Coop d'Etat (Part 1)

You’re gonna live in a what? A chicken coop? You’ve got to be kidding!

This was basically the response from parents, family, friends and riff-raff. Our poor parents thought that now that we had been married for 11 years, Gini was working for a travel agency in Boston and I had been teaching at the University of Lowell, that the worst was over. We had matured and turned the corner on outrageous behavior. Uh, maybe not.

Gini and I subscribe to the monkey wrench theory. If things are going on too long, no matter how smoothly, you ‘throw a monkey wrench into it’. If you cannot put the pieces back together again or have lost interest in doing so you might as well find out about it sooner than later. If you do put the pieces back together then you will be bonded much stronger. We have done this two or three times in our forty year relationship.

This time we had bought this chicken barn in 1980 and had dabbled with improvement projects for a few years. Then, as bratty as we were after being ‘just us’ for eleven married years, Gini became pregnant, we quit our jobs and sold our house in Cambridge that we owned with Gini’s sister and my cousin and headed for New Hampshire.

Now wouldn’t you feel just calm and tranquil upon seeing your expecting daughter/daughter-in-law move into:



Well, both sets of parents decided to visit us at ‘The Barn’ very soon after our move. Within two hours of arrival my father, with lifelong back problems from various car accidents, was lying in the back seat of the car. My mother, who had one scotch and water everyday late in the afternoon, decided 1:00 pm was the right time for this one. Gini’s Mom found it difficult to speak. But Charlie, good old Charlie, decided to play the visionary with me:



We talked about fruited plains, purple mountain’s majesty and at least two golf holes.

Just a few hours after their departure Charlie and Anne called. Somehow the vision was clouding and they would pay for us to live in an apartment in downtown Bristol if we would come to our senses. Well, politely and firmly, we would like to decline your offer.

I mean we had amenities like a flush toilet. It was in the back part of the barn that was basically an open 48 by 24 foot area. We thought the Moroccan wall hanging was classy:




The basics were definitely present. You know, a fridge for beer, a hammock, wood for the stove:










I mean we even had electricity!...and a satellite dish!!
















Granted there were shades of the Grapes of Wrath ever present:




and we had to be somewhat creative with our closets:




Our first Thanksgiving was memorable since Gini was now well into her fifth month and the furnace that we had ordered arrived in such poor condition that we had to send it back to Somerville Lumber and wait for a replacement. In the mean time that stove that you saw only burned for two hours before you had to reload it. Ah those restful nights.

None-the-less Chip made his appearance on time and he thought that the rustic approach was the way to go:






We all lived in the front part of the barn. This was where the chicken farmer had kept the feed and the tools. There were air tight, tongue-in-groove stalls for the feed with tubes leading to the outside so that the feed truck could pressure blow the feed into the stalls. These made good walls for a bathroom to surround our Moroccan wall-hanging.

At this time let me introduce our hero John. Granted I can say that just one other guy and myself renovated the barn but really...I was the “other guy”. John said that he would do the job for an amazingly low price due to the Beautiful Sister Discount (he loved Gini, Janice and Linda) but we had to name Chip after him. So enter Charles John Duggan as the legal sobriquet for Chip.

Now let it be said that some people can do things so well that they can perform with “one hand tied behind their back”. We did not really anticipate that John would take this as a real challenge:



About 80 per cent through the job John had an aerial dispute with a wasp.

The first real project after making the front apartment livable for all of us was the back deck. This was because we needed a platform for the blender. Our daily incentive was the DOD (Drink Of the Day) which required precise blending:



The roof was the hardest – thirteen days non-stop. I now have arthritis in my feet from lifting 4 by 8 sheets with the arch of my foot.

Chip proved to be an interesting addition – he did not sleep – for two and a half years. Our friend Linda was also living with us and John. All of us were in the front part of the barn, when Chip arrived. There couldn’t have been ten feet separating any of us. We, being the progenitors of ‘benign neglect’, proudly made Chip the first inhabitant in ‘our’ side of the barn when his room was completed first. Thank goodness for those baby monitors and speakers.

Chris, having completed a master’s degree in Energy Engineering decided that the high tech way to heat this place would be a Russian Fireplace, a centuries-old technology. We sent our precious five dollars to Basilio Yevtuschenko in Richmond, Maine for plans. He sent us the plans and some phone numbers of some satisfied customers in case we needed further convincing.

This kind of fireplace is a large box of bricks that has ‘baffles’ in it so that the heat from the fire goes up and down several times before escaping through the chimney. When the fire is out, a damper is closed to seal in the heat. On the coldest of days the fire only burns for a total of 8 or 9 hours. For over twenty years we heated our entire side of the house with just three and a half cord of wood. Thank you Basilio.

Getting a mason to build such a ‘crazy thing’ was not easy. None of the Newfound area masons would take it on since they did not believe it would work. The only mason in Meredith who would do it said we had to wait over two years. Our friend Reno Rossi, yes, of the Rossi family that built the restaurant as you come off Exit 23 on I93, felt sorry for us and agreed to do it:



It took eleven days and he even he was impressed when the first fire draughted very smoothly:




We were very proud of what John led us to do though we were very nervous when the huge half round window for the master bedroom was lifted into place:



The finished product was impressive:










Now we could enjoy our view directly:





That car sitting in the yard was the only irritant to Gini, a real Saab story. It was later removed as a birthday/anniversary present.

So it was the simple life for us – that is if you feel that a hot tub is de rigeur to simply relax. I dared to rent a backhoe/loader in the midst of seven inches of rain but out of the west came John to rescue us once again. (to be continued).