NEW LIFE FOR AN OLD SUGARHOUSE

IN WEST FAIRLEE, A DILAPIDATED
1912 SUGARHOUSE IS REBORN AS
A GUEST HOUSE AND RENTAL PROPERTY.
by David Sleeper
Photos by Carolyn Bates

hey are the ghosts of Vermont's agricultural past. Horse barns, chicken coops and granaries. Equipment sheds and sugarhouses. Mammoth three-story cow barns and tiny slate-roofed springhouses. They litter the landscape, weathered reminders of a lost farming heritage, slowly disappearing under the weight of winter snows.
     Romanticism aside, however, many of these structures are little more than eyesores; undistinguished architecturally, they represent highly functional buildings that were worked hard and now often pose safety problems. Often they end up bulldozed into piles of beams and barnboard, eventually burned by local fire departments.
     Roger Bailey inherited such a structure in 1998 when he bought a new home on Grasshopper Hill in West Fairlee. The prudent course would have been to knock down the sagging sugarhouse, vintage 1912, which was located a few feet from the new driveway and which seemed to be slowly melting into a steep embankment. Many of the 12 over 12 windows were broken; the sliding door was akimbo; even the distinctive roof vent was gone, long ago covered over by tin roof panels. The sugarhouse hadn't boiled sap since the 1940's.
     Perhaps it was his status as a new Vermonter - freshly arrived from Detroit and the advertising business - that made Roger see the sorrowful structure in a new light. He decided the old sugarhouse could have a new life as a guest home and rental property. With that mind, he contacted architectural designer Ray Chapin and general contractor Chip Odell, both of East Thetford, and they set to work.
     The idea was to keep intact as much of the original sugarhouse as possible, thus providing guests with a unique and fun experience. "I wanted the promise of the building to be carried through on the inside as well," says Roger.
     This would be no small feat, given the deteriorating condition of the sugarhouse and the need for modern amenities. The first step was to dismantle the building, numbering the beams and barnboards individually and salvaging as much of the original building material as possible. A new site with a similarly sloped bank was chosen: an overgrown field adjacent to Roger Bailey's home. Although the main entrance would be on the first floor, the building was tucked into the hillside so that guests could also enter and exit from the second floor, much as the original sugarmakers brought in sap at the upper level.
     The building is sited approximately 75 feet from the parking area and driveway. This is so that the sugarhouse can stand on its own aesthetically, unencumbered by nearby vehicles. This visual perspective - really an artful framing device - is further enhanced by magnificent serpentine retaining walls, built with stones from Sharon, and bluestone walkways. The walkways include stone piers with recessed lights, a nice touch when guests arrive at night.
     Although the new building resembles the old sugarhouse in terms of its overall shape and size, in truth this 1,000-square-foot home is a hybrid structure. The first floor uses many of the original hand-hewn posts and beams, which are pegged together using timberframe construction techniques and which are exposed on the inside of the house. The outside walls and second floor, however, use stick-built framing and standard-sized lumber. Vertical boards salvaged from the old sugarhouse cover the outside walls (a useful trick here is that the plywood nailing surface underneath the barnboard is painted black). An oversized sliding door similar to the original slider can cover French doors, which serve as the house's main entrance.
     Inside, the floor plan performs admirably for a small home intended for overflow guests from the main house and also as a vacation rental property. Downstairs is a living room-dining room, sizable open kitchen complete with Sub-Zero refrigerator, small mechanical room, a full bath, a stacked washer/dryer concealed in a closet, and another storage closet under the stairs. Upstairs are two bedrooms and a half bath made possible by a convenient doghouse dormer. Because space is at a premium in the bedrooms, bureaus are built into the generally unusable space under the sloping ceilings.
     The house is heated with a small propane furnace (radiant heat under bluestone flooring downstairs and hidden hot-water baseboard radiators upstairs) as well as a with a small Vermont Castings woodstove. The energy-efficient Brosco windows, which have true divided lights, and abundant insulation in the walls make for a tight, warm structure.
     As in its earlier incarnation as an operating sugarhouse, the building works efficiently and well, getting the job done with a minimum of wasted space. But Roger Bailey's house does more than that; it succeeds in capturing the magic of its Vermont past. The first thing I notice is a weathered gray table made from the original sliding door, cut down and with the wheels still intact. In front of a comfortable couch is a coffee table constructed from one of the metal sugar pans. Inside the pan, under a glass tabletop and set off with dark-blue felt, is a collection of sugaring implements: maple-syrup spoons, taps, wooden paddles, and a bit brace. Hanging from the exposed beams are three 100-year-old wooden sap buckets and a wooden snow shovel. Roger found some of these sugaring artifacts in the decrepit sugarhouse but most came from Farr's Antiques in Danville.
     The ambience is heightened further by the banister leading upstairs: a smooth old beam replete with holes from ancient powderpost beetles and, hidden from view, miniature track lights beneath to light the stairs. The hand-plastered interior walls are covered with deer antlers (from the Moose River Lake and Lodge Store in St. Johnsbury), woodcut prints from Sabra Field and Jeanne Robacher, and other pieces of art.
     In West Fairlee on Grasshopper Hill, the promise of the old sugarhouse has truly been recreated inside. It's sugaring time once and forever more. V

For more information about the sugarhouse renovation and its availability as a vacation rental,
contact: Roger K. Bailey
1874 Blood Brook Road
West Fairlee, VT 05045
(802) 333-4285

Other participants in the project include:
Ray Chapin, architectural designer
East Thetford
(802) 785-4321

Chip Odell, general contractor
Odell Construction, East Thetford
(802) 785-2400

Lee Ilsley, stone mason
Thetford Center
(802) 785-2090.

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