“Now I want these two rooms made into one,” said I. “I want one of the doors into the hall closed up, and a glass door cut out of the south side to a pergola veranda. Can you do it?”
Hard examined the partition. He climbed on a box which we dragged in, and ripped away plaster and woodwork ruthlessly, both at the top and at places on the sides, all without speaking a word.
“Yep,” he said finally, “ef yer don’t mind a big crossbeam showin’. She’s solid oak. Yer door, though, ’ll have to be double, with a beam in the middle.”
“Fine!” I cried. “One to go in by, one to go out. Guests please keep to the right!”
“Hev ter alter yer chimney,” he added, “or yer’ll hev two fireplaces.”
“Fine again!” cried I. “A long room with two fireplaces, and a double-faced bookcase coming out at right angles between them, with two settles below it, one for each fireplace! Better than I’d dreamed!”
“Suit yerself,” said Hard.
We next arranged tentatively for a brick veranda with a pergola top on the southern end of the house, and then went upstairs. Here the four small chambers needed little but minor repairs and plaster work, save that over the dining-room, which was to be converted into the bathroom. The great space over the kitchen was to be cut into two servants’ bedrooms, with dormer windows. It already had the two windows, one to the north and one to the south, and had evidently been used as a drying-room for apples and the like. Hard figured here for some time, and then led us silently downstairs again, and through the front door.
My front doorway had once been a thing of beauty, with two little panel windows at the sides, and above all, on the outside, a heavy, hand-carved broken pediment, like the top of a Governor Winthrop highboy. Hard looked at it with admiration gleaming in his eyes. “I’d ruther restore this than all the rest o’ the job,” he said, and his ugly, rumsoaked little face positively shone with enthusiasm.
“Go ahead,” said I; “only I want the new steps of brick, widely spaced, with a lot of cement showing between. I’m going to terrace it here in front, too–a grass terrace for ten feet out.”