Clifford Renovations & Restorations

The Goose Hill Road Project Story

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I hold the Goose Hill Road project near and dear to my heart. This 326 years old Circa 1680 farm house sat vacant for over a year. Potential buyers came & went, loving the charm but Goose Hill Front Yard then backing out after completing their engineer’s reports which uncovered major structural flaws. Not your typical fixer upper, no one seemed willing to undertake or have the skill to tackle such an enormous project until yours truly happened by.

I passed the old red house many times on my way back and forth to other projects wondering if anyone would ever restore it to the condition it deserved to be in. I was finishing up my Fox Hunt Lane project and had it on the market hoping to sell quickly and secure this beauty. I felt my name was written all over it & even recall driving into the dirt driveway several times just to sit & ponder it’s potential.

Circa: 1680 - Goose Hill Road, Cold Spring Harbor, New York
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My wife Katrina is a top producing Realtor but coordinating a sale and a buy sometimes doesn’t work out the way you hope.. One day as I was driving up Goose Hill Road, to my dismay I saw a “SOLD” sign in front of "OUR" next house!!!.

Months passed and life went on but no one ever moved into the old red house. One day a wonderful young family made a promising offer on our Fox Hunt home but we had no where to go. As luck or fate would have it, that was the week that the old red farm house came back on the market. And as they say, "the rest is……".

The thing I love about old homes, knowing all that I do about construction is the workmanship that came before me. I have so much admiration for the efforts of the carpenters and craftspeople who had no power tools, no lumber yards, no Home Depots. Everything they used they made themselves. This particular house had been sitting here proudly for hundreds of years but really started deteriorating in the last 50. There were many renovations that perhaps well meaning people did over the years that only escalated that process. Maybe it’s a sign of our times as craftsmanship and working with our hands fades from our daily lives.

With this project I took on a job that no one else would and have transformed one of Long Island’s oldest houses to a beautiful comfortable home with all of today’s amenities, yet one that I think Andrus Titus, (one of the original owners) would be proud of.

The Goose Hill Whaling Pot
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There were many unique elements in the house that we felt needed a special stage. The Whaling Pot, hundreds of years old & deteriorated beyond repair now has a special place in the Garden. The tilted pot pours out flowers next to the soft belly curve of a low farmer’s stone wall with a back drop of a white cedar fence I fabricated.

The Kitchen epitomized the challenges I faced orchestrating new construction with old. I first installed a huge header consisting of 4 massive TGIs attaching the new addition to the old timber beams making this large open expansive kitchen possible. I resolved the differences of ceiling & floor

The Goose Hill Road Kitchen Remodeled
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heights by a clever kitchen design & enhanced it by building custom crown moldings & installing distressed cabinetry at different heights. I installed a new wide pine floor that closely matches the original floors. I custom fabricated the soapstone countertops and relocated an original multipaned picture window over the farmsink .

More Goose Hill Road Project Photos

The Floors

The original pine floorboards in the center hall were loose, uneven and not stable. They were also covered with layers and layers of peeling paint.

The Goose Hill Stairs Before
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To ensure a solid floor, yet retain the original pine floor planks I individually removed each plank and mediculously beefed up and braced the existing floor joists until they were solid and secure. I reused all of the original handmade nails and used screws as well that I hid with filler. I hand painted correlating grain onto the filler and sanded it smooth with a fine artist brush and dark artist oil paints so that all the filled screw holes are now virtually undetectable. The floors are as solid as they were hundreds of years ago…. once again.

I used this process to restore all the original floors through out the house. I then took on the tedious task of removing dozens of coats of paint using liquid strippers and heat guns because the paint would immediately clog up the

The 2nd Floor Stairs After
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grit in the sandpaper of a sanding machine.

Sanding all the wide plank floors down to their original beauty was an incredibly long & tedious process that I do not recommend to any DIY’er! Even professional floor refinishers did not want this job. Once this process was completed I sealed the floors with several coats of sealer.

In many older homes there is no such thing as a sub floor. The finished wooden floor planks were nailed directly to the floor joists below. In the case here the floor joists were basically trees, some with the bark still present.

To ensure stability and a safe solid feeling under my feet I installed what is known as "cribbing". Basically, this process entails adding new floor joists against the old ones (which were really just rough hewn logs) to narrow the spacing of twenty four inches on center, to a now more conventional solid sixteen inches on center.