once upon a time there was a little house way out in the country she was a pretty little house and she was strong and well built the man who built her so well said this little house shall never be sold for gold or silver and she will live to see our great great grandchildren great great grandchildren living in turn over the years the little house became very sad and lonely her paint was cracked and dirty her windows were broken and her shutters hung crookedly she looked shabby but she was just as good a house as ever and really high i'm standing on box one of the children's most love stories is about a little house in the country that becomes rundown while an entire city grows up around it finally discovered is lovingly restored today we're bringing you the story of a little house in the country in peter's township like the house in the book its potential had been forgotten or overlooked for many years that is until it peters couple at this eighteen seventy farmhouse with new eyes and saw a place they could call home but first there was a lot of work to do the house was small and over one hundred years old was they didn't want to just remodel over the original teachers they needed a contractor who would respect the history of the house and yet make it livable and spacious as well not much is known about the original owners of this farm house site and the current ones would like to remain a mystery as well but they did agree to let story with a very happy if you're looking for a new house in peters township you'll have plenty to choose from but if a part of you longs for than a stallion of an older home you might find the answer to your dreams is a combination of past and present hi and welcome to day one of our old house diary today i'm standing in the back of the farmhouse just off what used to be the original kitchen something that will be very helpful to understand before we begin this process is that the farmhouse is actually divided into t halves the old part that i'm standing in front of right now and to my right a brand new seventeen hundred square foot addition being completed by franklin construction as you'll see each half of the house is at a very different stage of completion tomorrow when we look at the addition we'll see that it's still very much under construction but today we're going to take a look at the original parts of the home the contractors have just two weeks to prepare the home for the owners to move in an frank i know that this isn't your first historic project in the township crankiness family live in one of the original homes in peters and i was wondering how did you get your interest in in these sort projects so i grew up with it and i my family was in the construction business in new england and my dad and my uncles restored old homes and i've been doing it since i was a little boy in a project like this a combination project how do you go about preserving the original features in the history of the house and what do you think is more challenging taking a restoration project on or building a new home restoration especially one like this where you really had a lot of house to an existing it's difficult to do that but we've tried and now as you walk through the front door and what was your old kitchen which is now four years into the family room which will be stored you'll notice that on the plan but there is we put a big window in right here which is an old porch we knock down a rebuilt this is the transition area between the existing farmhouse and you dishnet we added onto it through this transition point we broke through two doorways which become passageways here's a great room that we added you know he'll notice that a window display window matches this big window which we put over here we knock down this whole porch this area here is a kitchen area as a new kitchen and now  has now been completely redone with a master bath and we go outside and have a new deck out here now not exactly the way the architect designed it we redesign it so that you can look out the doors the pond it's in the back has so many original features and one of them here is the fireplace can you tell us what this was originally like and what what your plans are for it oh yes the owners lived in this house of course for many years and it's used to be a stone fireplace  actual floor plan of the original farmhouse is very simple where we were in the dining room and now we're in the living room and originally there was just this living room dining room and kitchen actually kind of small and i so we have some simple windows and window treatments here let's go over to  look at the original staircase frank i understand that this is the original staircase were you surprised to find out that it was still in such good condition yes especially after we stripped it we stripped a small segment of this even before the project started and the owners wanted to try to match this color on the floors and to continue the theme throughout the whole house yeah they want to continue the theme by stripping the existing old floors in the house and then putting new floors down  addition other points of interest in the original part of the home are the up stairs bedrooms each with their own fireplace a newly designed bay window which emerged where an unwanted entrance once stood and one excess busy since the project began frank and his crew of that plenty to keep them busy like grading the land and other site work that goes along with new construction and as frank told us a whole new crop of details to house diary yesterday we got to take a look at some of the original loves plants and the builders have a design a very special place for her to put them let's go see if we can find frank centered on the old doorway which is centered on the bay window my house my heart i get out of in sequence almost without an access line drawn to the house so that the middle of that door which goes out to the deck descends on the here in the master suite are all the amenities you find a new home including a full wall of oak closets cathedral ceiling and in the bath a jacuzzi tub and double sink the success of a complex project like this one rides not only on a good crew but on the person who has to keep in mind the big picture watching frank at work gave us an idea of what is on his mind on a daily basis like every day a contractor has to think about dearly arriving on the job really trying rechecking things that arrived on the job to make sure they fit