Last Saturday after Stefan’s parents headed home, we got the chance to go tour our neighbor’s beautiful timber frame (“fachwerk”) house. We have been trying and meaning to get over there for months, after finally speaking to the owner for the first time many months ago while out walking Ayla. He told us then to drop by whenever their front gate was open and they’d be happy to take time to show us what renovations they’d done in their own house – and show us the double windows they built to help keep the house better insulated and quieter, as well as preserve the air-flow, integrity and history of the house.
So last Saturday they had a sign out advertising fresh pressed “Süß” which is apple juice without filtration (so you still have all the good stuff – it’s cloudy.) We want to try making apple wine this year so we figured what better place to get the apple juice than from our neighbor. That venture will have to wait another month or so though, because he was telling us that the optimal apples for it won’t be ripe for picking until late-October.
Instead we just dropped off a large container so he can fill it when they have the apples ready and the time to take it on, and got down to talking about his house. As it turns out, he’s not yet a full-time farmer – he only does this in his “spare time.” Tending 150 apple trees, haying about 10 fields, plowing with horses, raising chickens in his backyard and maintaining everything around their farm. Sure, some of that’s seasonal – but in seasons very close to one another and when you’re working a 9-5 job already, it’s a wonder he manages to keep himself going at all!
They’ve owned their house for 18 years and it was basically falling down when they bought it. But they did such a lovely job restoring it, that they were given a German fachwerk house prize in 2003, which is a very nice accomplishment. They have gone with as many natural materials as possible and kept to the old way of things. But I think he does it not only because he prefers it that way, but because he knows the house would kick out the materials in a couple years anyway and make you start over.
Their farm is actually smaller than ours but the layout is very nice. They also have a large field behind their house which allows them to have roosters and their horses right there. But their barn is about half the size of ours and the house itself is also much smaller. We also didn’t notice any garden anywhere which we found odd – but maybe it was further back on the property. Although we got the feeling that he could be persuaded to trade some day for our place, I don’t think we’d take his – although it is an absolutely beautiful place. One room has floor boards which are about 3 feet wide – something you just can’t find these days. And he’s taken all the paint off the ceiling beams in the house which looks great. We would love to do that in here but it would be a massive amount of dust and chaos now so it will just have to wait until we have another moment of insanity somewhere along the lines. I guess that will come together with us taking the plywood out between the ceiling beams and filling it with clay-plaster as it originally would have been. No idea what the PO (previous owner) in here was thinking but when we get around to it, it will be massively warmer in the rooms since the heat won’t be passing from one place to the next all the time. Although this year we’re managing to hold on to a lot of heat in the house which is fantastic! Just have to find us some old blankets now to make some window blankets for this year to help keep the cold out a bit more and we’ll be set.
Which brings me back to the windows! Finally, right? I unfortunately didn’t have a camera but will explain as best I can otherwise. Because the window sills in the house are so wide, the neighbors have built a second window inside the house which is double paned. This allowed them to keep the old windows (which is really practical and essential in an old house because of the way the house moves, shifts and breathes) while still providing them an airlock for insulation and street noise. The photo below is a window in our house and you can see that our window sills are also a good 6-8 inches deep. The new window would sit flush with the edge of the window frame, leaving us ample space for the window pulls. It would also give us a really fun space to decorate in during the holidays which would be safe from dog and baby mouths!
They’ve had no trouble with moisture build-up in the house or windows and it looks fantastic. We would basically only need to do this in the living room and our current bedroom upstairs…and eventually a couple smaller windows when we got around to it…so a total of 12 windows throughout the house. The windows we installed in the kitchen are already double paned and Mackenzie’s room has newer, sound and heat insulating double paned windows too. Adding windows this way would mean a whole lot less mess because we don’t need to remove the old windows and we can make sure the style of the house isn’t altered either because of the new windows going in.
We’re quite excited about the prospect but clearly this project will be on hold for a while. We don’t know what someone might charge for this but the neighbor is going to try to get us a number of someone who may be able to help out…and worst case we always have our other neighbor next door who does this sort of thing all the time (even though we did ask him for an estimate on rebuilding our shutters months ago and he hasn’t gotten around to it yet.)
