An 1875 Granary in Utah Gets a
Facelift
Joan
Katherine Shaw
The Granary as a working storage facility
(left) and (right) as a young librarian's cozy home
Balcony of Memories
The
granddaughter of the original builder
of our 1875 granary, Edythe Bair (now deceased), described to me once
how she and her siblings swung from its balcony and played up there
and in the loft when the weather was too inclement to play outside.
When she heard of
our plans for renovating the building for a small home for our youngest
daughter she said, "Oh, I do hope you keep the balcony!" But removing
this charming addition to the granary's facade was never under
consideration, and remains one of the nicest architecual features to
the entrance. Besides, our daughter, Melanie, remembers playing up on
the balcony herself, and when she suggested that her Dad (and my
husband, Alan) could perhaps renovate the granary into a house for her,
the balcony was included in the plans.
A
Typical History
The
builder of both the granary and the northernmost part of our house was
Neils Bergeson, a settler who brought his young family into Cache
Valley from Denmark in 1873 via the United State's newly inaugurated
railway. The
Bergesons, like many of their fellow settlers, lived for their first
two years here in a dugout excavated out of the hill below the
spot on which their first home was built above the Cub River. And, as
was the case with the other settlers, they viewed the problem of
storing crops as outweighing the luxury of living quarters above ground.
Therefore, the granary went up first, in 1875; the house went up
second, in 1876.
Both granary and house were built by Neils Bergeson, a shipbuilder by
trade in Denmark, of
local Douglasfir. This dense, fine-grained timber, called by the early
settlers, 'Red Pine' because of its
reddish bark and red-streaked wood, was used extensively for building
throughout the valley, and is judged by experts in forestry to be as
near to today's hardwood as makes no difference. Neils' granary was
therefore solid, tight, dry, and clean, and must have been an
attractive alternative to the dugout.
Structure - and its problerms
As the
photo at the head of this page
shows, the granary walls are made of rough 2x4s stacked and nailed
together with the butt ends alernating on the corners and at
the outsides of the interior walls,
something like the early log cabins, except with much tighter walls
(see Melanie's sketch of a 2x4 corner at right). This granary had two
interior walls that went through on either side of the front door to
the back, the outline of which shows clearly by the butt ends flanking
the door in the top left hand photo. It also had a wall going from
the south interior wall to the north for a total of
three storage rooms on the first floor. Inside the east-west
interior walls was the
staircase to the second floor. Into the floor boards on the second
floor were cut the openings through which grain, carried up the steps
in bags, was poured into the storage rooms below. Later, grain
augers would be used to left it mechanically.
Since granaries built on the stacked-2x4
model had no inside,
substructural framing, these interior walls were what kept the granary
in plumb. Years of use, however, and a 1962 earthquake did skew the
building slightly to the north -- not on its foundation, but from the
top, much
as one would wring out one end of a wet wash cloth. The walls on the
second floor were unbraced on the inside, that floor functioning as a
loft. They also had their one east-west bracing timber removed sometime
in the past. This lack of bracing, weakening both the rafters and the
ridge beam, led to an eventual spread outward of the walls and a sag in
the roof. In fact, the granary roof had, over the years, taken on a
pagoda look. Further, the lack of bracing and a constant onslaught
of winds, rain, and scorching sun gave the once-solid,
straight-as-a-die walls a worrisome buckling, especially on the most
exposed west wall. Finally, the
granary had an unmistakable list to the south from the loosening and
falling away of its dry stone foundation on that side.
Granary Before Renovation, approximately
1988 (Jane
O'Keefe)
Some
of the problems grimly outlined by Melanie's Dad, were not obvious
in casually looking over the place by the unitiated (which Melanie and
I most definitely were at the time). For
instance, the slight list in the floors and staircase were noticeable
every time we stepped into the building, but the fact that it was
skewed and that the roof had a sway back were subtle enough to come as
a surprise to both me and Melanie and we really had to squint to see
it. To an artist's eye, these faults were simply nonexistent, as
evidenced by the lovely, romanticized sketch above. To an engineer's
eye, however, these problems were both obvious and
serious and had to be dealt with before any grand plans were laid out
on the drawing table.
