April 18, 2005
Mass. women work to breathe life back into historic homes
By Emily Cavalier
Telegraph Staff
BROOKLINE - Two Massachusetts women went and bought an old house - as in circa-1700s old - for $6,000 on eBay so they could take it apart board by board and rebuild it on Cleveland Hill Road.
You can call them crazy, but they’ll be looking like geniuses if their business takes off.
The women have already sold that house for more than $500,000. Their next project, a $1.2 million restored cape, is going up in Hollis and has already sparked quite a bit of interest in town.
The first old house - known as the Benjamin Spaulding House - was located in Townsend, Mass., on a tract of land that the landowners wanted to clear. Holly Bradman and Sherill Rosoff saw an opportunity and took out all the equity in their own homes to fund a re-creation of the house, albeit a more luxurious one.
It all started in 2001. Bradman and Rosoff had come into each other’s lives by chance when Rosoff was looking to buy a house.
“I met Sherill when her realtor brought her to me,” Bradman said. Rosoff had fallen in love with an old house, but was worried about rotted windowsills.
“I said, ‘What do you expect? It was built in the 1700s.’ So we hired a contractor to work with us,” Bradman said. “When we were done, she was just glowing. Sherill said that the two of us should go into business together.”
Rosoff had a real estate and business background. Bradman also had a real estate background, as well as experience owning an interior and landscape design company. So the two women drew up a business plan and named the business The Restored Homestead.The women tried to get financing for the business, which is based in Pepperell, Mass., but found it difficult since they hadn’t yet completed any projects.
“We took all the equity out of our houses,” Bradman said. “My husband believed in me. But I couldn’t get a loan until we did houses on our own.”An eBay discovery
In 2003, a woman Bradman knew alerted her to the home posted for sale on eBay. Bradman looked at the posting and saw the home was available to the first person who could come up with $6,000, and it was located down the street from her home.
“It was in really bad shape, but we fell in love with the fireplaces and the beams,” she said.
Bradman offered the owner $3,000, but he said he had some potential bidders flying in to see the home. Bradman went home after making her offer, but said she was scared she’d lose the opportunity. She went back that same day and bought the home for the asking price.
Bradman and Rosoff found a contractor to take the house down piece by piece. That took a few months. Meanwhile, the women were looking for a piece of land where they could rebuild the home, but Bradman said land in Massachusetts was too expensive.
“Every house has its own setting, and we wanted something woody,” Bradman said. They found their ideal wooded setting in Brookline.
To say the re-creation was a labor of love would be an understatement of epic proportions. The two women worked with contractors and did much of the detail work themselves. They had 2,000 bricks to clean to redo the fireplaces. Old doors had to be insulated to be brought up to code.
Doors that couldn’t be saved were replaced by matches hunted out in salvage yards from Maine to Connecticut, but because all the doors were different shapes and styles, each frame had to be custom-built.
The building features the homestead’s original wide pine floorboards and hardware, and even soapstone from original sinks. All of the hardware - the door hinges and latches, the window locks - was redone by the Old Smithy Shop in Brookline to look as good as old.
Original glass panes were reset in energy-efficient divided light windows. You know, the kind with actual windowpanes.
What seemed most incredible, during a tour of the home on a recent afternoon, were the modern touches that have been added to bring it into the 21st century.
Bradman and Rosoff put an addition on the home, and it includes a pantry that looks exactly as a pantry would have looked during the 1700s, with the exception of the rug the women had hand-painted on the floor.
The home has luxury appliances, but they’re set on floorboards that bear the initials of Benjamin Spaulding.Finding a family
So, who buys a new old house?
“We really wanted a couple who appreciated the history,” Bradman said. “That’s the basis of our business. We save pieces of New England history.”
Enter the Caldwells, formerly of Garden City, N.Y.
Kent Caldwell, a retired Navy commander, his wife, Natalie, and their children were ready for a change.
“We had our choice of places to go. We owned a home in Virginia and that would have been the easy choice,” Natalie Caldwell said. “We must have looked at 100 houses. We visited New Hampshire and fell in love. It was really a matter of finding a house that we liked. Everything was cookie-cutter. I wanted something different.”
Then the Caldwells found an online listing for the Spaulding House and were smitten.
“For Kent, it was the history behind it and the uniqueness of it,” Natalie Caldwell said.
However, not everyone in the family shared in the enthusiasm.
“Charlotte didn’t understand why there weren’t doorknobs,” Caldwell said of her 13-year-old daughter. The house has door latches instead of doorknobs.
But by last spring, the Caldwells had put a deposit on the $571,000 home, hoping it would be ready for them to move into in July. The home wasn’t ready until October. But for Natalie Caldwell, it was worth living in a hotel room for a few months in order to be able to take possession of her new old place.
“I’m very proud of it,” she said. “I feel very fortunate that we found this. I’m used to the vinyl-sided colonial. I just about had a kitten over the winter when I saw my floorboards were separating, but now I’m used to it. Here, the wood swells in the summer and it adds character to the house. I don’t ever want to go anywhere else.”
Bradman and Caldwell exhibit a closeness and familiarity that is probably rare between other home designers and customers.
“We don’t build houses, we build homes. We feel that people who buy our houses are a part of the family,” Bradman said.
Almost as if to prove the point, Caldwell drags out a huge binder full of photos and documents.
Rosoff and Bradman filled the binder with old paper clippings that had been found during the deconstruction of the home, along with details of the original family’s genealogy, historical photos, and photos of the restoration process.
The women gave the binder to the Caldwells. Bradman said she and her business partner plan to do the same thing for all of their homebuyers.Old doors
After the first project was completed, Bradman said it was relatively easy to get financing for their next project, an early- to mid-1700s cape currently being reconstructed in Hollis’ historic district.
The home, known as the Maxcy Fisher House, arrived on a flatbed from Franklin, Mass.
This home has details like an original beam with a space carved into it to accommodate one of the Fisher family’s grandfather clocks. However, the new version will include luxurious modern amenities like radiant heat in the master bathroom’s shower walls and floors.
Meanwhile, the basement of the new construction is full of old doors waiting to be reincarnated. Bradman walks from door to door, caressing each one like it is her child.
Bradman said she’s not offering the Hollis house through a real estate agent, so interested buyers will have to contact the company directly. The offering price is $1.2 million. But not all of The Restored Homestead’s homes will sell for such a price.
“These houses are from the common people, the bakers, the cobblestone guys,” Bradman said. “I want to build antique homes for people who can afford them.”
They aim to complete the Maxcy Fisher House in mid-June, and begin construction on a four-lot “mini-village” of new old homes in Brookline soon after.
Copyright 2005 The Nashua Telgraph
