When a couple with dreams of buying a fixer-upper found a 19th-century farmhouse for sale in Pennsylvania, they knew it was their ideal project. They devoted five years to the massive restoration, and today, the 31-acre property is unrecognizable.
Married 37 years, New Jersey natives DeWitt Paul, 58, and his wife, Jean Paul, have lived all over the world. They have four children living in four different states and eight beloved grandchildren. With a branch of their orthotics business, Foot Solutions, in Easton, Pennsylvania, their interest was piqued when they found a farmhouse for sale in 2018 in nearby Saylorsburg.
“We were living in Las Vegas at the time,” Jean told The Epoch Times. “It was a bank foreclosure. We put an offer on it, sight unseen.”
The Hard Work
DeWitt said that the property had two houses, three barns, and one extra garage. The farmhouse was built in 1881, and the bigger house was built around 1985.“The original owners were 40 years ago, we don’t know very much about them. We are the fifth owners of the property,” he said.
The second owner had it until the 1960s or 1970s, before the third owners, a couple, bought it. “They built the bigger house in the 1980s. They really worked on the property to be beautiful. They did [it] for a lot the same reasons as us—they wanted a property their children can come and visit and that would be a fun place for them to come,” DeWitt said, adding that the third owners sold the property when they got older and could no longer keep up with maintenance.
The fourth owner was a woman who had a lot of cats. “They used the house as a litter box,” Jean said. “The place was just run down. The smell was so incredibly bad that you couldn’t even walk in without gagging.”
After packing up their things and driving cross-country to Pennsylvania, DeWitt and Jean secured the property from the bank for $220,000.
“Even though it was completely disgusting, we were like, ‘Yes, this is what we want!’” said Jean, who dreamed, alongside her husband, of making the 31-acre site their home and a holiday haven for their kids and grandkids.
DeWitt added: “The main house we started right away so that we could live in it. Three days after we closed on the property, we basically camped out in the big house while renovating. When the pandemic hit our retail business was shut down for a few months, so we pivoted our attention to the farmhouse. We were going to spend maybe $75,000, [but] we did a lot of this during COVID when the wood prices were ridiculously high, so I think that probably cost us almost an extra $30,000.
Triumphs and Challenges
Sticking to as many original materials as possible, the couple installed white oak hardwood floors and fitted the exterior of the house with cedar siding, which they painted, slowly constructing “an 1881 house that has all of the conveniences of a new house.”There were many arduous tasks, among them a sloping laundry room and brick wall restoration.
“The ceiling and floor [of the laundry room] was slanted down six inches from the back, so we had to jack it up with posts and then dig a trench all the way around, pour a cement foundation three feet down, then set the house back down on the wall,” DeWitt said. “The brick wall that’s in the kitchen got totally stripped down. Getting the paint off that wall was very, very hard!”
Yet by completing over 70 percent of the restoration themselves, DeWitt and Jean, who had flipped a home before, confirmed how well they worked together.
DeWitt said: “It wasn’t quick and it definitely wasn’t easy. The way that we kept motivated was, we would get to certain milestones where we could really see that there was some progress, and as we saw those points in time, it gave us the motivation to keep going.”
Jean, who minored in interior design at college, took the lead on home decor sourcing antiques from local establishments that would have been from a similar period as the 1881 farmhouse. As the renovation progressed, Jean got a sense of her ideal style, using “modern farmhouse” for the finished look.
One of her favorite spaces is the formerly sloping laundry room. “If you take a look at the ceiling, it’s actually shingles—so she shingled the ceiling, which is really kind of fun,” said DeWitt. “The primary bedroom with the wood ceiling is really pretty as well.”
As the couple tore down the ceiling, they also discovered that wooden transport crates had been used to board the attic floor. Since these boards bore original markings from transporting copper from Connecticut and Allentown, Pennsylvania, the couple decided to repurpose the boards for the wooden ceiling in their master bedroom.
‘We’ve Been Successful!’
All that remains to be finished after five years of immense hard work is the exterior landscaping and stonework. There is also an original carriage house adjacent to the farmhouse that has fallen apart over the years; the couple is planning to rebuild that and paint it “the original red and white” that it was.“We have the main house that we live in, then we have the farmhouse that we have redone, and we have 31 acres, so it’s a place where all the grandchildren love to come,” Jean said.
DeWitt added: “[Our kids] really love it. We’ve been successful!”
The smaller farmhouse is used to host family, and as a short-term rental with approval from the township. DeWitt and Jean’s grandkids adore exploring the three miles of hiking trails on the property, the meadow replete with fire pit, the barn with its friendly pet goats, and the tractor and riding lawnmower. DeWitt and Jean even have a target-shooting range on site and regularly host games and cookouts.
To the couple, a home is a place to gather, and they are proud of the fruits of their labor.
“Something like this would cost way more than we could afford to pay, so we used sweat equity and our time, and now we have this beautiful property,” DeWitt said. “Obviously when you rebuild a house, there’s quite a bit of expense, but a lot of the things that we’ve done are not expensive things.
“If there’s a message that we want to tell people, it’s that if you’re handy, you can do something like this. You can make something beautiful out of something that’s falling apart.”
