort to color-match the red oak to the existing floors, preferring a gentle reminder of the walls that once stood.

It was while the stain was being applied that we discovered that all the floors downstairs, including in the old kitchen, were made of a very fine solid maple. The ribbons that appear when fine maple is color-stained tell the story. They are exquisite, most especially when the maple is darkened, just as they had been when the house was built nearly a century ago, and just as they are today.