The house
Spruce frame, pine sheathing, clapboard over it, and a roof at fifty-two degrees because snow slides and shingles do not like sitting under it.
1888
Elias Zinck built it in the year the fleet was at its largest. The ground floor was trade and the two floors above were family, which is why the stair is narrow and at the side rather than grand and in the middle: the ground floor needed the width.
The dormer across the front is the thing people photograph. It is five windows wide, it is carried on brackets, and it exists because a five-window dormer gives you two usable attic rooms where a plain roof gives you none. Every third house on this hill has a version of it.
What the chandlery left
- The counting room at the back, with the safe recess still cut into the chimney breast.
- The half door, hung open on the passage wall, with the counting shelf on it.
- Four iron hooks in the ceiling joists of the front room, which held coils of rope.
- A stain on the floor of the back passage about two feet across which is almost certainly linseed oil and which has outlasted three sandings.
Apartments, 1979 to 2004
Four flats, which meant four kitchens, two of them in bedrooms and one in the attic. All four came out in 2006. The damage they did was mostly plumbing, which is to say mostly to the floors, and the second floor was relaid in pine from a barn near Pleasantville because new pine was the wrong colour and would have stayed the wrong colour for thirty years.
What we have done
- 2006 to 2009: the flats out, the house rewired, seven bathrooms in.
- 2012: the clapboard, about forty per cent replaced, and painted the same oxide red it has been since at least 1910 according to a photograph in the Fisheries Museum.
- 2017: the roof, cedar shingle, which is expensive and correct.
- 2021: storm windows made to the original sashes, so the originals stay in.
- 2023: the counting room, lined, lit and fitted out.
The heritage rules
The old town is a national historic district and a World Heritage site, which governs what can be done to the outside: colour, cladding, window pattern, roof line. Nobody tells us what to do with the inside, and we have mostly left the inside alone anyway.
The people
Eight of us. Two on the desk, three in the galley, one on the rooms, two on the counting room door and counter. Six live within four streets of here. One has been here since the house opened in 2009.