From decrepit tear-down to dream home

TILTON — When Stacey Robitaille spotted a tumbledown house on a spacious lot, she expected a diamond in the rough. Rough was an understatement.

The home on Route 132, rumored to have been built in 1776, had been condemned, declared unfit for habitation, after the two women who had lived there for 60 years without making any improvements moved to a newer and safer location. Robitaille, a hair stylist with two children, purchased what is now a 3-bedroom house with a view of Mt. Kearsarge for $68,000 in 2015 – a steal. The price was based on the land alone, a sweeping lot with waist-high weeds, overgrown gardens, bushes that had morphed into giant popsicle shapes, and pear trees that had been planted 40 years ago and looked a little like the gnarly trees from “Lord of the Rings.”

Robitaille fell in love with the location. But not with the house.

“One guy drove up and said, ‘You should burn it or tear it down,’” Robitaille said. “A lot of people said, ‘Good luck.’”

Comfort and curb appeal were not obvious, or even apparent. But they were in the long-range vision of Robitaille and her father. As house and rental prices throughout the Lakes Region continue to climb beyond what most lower and moderate-income buyers can afford, fixer- and "carpenter specials" continue to be a bastion of hope when it comes to owning a home.

 It helps to be resourceful and patient — and have friends or family in the building trades.

“It’s still a work in progress,” Robitaille said. “I have a lot of nice people who help, that I’m grateful for. It’s nice to know people who know what to do.”

It’s taken five years to make the house livable and something that will eventually surpass Robitaille’s imagination. Locals remember the listing structure with a collapsing porch and roof that used to sit on wild, untended land. The transformation into a restored, open-concept post and beam house happened because of hard work by three people: Robitaille, her father, who was then 60 and battling cancer, and his assistant, who was 75 at the time. Her father, Mark Robitaille, had restored five old houses in Sanbornton before he tackled this one. He rebuilt if from the ground up.  It was a labor of love.

“For the last two years, he was hooked to a chemo bag,” said Robitalle. “We’d have to carry him home, he was so tired. He did it because he loved my children dearly. I didn’t know what he was capable of until I brought him here.”

Mark Robitaille toiled until he couldn’t stand. He died before the restoration was complete.

Now, an 1886 windmill towers above the yard, like a whimsical heirloom plucked from “The Wizard of Oz.” A Polynesian teakwood table that Robitaille bought for $100 at an antique flea market in Danville, is centerpiece of a renovated kitchen. By scouring wholesalers and discounters in central New Hampshire, she acquired two doors and 22 pane windows for $2,200 – another money-saving triumph. A 15-pane window from the back of the old house was repurposed as a bathroom mirror. Seven antique-style living room wall sconces were salvaged from a dump.

“We took every wall out.  All the horsehair plaster was removed.  There was no insulation in the house at all.  My father rebuilt the ceiling with trees from the land,” Robitaille said.

The renovation yielded surprising discoveries. “Once we started peeling the paneling off we found horsehair plaster under most of it,” a home construction common in the 1800s. Remnants of corn cobs and newspaper from 1900 were stuffed in the wall to retain heat from a single wood stove.

The most intriguing surprise was the images on beams beneath horsehair plaster which drawn over 100 years ago.

“Someone had to stand on something to do that,” said Robitaille, pointing to child-like pictures now exposed on ceiling timbers. “Someone told me people used to tell family stories by drawing on the beams. Odds are pretty high that Native Americans may have lived in this house at one time.” During the Colonial era, Tilton was known as Sanbornton Bridge, and Sanborn Road was a north-south stagecoach route and a main road to Canada.

So far Robitaille has spent roughly $150,000, including the original $68,000, to buy and fix up the house and its three-acre lot. The renovations alone might have run $200,000, she said. Her father and his assistant jacked up the main part of the house to put in a cement-floored basement with a six-foot ceiling, which might have cost roughly $80,000 if she had to hire an excavator. Her father also sandblasted the beams of the entire house, a project that might have run $50,000. 

In addition to being a monument to her father, her home is a museum of his Yankee thrift – a trait he passed to his daughter. “My father was so frugal he unplugged my phone charger whenever I wasn’t using it,” said Robitaille.

For $800 Robitaille purchased cement board siding in different colors, the remnants of other orders, which she will repaint to match.