The Sandwich Home

I was contacted by the owner regarding his family home. He grew up working on the property, where he made cranberry boxes as a young man. He went off to college and there he met his wife. The love and nostalgia of the old Sandwich homestead which he planned to return some day was always with him.

(The following information I have found on the internet and in conversations about the property’s origin).

What we found on our first visit was an interesting house and unique property to say the very least!

Rumor has it that the homestead had belonged to the Benjamin Nye family, one of the first to settle in Sandwich MA. Different articles and writings indicate that He was born in England 1602 and died in 1706. He landed in Lynn MA in 1635 abouard the ship Abigale and two years later he traveled to the Cape with 60 families and settled in the new Town of Sandwich. He married Katherine Tupper in 1640, where they settled on nine acres at Spring Hill about a mile east of Sandwich Village. There they raised eight children.

By the late 1650s, he acquired a salt marsh and a spring fed pond. Near there he built a dam and mill. In 1669 Benjamin built a new house next to the mill.

Observations

I observed that the house is an early eighteenth-century house with multiple additions and a large-scale remodel to the story and a half main house.

Amazingly the main house was lifted around 1835 and set on a large granite block foundation with a crawl space and another partial house was married to the east facing end.

The two front rooms and the parlor had been remodeled in the Greek revival era with beautiful Greek revival trim, adorned with built in window seats, mantels, and panels below some of the windows. The front of the house which faces south had a Greek revival entrance with sidelights to each side of the replacement entry door. It had beautiful pilasters and original trim from that era. The house has four fireplaces, one of which is a restored fireplace in the dining room with the crane in the fire box and oven remaining in place. The breast plate of the mantel had an old rifle hanging on it which gave me the feeling of stepping back in time. The house also had a long, very old summer kitchen which I believe, based on the construction, was built in the later sixteenth century. It was built over an old well which had been a working well and the pump remained in the house. The pump was lovingly restored by the owner and mounted to the granite countertop in the new custom kitchen we built.

The summer kitchen was in such bad and failing condition it had to come down and be replaced with a newly constructed wing and made slightly larger to accommodate a very nice working kitchen with lots of storage.

We restored this house by adding new 8×8 sills, multiple structural repairs to the floor’s walls and roof frame. We insulated the house’s exterior envelope, replaced the roofing with taper sawn and treated red cedar shingles.

We repaired all the compromised exterior trim. We restored the front entry way and made a custom fabricated period entry door. We removed all the clapboarding from the front wall restored it and reused it and added some new clapboards as needed. We even made some period moldings with wooden planes to match the details of some of the original trim boards. We build another period custom entry door unit complete with door jambs and custom-made threshold and exterior trim going out to the back yard. All the original window sashes were stripped to the bare wood, reglazed, broken or cracked glass replaced and restored. We replaced all the white cedar wood shingles on the house except for one gable end that was recently done. We heat stripped all the old paint from the interior trim and doors for new painting. The house has all new wiring, heating, air-conditioning, plumbing updated bathrooms all in keeping with an antique house and a generator. The kitchen wing now has a full basement with all the mechanicals in it.

There has been so much restoration on this house to mention. It was a labor of love by the owners and an excellent relationship with them that allowed us to achieve the outcome.