Lee McColgan’s career in finance was probably doomed once he started visiting history museums. The first one he toured was Fairbanks’ homein Dedham, Massachusetts, the oldest surviving log-frame house in America, built in 1637.
It was 2014 and Mr. McColgan was living in Omaha, where he worked as a sales representative for a large investment firm. Despite his childhood in Vermont and his interest in the visual arts and building, he had spent much of his adulthood working in a cubicle: five years “entering” a call center outside Boston, followed by several more as “outside” Midwestern wholesaler” recommends mutual funds to financial advisors.
In quiet desperation, Mr McColgan took up woodworking as a creative outlet, building an oak trunk in his garage. This experience, and the visits he made to historic homes each time he returned to New England, inspired him to reevaluate his life and envision a different future working with his hands.
He especially appreciated the sturdiness of the early colonial building: the big, heavy beams that can last hundreds of years as long as bugs and moisture don’t stick to them. dry stone foundations that will not weaken as long as the roof is kept in good condition. He was obsessed with quality and hated “cheap stuff”.
In 2017, Mr. McColgan finally quit his job in finance and began a new career as a contractor specializing in the preservation of historic homes and buildings. To teach himself the trade, he did something impossible and possibly malicious: He bought a very old New England Colonial in rough shape and set about restoring it using period techniques.
Not only that, but Mr. McColgan and his wife, Elizabeth Bailey, decided to live in the house while it was a work zone and workshop. This difficult, educational, ultimately transformative adventure is the subject of his new book.A House Restored: The Tragedies and Triumphs of Saving a New England Colonial.”
“No kids and a supportive husband,” Mr. McColgan, 43, said on a recent afternoon, explaining how he was able to embark on such a quixotic pursuit.
He was sitting in a high-backed armchair in the front room of the old house he bought and renovated: the Loring House, built in 1702 for Thomas Loring III, in Pembroke, Mass. Dressed in jeans, a tight black T-shirt, and sneakers, he looked unusually modern in early American interior design, with its low ceilings, brick hearth, and spartan colonial-style furniture. It was a sunny afternoon, but the house had a shadowy coolness characteristic of houses of the period — pre-modern air conditioning.
As prospective buyers, Mr McColgan and Ms Bailey, 37, director of development at Archaeological Institute of America, had toured the Loring House “with childlike wonder,” he writes in the book, admiring the unexpected elegance of the fluted, carved jambs on the front door and the hidden closets and secret rooms (the result of multiple additions over the centuries). They envisioned themselves stabling horses on a 13-acre property located along a country road lined with farms.
The couple bought the house for $550,000 from a woman in her 90s. They were not blind to its issues, including the sagging of the roof, but Mr McColgan thought, “Slight cosmetic work. Nothing more.”
This changed quickly once they were installed and up and running.
In the book, Mr McColgan describes floorboards that “rolled and tossed me around like a ship in a storm”. An exaggeration for dramatic effect, one assumed, until he got up and led the way to the dining room. There, the broad pines sloped the way mountains slope into a valley. An antique oak dining table flanked the bay in the middle.
In the kitchen, Mr. McColgan faced a bigger problem. “I tear off this wall panel and a section of the frame is just dust,” he recalls, describing how one corner of the wooden frame had completely rotted away. “This is Week 1. I thought, ‘How is this?’
Elsewhere he discovered a holed foundation, frozen pipes, weathered bricks in seven fireplaces and broken windows.
“I realized I can’t do it alone,” he said.
So he reached out to local experts in the specialized world of historic preservation, including Michael Barrywho teaches conservative carpentry at North Bennet Street School, a private vocational school in Boston, and has a restoration business. For one summer, Mr. McColgan served as Mr. Burrey’s apprentice.
In his quest to learn how to work with the six basic materials of the early 18th century—wood, lime, iron, stone, glass and brick—Mr. McColgan tagged along with a plasterer to Nantucket for a week and picked up a dry stone. course of masonry in Carving Studio & Sculpture Centerin West Rutland, Vt.
“He was one of the workshop participants who had a goal,” Dan Snow, Drystone Wall Expert and Sculptor who taught the class, said of Mr. McColgan. “He wanted to know specific answers to questions he had about the stone foundation of his house. He was really taking it on.”
Mr. McColgan also hired himself out as a laborer to a man who specialized in window restoration. Through this work, he came to work at Louisa May Alcott’s Gardenin Concord, Massachusetts and Old North Church in Boston, two landmarks of early 18th century architecture.
“We pulled out every window and brought them back to a little shop and cleaned them,” Mr McColgan said. “Some of the most boring work, but interesting properties.”
Describing his chosen profession, he added, “A framing chisel and a hammer — you don’t see those on a modern construction site. This world is still living on the fringes.”
Slowly, Mr. McColgan gained a foothold in his new career — and under his own roof. started a business, Helve Historic Trades, and now works mainly in history museums. (A recent work was the restoration of the woodwork in its dome Mayflower Society Housein Plymouth, Mass.) And he continued to bring the skills he learned on jobs back home.
There is a divide of opinion in the world of old houses, a clash between preservationists who are sticklers for historical accuracy and those who prefer a certain level of modern comfort. With the Loring House, Mr. McColgan sought to preserve the historic details, leaving them largely untouched while making only the repairs necessary to make the structure sound and livable.
So the floors still sag and roll in many rooms, and the wall paint in dark shades of gray and mustard yellow is positively ancient. But he replaced the rotting kitchen beam with a new “in-kind” piece—oak where oak used to be—and fixed a two-foot-long fracture that ran through the brick fireplace in the living room.
The plumbing and heating had been updated in recent years, so Mr. McColgan did not do any modern construction, as he prefers. “I want to do the framing, brickwork and blacksmithing,” he said. “These are the things that interest me.”
But at the back of the wandering house is a surprise: a bright living room with high ceilings and a floating steel staircase that rises to an attic. The space already existed, but Mr. McColgan added the staircase and otherwise changed the layout. The room is as impressive in this old, old house as the owner in his jeans and sneakers.
“You can sit there and be in the modern age,” Mr McColgan said. “And then you go back into the kitchen and you’re in the 18th century.”
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