Basic Corrections
What
followed was a year-long period of structural corrections. A l/4-inch
steel cable, stretched diagonally between the northwest and southeast
walls and inched together in stages with the aid of a turnbuckle
eventually de-skewed the building. Alan did this turning with the aid
of
a good-sized pipe wrench and his own two arms. The groaning of the old
structure
during every turn of the screw, week by week, was horrific to hear, and
frankly terrifying to Melanie and me who were often caught by surprise
by the noise in one of the rooms below -- from which, you can be sure,
we immediately beat a hasty retreat.
Meanwhile, a wall jack under the southeast floor joist put the place
back in plumb, and Melanie, with the help of a husky neighbor, replaced
the missing rocks on the southeast corner and in fact rebuilt
the foundation all around. The rocks, by the way, are enormous
and were
difficult in the extreme to move into place. As the foundation was put
back in place -- the building now in plumb ( thanks to the in-place
jack) -- Melanie commenced mortaring both the newly replaced and
original
rocks in the foundation.
After the deskewing process, Alan stretched this same 1/4-inch cable
from east to west in what would become a crawl-space-sized attic
until joists were in place to brace the rafters. The new living
quarters were to be built into the second floor, the loft of the
granary. These walls would form additional bracing for the outide
walls. All cables were removed at this time except for one stretched
through the inside wall of the bedroom from upper wall on the west side
to the floor by the frame of the bedroom door on the east. Cables were
also stretched inside the sitting room walls from both outside walls to
the floor on either side of the sitting room door. These permanent,
though hidden, cables would give added strength to the outside walls.
While the walls were being built, Alan was correcting the buckling of
the east and west walls by means of bolting angle iron vertically on
the insides, one piece on the east wall and two on the west. These,
also, were tightened in stages in order to eliminate the buckling as
much as possible without cracking the wood.
Finally, in an effort to allow as much light as possible into the
second-floor area, Alan fitted skylights into the west-facing roof --
one in the hall (seen below at the head of the staircase), and two in
the kitchen.
Searching for Spare Parts
A mile
or so to the west of us, a serendipitous
dismantling was going on of a
1920s house and Melanie and I were invited to go foraging. We
discovered a staircase
to replace the badly worn one in the granary, several interior doors,
two windows for either end of the gables, some door and window casings,
and some hard-to-find ship-lap siding to replace the granary's
Swiss-cheese-like gables on the north and south. All Alan had to do was
go
and unfasten them from their moorings -- not an easy task, but doable.
From an antique shop in Logan, we found two casement windows dating
from the 1920s with leaded, diamond-shaped panes and an outside door,
also with diamond panes. From our own renovation of the main house we
salvaged what would become Melanie's front door and found an
old-fasioned kitchen sink that had been stored underneath the granary .
A Long Refinishing
Melanie
and I spent the next year refinishing our haul of windows,
doors, and siding. Alan was left with the problem of changing a set of
right-hand stairs into a left hand set, which he did by simply turning
them inside out. This was more serendipity, since the bottoms of the
steps were now new and unworn. On the left above is the staircase,
finished.
The casement window, which would eventually find its way on the south
front of the granary, needed not only refinishing by Melanie and me,
but needed new diamond-shaped glass in all its diamond-shaped holes --
some were missing, some were cloudy, some were cracked.
The replacement glass was cut by a glass business in Logan, but Alan
was left with
fitting them in. This was a leaded-glass window, and all these little
diamonds had to be leaded, naturally enough, into their places. The
window lay out on two sawhorses in front or inside of the granary's
garage for approximately a year while Alan worked during his spare
time, leading in glass. It was a red-letter day when the window was
finally fitted into the frame in Melanie's tiny library on the
southeast end of the building.
Fitting
it all in
Drawing up plans, complete with furniture and
plumbing, that would fit a
sitting room, a bedroom, a kitchen, and a bathroom in a space measuring
approximately 28 by 15 feet was an engineering job fit for a submarine
architect, especially taking into consideration the 45-degree knee
walls on the east and west sides. But Melanie and Alan managed it in
the end. Though
it took some comments of the obvious from yours truly, like, "When you
sit down on the throne in the bathroom, Mel, where are you going to put
your knees?"
The
granary bedroom, before and after. I papered the room before the
windows and doors were put in place.
