All carpentry, including necessary work for
    plumber, electrician, etc. 160.00

    Masonry, including repairs to fireplaces and
    chimneys 105.00

    Decorations, paint, and paper for twelve rooms 150.00

    Architectural supervision, plans where needed
    and preliminary inspection of several houses 150.00

    Total $2,798.00

These are the actual figures for a livable and attractive country home.  There are, of course, some things that await a future time for their accomplishment, but what place would be really enjoyable if there were not certain corrections and additions over which the owners could daydream and plan.  We admit the figures just quoted are so low as to seem hardly credible, but they demonstrate what could be accomplished within fifty miles of New York during the summer of 1935.  The contributing causes for this happy result were that these people knew what they wanted, hunted in a section that had not been too thoroughly combed by others like themselves and, lastly, happened to be ready to buy at just the right moment when the man who owned the property was anxious to sell.

But old country residences, including structures built as taverns, private schools and the like, are not the only type of buildings that may be remodeled into acceptable homes.  We have seen old barns or stables, disused sawmills, general stores, old stone buildings that once housed small industrial enterprises, and even a church of the Neo-Classic period remodeled with distinct success.

Again, in Massachusetts there is a former textile hamlet.  The mill itself is now a community club and the workmen’s cottages, built about 1815-20, are homes for a dozen or more families where, daily, the head of the house motors to his office in an industrial city about a half-hour away.  These story-and-a-half cottages, executed along simple Federal lines, are owned by the families who occupy them.  They look out on a street lined with fine old elms and at the end is the stone mill with its belfry where still hangs the bell that once ruled the lives of spinners and weavers with its clanking iron tongue, morning, noon and night.

For picturesqueness, if the unconventional has a greater appeal than the more standardized type of home, remodeling an old barn into a country home has its advantages.  This is particularly so if one can find either a capacious one of roughly laid ledge stone, once popular in parts of New Jersey and Pennsylvania and more rarely built in other sections, or a large hay barn with hand-hewn framework and side walls of weathered boarding.  It takes only a little imagination to visualize such a building remodeled into a country home with a generous stone chimney and fireplace occupying one of the end walls of a former haymow.  Invariably such remodeling includes construction of one or more wings to house dining room, kitchen, and servants’ quarters as well as additional bedrooms and baths.  The actual barn structure seldom lends itself to more than a living room and possibly two bedrooms.