The Satterfields have finally moved - upstairs that is. After a year and a half of living in the basement among boxes, dust and the occasional snake, Tim and Tami Satterfield and their two children, Carson and Dylan, are finally sleeping above ground and in their own rooms in an old barn that they have been renovating in Monkton.
Although the move was just to the floors above, it has been an onerous task. The boxes - all of those that have been sitting stacked up all over the ground level - must now be opened. As she unpacks, Tami Satterfield is finding things that she forgot she even had.
"Carson said it's just like Christmas. ... you don't know what you'll find when you open the box," she said. Some boxes have been crushed along with their contents. Some things became moldy and had to be professionally cleaned.
"The pile of laundry has been phenomenal," Tami Satterfield said as she unpacked boxes of clothes and other linens that were packed away clean but now need to be rewashed.
She doesn't mind the extra work too much. "I'm glad that it's all finally up here," she said.
The family's menagerie of cats seem to be the only ones to mind the boxes being moved. "They're a little depressed. They liked climbing on top of the boxes. That was their home," she said.
The boxes were a fixture in the Satterfields' temporary quarters on the first floor of the turn-of-the-century barn they purchased last year with plans to turn it into their dream home. For 18 months, while contractors transformed the upper loft into two stories, the couple and their children lived in what is now the basement of their nearly finished home.
The Satterfields are happy to be upstairs. "It's nice to plop down and watch a movie and not have a spider crawl on you," Tim Satterfield said. There are other little things about home life that they missed all those months.
"We have our own ice. We made it ourselves," he said.
The sleek refrigerator with ice-making capability isn't the only thing the couple love about their new mission-style kitchen. There's also a shiny, chrome-colored, professional-type stove, and a pantry behind a pocket door. "That's Tim's favorite room in the house," Tami Satterfield joked.
"It has everything you need inside," he explained of the pantry. "There's food, air conditioning and a phone. You can close the door and escape."
The family has lived without a kitchen during the entire year-and-a-half renovation process.
The first meal Tami Satterfield prepared in the new kitchen was a birthday dinner for their son, Dylan.
"The first thing he said to me was, 'Now you can make me a birthday cake,'" she said.
For Tami Satterfield, being able to prepare meals at home means more than just an end to cold cereal for breakfast and takeout dinners at night. "It has brought a sense of coming back to order as a family. ... For Dylan and Carson, this has been a big deal," she said.
Tim Satterfield points to the centerpiece of the new kitchen - a long table made out of the the barn's floor joists. He's especially pleased that the couple's contractor, Jay McCardle of McCardle Custom Homes, was able to recycle much of the barn's original wood in unique and creative ways. It was important, they said, to keep reminders of the barn's origins in the new space and not let the many modernizations they wanted spoil the 1915 structure's architectural integrity.
The corner entertainment center in the family room and a desk in the office are made entirely of recycled wood. The barn's original siding covers a wall in the bathroom. The ladders leading up to the loft area in the children's bedroom came from the stable where the family's goats and donkeys sleep.
The main staircase and railing are constructed of old posts, floor joists and 4-by-4's pulled from the walls.
At first, the Satterfields planned on purchasing and installing a new banister. Then they thought of doing something a little different. McCardle suggested using old wood for the staircase and railing.
The couple's architect, Paul Pare, wasn't sure that that would look right. "He thought it might be too heavy," Tim Satterfield said, "but then he was amazed at how great it looked" when it was done.
Pare, he said, has gone "above and beyond the work of an architect. ... He even helped us move. He wants to see the finished project just as much as we do," he said.
A few things in the home remain to be done. Posts are in place for the wraparound deck that will soon be completed, and a lot of finishing work remains, such as touch-up painting, putting in switchplates and repairing things that got banged up in the final stages of renovation.
The house's cooling system isn't working as well as promised. "I'm not entirely happy with it," Tami Satterfield said. With all of its windows, the house is suffering from the aquarium effect, she said. Some rooms, like the office with its skylights, are hot and stuffy, while others, including the children's bedrooms, are frigid. It's likely that there aren't enough ducts in the home, her husband said.
One contractor trying to fix the problem created another one when he forgot that the home contained blown insulation. After promptly cutting a 14-inch-square hole in the ceiling of the office to make room for another duct, he saw the insulation and realized that he couldn't install a vent in that space after all.
The Satterfields now have a 14-inch hole in their ceiling with a lovely view of the insulation. But the pair, who have weathered far worse things during the past 18 months, have a sense of humor about the situation. "We'll do something creative with it," Tami Satterfield said. "Who knows, it might look good."
'The Project'
Tim Satterfield and his wife, Tami Boehle-Satterfield, are renovating an old Amish barn in Monkton. This is the fifth in a series of articles about that project.