Remodeled Farmhouses

by Mary Harrod Northend

The great charm of Colonial farmhouses lies in the simplicity of their appearance. Many dilapidated, weather-beaten old buildings, long neglected by an indifferent community, are really little masterpieces of harmonious line and good proportion.

The style of the roof tells much about the age of the building to the initiated, and its line is easily the most important factor in the appearance of the house. The pitched roof is one of the oldest types and was used long before our country was discovered. This roof slopes away from the ridge-pole on both sides, thus forming a triangular area, the angle at each end of which is called a gable. In the early days, the pitch was built very steep to accommodate the thatching with which the roof was covered. As shingles came into use, the slope gradually flattened, and the age can be roughly judged by its angle.

The gambrel roof appeared before the eighteenth century and was commonly used in New England farmhouses. Each side of this is made up of two distinct pitches, which have no rule to govern their relationship. A somewhat later development was the hipped roof, in which the gabled ends were flattened, making four flat sides sloping from the ridge-pole. This was used when no attic chamber was needed. In the more pretentious Georgian houses, the top was flattened, and a wooden balustrade put around it. These roofs are generally shingled and practically never painted; the soft gray color they attain in weathering is sometimes imitated in stain on new shingles.

The addition of a wing or ell brought up a new problem in roofing, and it is this point that demands most serious attention from the remodeler. The old builders have not always been successful in preserving the unity of the roof line that is so essential to pleasing design. Whenever it is possible, the new roof should be made a part of the old, and the lines of one should run into those of the other. The pitch of the two should be practically the same. The same type of roof must be used over all parts of the building, although it is occasionally permissible to have a pitched roof on an ell when the main roof is a gambrel.

Where a veranda is added, its roof line must be carefully studied and made to seem an original part of the building, not something stuck on as an afterthought. This problem of keeping the lines of the different roofs in harmony is a vital one, and nowhere is there greater demand for ingenuity and thoughtful treatment.

The question of dormers is also important. When it is desired to have a second-story porch or sleeping-room, the dormer often supplies the solution of this difficult problem. The earliest ones were merely a flattening of the pitch of the roof, and this is the type that should be used when it is necessary to add a dormer to the older farmhouses. As the Georgian details were developed, the gable-roofed dormer was used with the cornice moldings of porches and door frames. These dormers were high, with a single window often having a semicircular head. They were usually combined in groups of three and connected with each other by a balustrade.

The exterior walls of the first houses were made of heavy boards laid vertically on the framework, without studding. Before long, the wood was laid horizontally, each board overlapping the one below it. This clapboarding and siding was used without interruption through all the various changes in other details. Much later, the shingle was adopted for the sides of the house as well as for the roof. A larger shingle, however, was used on the walls, with a wide exposure of surface. These were made of pine or cypress.

Although the walls of most old houses follow a straight line from one story to the next, there was a type, copied by the colonists from the buildings of the mother country and used somewhat freely before the Georgian era, in which the second story extended beyond the first. This overhang was generally used only on the front and back and not on all four sides, as in the European counterparts. The girders and cross beams were framed into the second-story posts, which frequently ended in an ornamental knob or drop, as it was called. The gables, too, occasionally had a slight overhang. In altering a pre-Georgian house, it is therefore permissible to make use of this overhang feature, and it may solve some otherwise knotty problems of required extra space.