As eventually finished, the west side of the second floor
had a pullman-type kitchen with built-in cabinets and a bathroom
fitted with a 5-foot tub, a toilet, and a washstand. The sitting room
and bedroom are on the east. Melanie chose the northeast corner for the
bedroom to take advantage, as much as possible, of the cooler air on
that side. After the past summer's record-breaking heat, however,
Melanie threw
up her hands and had air conditioning installed. What a relief.
She was coming home from the library greeted with a sitting room and
bedroom radiating with 95 degrees of heat. Above is a before and after
view of the bedroom. To the left is a view of the kitchen showing the
skylights and the 1920s sink. As you can see, the oak built-ins are
still waiting for their oak doors and drawers.
Walls ...
The
outside-facing walls Melanie and I
plastered with black roofing asphalt (what a sticky-awful job!)
as a moisture barrier. Alan then covered the treated wall with 3/4"
insulation
board topped with sheet rock, which was either papered or covered with
Lauan
wood paneling (a mahogany-looking wood). We mixed oil stains of various
colors for the walls
until we came up with something that pleased Melanie -- a mixture of
walnut
and cherry -- and applied it to the walls. Alan finished the
inside, stacked 2x4 walls with a 10-inch grinder, which Melanie and I
then finished with an orbital sander, and treated with the oil finish.
A bit of
this inside wall by the staircase is shown above right.
Floors ...
An
especially daunting job was redoing the
pine floor boards on the second floor to match as closely as possible
those
on the first floor which were of the old Douglasfir. They were also
warped from years of rain and wind coming
in the open windows and porous siding, and they were gouged
and pitted from generations of boots and heavy farm equipment. Alan
bought a 12-inch planer for the job and planed these problems from
every board, removing 1/8-inch from each side. The sound of the planer
was of a jet on takeoff with the listener standing at about the jet's
tail. We started on a Sunday (thank heavens we had no near neighbors at
the time), and had one pair of ear protectors between us which I
insisted Alan should use. He was the closest to the business end of the
planer, after all, while I was holding on to the end to keep the boards
steady. The ringing that I've had in my ears since then is proof
positive that cotton is little help in such a situation. However, the
boards finished up beautifully and were duly oil finished after the
rooms were in.
And
Doors
Equally
daunting was working around the angles resulting from the gable out
onto the balcony, and fitting an antique door and casing into the
very tight spot between the doorway and the top of the staircase. Alan
managed it, however, and Melanie and I papered this complexity around
the door to match the upstairs hall and staircase wall (photo of
balcony door above left).
This
balcony door was found at a local antique shop. The inside doors on the
second floor were all salvaged from the 1920s house, lovely paneled
pieces, that needed to be stripped, sanded, and then finished with
stain and varnish. The door out of the sitting room, pictured at the
right, has a replica of an antique embossed carving in the middle,
ordered from Van Dyke's Restorers. The locks on these doors are the
original square, old-fashioned locks found on doors of this era.
Melanie
dismantled them all, cleaned them with a rust-remover compound, oiled
them, and put them back together.
Melanie dismantling 1920s locks for
cleaning and oiling
Another Room on the First Floor
A year
or so after settling down and
furnishing the second floor, Alan and Melanie built her small library
on the southeast end of the granary. By this time, the complex job of
the l920s casement window was at last finished and could be put in the
wall facing the bookcases (photos below). Showing on this southeast
view of the granary is the diamond-paned leaded glass window. On the
right is a view of the south end of Melanie's library. Again, the
paneling is
of the mahogany-like Lauan, covered by an oil finish of walnut and
cherry, mixed.
South
east end of the granary, showing diamond paned leaded glass window.
Inside, the south end of Melanie's small libary
The next to last room to be finished in the granary is awaiting its
trim and other finishing touches. The second diamond-paned window is in
the shop, waiting for Alan
to get the time to reglaze it and Melanie to refinish it. The
window will go into this new room, the largest one in Melanie's
doll-like
house, a magnificent 9x15.
Until then,
Best wishes,
Joan Katherine
Shaw
September
2003
To read about
the garden surrounding Melanie's granary, click on:
A
Miniature Rose Garden in Utah
All photos
by Joan Katherine Shaw
Click to
enter
American Rose Society site
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