snug and also it finally does make a house into a home a porter to check the final details and keep the crew motivated but frank's mind wasn't always on serious matters he even took the time to talk about how music can help orchestrate the building process but actually i a bipolar i go from anywhere from beethoven which i which i love my hero right to led zeppelin or pink floyd and write them like different kinds of building as far as being a rock you with the many subcontractors and crew working on site we decided to talk with some of them about their work a major part of the project was restoring the exterior surface of the original house we met up with ben byers and keep champagne from chiang coke leaning company and right now are applying paint stripper to get the paint the tar off the house and looks like the chimney turned out really well what do you think of it yeah it turned out pretty good it's still  it off that's just all sand land on or no but it turned out pretty good you know frank tells me that this is the original chimney in the original stone work and i i thought that was pretty amazing what do you think that's great it's nice you go do a stone house and it's black and you get done and it's white like all so it's like it turned some heads later the crew from churn co washed the brick on the original part of the home the brick on the new addition was matched to it as closely as possible this is a one hundred year old brick however it was put on over the original frame home in one nine hundred forty five next we found kirk books from frank's crew working on the landscaping and christine you're going to be getting some grass here soon how what do you exactly planning to do out here in the yard we're just going to smooth everything out so you can plant the grass we're supposed so you've been working with frank all the time nine years there would be down here three years now ok how do you like it in peter's township like no one has quite a community will be different than living outside in new york i bet i understand you have two children yeah peter and c everything you get done with this project yeah things just keep getting added on there not in a snowball and so we're just taking things one day at a time and you get near the final stretch yes while the crew worked inside we decided to step out and take a look at the grounds which in peter's or anywhere are breath of fresh air the farm property extends over forty acres  perfect indian summer day the new pond horse trails and the original barn provide a peaceful respite from contemporary life with peers townships rich farming history this farmhouse site is a charming reminder of our past from the early seventeenth hundreds and through today the farms in the township have been a vital part of the community and while most barns original barns in the township have disappeared from the landscape  standing and in good condition we're lucky to have a family friend of the owners here with us today paul lowery he's dug up some history on the farm house and we're going to have a talk with him hi paul how are you today good we want to tell you that i kind of us slipped down through one of the what do you call these one of these flats before so we're going to walk down here paula how are you today fine during our conversation with paul about his research into the farm house property we learned of an old the which showed the previous owners were a family by the name of douglas and i think it was a man and wife and a brother that lived here what do they mainly farm here do you believe well as far as i know they had cattle her milk cows and and just general farming as a matter of fact it was a man from the pond is about i guess seven feet deep in the deepest part there was a small pond there before and we've tried to start a landscape with plants that are can be used around and then put some  goldfish in there and stay all year long and notice from nice what do you call those what are you calling them water lilies or well water hyacinth which we're going to put some water lilies in one of ahead as our outside tour ended we stopped where paul likes to spend most of his time the garden filled with vegetables and an array of beautiful flowers in the chaos of new construction his gentle presence there was a constant reminder of farming traditions gone by here we are on our final visit to the farmhouse in the meantime the owners have moved in and all their furniture is in place and everything is completely done let's go take a look while the back porch looks great doesn't it during our final tour frank offered his personal thoughts on how his vision of the farmhouse developed from beginning to end my client  try to blend it so it doesn't clear the kind of blends together and i think that worked out with the materials that we have today but what happened inside is a it's not a going to play there with his values and probably when he went to architecture school and he designed it such that the interior space elements expose all the structure and expose everything has a function  goes beyond just the form in design as a function holds something up either vertically or horizontally and it gives the the inside of the region a greeting and then it's modern versus the house which is kind of like a farmhouse old farm well frank were at the end of the project here and we'd really like to thank you for all the time that you took to show us around the house and have us kind of get in the way sometimes and i just like to ask you what was what was your what are your feelings about the experience what were some of your favorite parts of it that are part of the people in the house i really love the people i work for here and i'm glad we could really do this project for them and that's what made it such a great project and i will people that work on it too because i'm a people person and the structure that we've built is just perfect for this location i really love how these built ins turned out we have some footage that we showed earlier of the building bookcase and the desk here so what's your next project we're going to shadyside to  the windows and shutters were fixed and they painted her a lovely shade of paint as the little house settled down on her new foundation he smiled happily once again she could watch the sun and moon and stars once again she could watch spring and summer and fall and winter come and go once again she was lived in and taking care of that happy ending guys