We Bought It! Let the Adventure Begin!
Introducing…Pigeon Manor!
We did it! We closed on the property on Wednesday! Hooray! So here is a description of what we bought:
It’s a 7000 square foot Second Empire built in the late 1850s by a man named Isaac Butz, and he had the very first store in all of East Mauch Chunk on one side and lived in the other.
Quick history lesson: The East side of Jim Thorpe was formerly known as East Mauch Chunk. It was its own separate borough until 1954, when Mauch Chunk and East Mauch Chunk merged. The mayors of each borough ceremoniously met in the middle of the bridge that spans the Lehigh River and shook hands, combining the two towns into one new borough: Jim Thorpe.
Pigeon Manor is laid out in a tetris-like shape, with an outbuilding attached to the Southwest side.
The interior is laid out like so:
The East side of the first floor has a main entrance, 3 beautiful parlor-type rooms, and a large kitchen along the East side. This is the most ornate section, and contains much of the original character.
The West side of the first floor has a separate entrance door. It’s a small 2 bedroom apartment, all on the first floor. It has a living/dining room, kitchen, bathroom, and two bedrooms.
The second floor has 10 rooms. Three of them are bathrooms, two are kind-of/maybe kitchens. There are three open staircases going from the first to the second floor, but two of them have been closed off between the second and third floors. Work was started to create an efficiency apartment, but never completed.
On the third floor, there are also 10 rooms. There is only one stairway to access it. There are 2 bathrooms, and one kind-of/maybe kitchen. This is the mansard roof section, so the large dormers provide lots of light and space. There are currently pigeons cooing in the walls, hence the name of the place.
Since closing on Wednesday afternoon, we’ve mostly been wandering around the 30 rooms (There are 30 rooms! 30 ROOMS!) going “huh.”
Sure, we came into this with organized lists and timelines, and we’re still sticking to those fairly closely! But there’s definitely a difference between the esoteric making of spreadsheets and the actual physical doing. Take, for instance, the first thing on the list: “Remove debris.”
That’s a really small description for an indescribable amount of “debris”. One room alone contains two pianos and a 10 foot long desk with live electrical outlets, nail-gunned to the floor. (And a keg turned into a birdhouse, but I digress.)
Personally, I decided my best starting place would be to deep clean the apartment we’re moving into. That included shampooing the carpet, removing the broken Venetian blinds, washing the windows, hanging curtains, and dusting the woodwork and ceiling fans. I do love cleaning, and with all the mess we’re diving into here, I felt a clean, safe, construction-free home base is going to be key to not feel like squatters. We still haven’t slept here; I’m not sure when that will happen. Maybe tonight? Who knows!
So let’s take a little photo tour of the inside! We’ll break it into galleries. This first one is called “Let’s Get Excited!” Here are some beautiful highlights, including the discovery of the original shutters (yay!!):
Now we’ve reached the gallery called “Let’s Get Scared!” To quote George Harrison’s 1987 hit “Got my Mind Set on You”:
It’s gonna take money
A whole lotta spending money
It’s gonna take plenty of money
To do it right, child.
The next verse about taking a whole lotta patience and time sounds about right too, but we don’t need to go there. We pretty much expected the place was going to be scary and need lots more work than we initially could see. We were right!
And here is the final gallery. I call it the “Don’t Worry Parents, Our Living Space Is Perfectly Safe.” We’re not entirely reckless! There is no picture here, but I bought a 6 pack of wirelessly connected smoke alarms I’m going to finish installing today. If one goes off, they all beep, so if a fire were to start, we would know it very quickly! As you can see, we even eat on very nice china, like the civilized people we are.
This week’s agenda: We are getting a lift and getting started on keeping the elements outside. We’re also focusing on getting new heat, hot water, and electric systems up and running. And removing debris. And I’m sure we’ll still be wandering around saying “huh” for a little while longer yet.
If you want to see more photos, I’m going to do my best to put a bunch up on our instagram, @pigeon_manor. Stay safe out there, see you next week!