House Tour: Frank & Jill’s Frajil Farm Renovation

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published Feb 10, 2009

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Name: Frank & Jill
Location: Mont Vernon, NH
Size: 1200 square feet per floor, 2 floors
Years lived in: 35 years

(Image credit: Apartment Therapy)

We’ve spent many family holidays at Frank & Jill’s farmhouse so we have a warm place in our hearts for this inviting space. Having extensively renovated the home — expanding and completely overhauling nearly every room — Jill and Frank have successfully injected their distinct personality into every nook. The home is filled with the art of friends and family and every piece has a story. Accentuated by low ceilings and small scale, built-in spaces, the home is warm, cozy and always at ease. We thought this was the perfect house tour to celebrate the hard work of DIY’ers everywhere…

(Image credit: Apartment Therapy)

We surprised Jill and Frank with our camera on our last visit. We only planned to take a few snapshots of the lovely antique furniture but ended up shooting the entire home. The image above is one of Jill’s from the summer after they completed their renovation but the rest are simply captures of how Frajil Farms looks on a lazy, winter afternoon, just as the sun goes down…

AT Survey
Inspiration: A little bit shaker mixed with our old loft in NY, also influenced by the gorgeous dining room at Monet’s Giverny. That made us paint our floor yellow.
Favorite Element: We’d have to say our property beginning with our long country driveway
Biggest Challenge: Renovating a 200-year-old house whose character had been practically obliterated by the previous owner. We were beyond restoration, more a reinvention of a badly abused home while retaining the outside structure
What Friends Say: It feels light and open
Biggest Embarrassment: We replaced the water pumps and everything else because we had no water — turned out the shallow dug well was empty. Or maybe the most embarassing thing is when the bank appraiser told us the “sills” needed to be replaced and we thought they meant window sills…
Proudest DIY: Helping the carpenter raise the roof from flat to pitched — and then cutting out the old roof
Biggest Indulgence: Corian counter tops and the big cuboard in the kitchen
Best advice: Live in your house for a while before you begin to renovate. The house will tell you much of what it needs if you just listen. We had 25 years to plan our renovation.

(Image credit: Apartment Therapy)

Resources
Appliances: Fletcher’s Appliance, Nashua, NH
Hardware: European Inviisible Hinges
Furniture: Past Tense East (Bridgehampto, NY; formerly NYC), Crate & Barrel, Red Chair Antiques (Peterborough, NH), some built in and the rest mostly auction
Accessories: Auctions
Lighting: Wolfs in Waltham
Rugs and Carpets: Kilim Rugs, auction
Tiles and Stone: Porch floor is yellow Mexican tiles (not suggested for floor but worked great), cork for the bathroom upstairs, and domino tiles downstairs.
Window Treatments: Marvin windows with no treatments at all
Beds: Built-in using pumpkin pine taken from the shed we disembled
Artwork: Collected and original
Paint: Various Benjamin Moore over special plaster walls, done in the old method
Flooring: Painted over original hardwood floors

(Image credit: Apartment Therapy)

Photos by Wes & Kayla

Related Posts from Frank & Jill’s Home:

Look! Foyer with Antique Mailbox Cubbies

Look! Farmhouse Built-In Bed Nook