I bought the Lennox Tavern on its bicentenary in 1991. What inspired me to buy the largest Georgian house in Lunenburg was not immediately obvious. Some old buildings sit in their derelict state with remnants of charm and call out for attention. In 1991 the Lennox Tavern was large and unappealing and had endured many years as a rundown apartment building.

I bought the building because I was looking for an affordable and exciting restoration. The process of restoring it spanned seven years.

Although the building was very dilapidated, many of the original features remained. I salvaged most of the historic plaster, wooden mouldings, doors and windows and duplicated the original paint colours. Most of the restoration work required, in addition to my labour at the house, searches for reusable doors, windows, mouldings and hardware at antique shops, yard sales, and at derelict house sites around Lunenburg County.

Restoration by the impecunious is often more accurate and thorough because of the extra time and effort spent. Hand tools will do the most authentic work and are often faster than power tools when properly used.

I have found the most useful modern tools to be a table saw, circular saw, planer and a one-ton truck. I had mouldings milled in Blockhouse, Nova Scotia, at a nineteenth-century mill using vintage machinery.

As the work evolved, I visited historic villages and house museums at Strawberry Banke, New Hampshire and Deerfield, Massachusetts. These field trips helped answer questions about architectural details and floor plans. I found a wide variety of books on architecture in second-hand bookstores, often publications not available elsewhere. Several periodicals specialize in seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth century furniture.

When compared with other old buildings of similar vintage, the Lennox Tavern is unique because of its large scale and room dimensions. The largest room is seventeen by twenty-one feet, and the smallest is ten by seventeen feet. The building is forty-two feet long and thirty-eight feet in depth. I have found two other buildings comparable in scale and age to the Lennox Tavern. The White Horse Tavern in Rhode Island and the Cram House in New Hampshire are similar in size and shape.

The Cram House was disassembled and rebuilt in New York recently. This continent was small when first settled and in some ways remains so today. while reading an article in Early American Life, I discovered that the Cram House was found in the part of New Hampshire where my ancestors had settled during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Many artifacts surfaced during the course of the restoration. I uncovered coins trapped in two hundred years of silt while replacing floorboards. During the rebuilding of a collapsed section of the fieldstone cellar wall I found a coin, dated 1791, embedded in the lime mortar on the top course of slate. This coin was situated, date upward, directly under the back door, a traditional German practice of dating a house.

Alternating work sites and focus of work enabled me to retain interest in the work of restoration, which progressed steadily. Having a variety of daily chores avoided time wasted while trying to decide what to do next. When rebuilding a section of the cellar wall, I alleviated the physical stress and tedium by turning to a simpler task such as shovelling out the sixteen inches of mud and debris from the slate floor of the cellar. As the shovelling revealed the shining slate, One scoop at a time, I noticed a three-inch square area without slate. Excavating this part of the floor exposed the round granite walls of a large well. Over the next several weeks I cleaned out the well, removing a few buckets of mud at the end of every day.

Discarded items from over the decades surfaced. Early light bulbs and bottles emerged from the mud and water as if coming to life. The oldest artifact was a perfectly preserved salt-glazed teacup found at the bottom of the well.

My approach to the work on the first and second floors was that of one job at a time. I removed wallpaper throughout and stripped paint. Carpentry work continued until the woodwork was complete and the floors ready for varnish. This method of working enabled me to concentrate on each job to its completion. Many layers of twentieth-century flooring such as linoleum, plywood, tile, oilcloth, carpet and paint were removed.

Sanding the floor completed this stage of the interior work. My most successful method for refinishing the pine floors was holystoning with a brick. Scrubbing the floor with a wet brick and sand removed most of the old paint without expense and resulted in no dust. I then used a small palm sander to finish the floor. The lime plaster ceilings were covered by an assortment of material: strapping, synthetic tile, wallpaper, wallboard, plywood panelling
and paint.

The qualities of two-hundred-year-old lime plaster were unknown to me before this restoration. Unfortunately, during the roof reshingling a deluge caught me by surprise. As water poured in through the open roof it pooled below the attic floor amongst the lath and plaster, finally breaking through a hole in the plaster the size of a quarter. Yet that ceiling is almost as good today as when it was made. Lime plaster can be wet and dried indefinitely because of the self-healing properties of the lime. Modern drywall would not have survived the water, and Victorian era plaster would have fared even worse. An added strength of lime plaster was that it was used with hand-riven lath, which, because of its irregularity, creates a stronger bond. During the lifting of the house to correct structural sagging, the ceiling straightened out without damage, proving again the great elasticity of lime.

I rebuilt the two 4-flue chimneys upward from the second floor ceiling. This was a thirty-foot distance for each and a total of sixty five hundred bricks. The cost was fifty dollars for sand and one hundred and fifty for lime and phosphate-free cement, commonly known as white Portland cement. To preserve the authenticity of the stacks, I recycled old bricks, which are more durable than modern bricks and less expensive.

The roof required over a hundred bundles of cedar shingles and was one of the more costly jobs on the restoration. The south-facing roof slope was the most seriously deteriorated from sun and moisture. I had to replace most of the roof boards before I started shingling. Removing boards and replacing them was actually easier and faster than removing nails from the old boards. The market price for shingles varied widely, ranging from twenty-seven to sixty dollars for grade AA white cedar shingles. I eventually bought Quebec and New Brunswick shingles in Maine for half the Nova Scotia price.

In the early twentieth century, the upper bank of front windows was lowered to afford more light, as the later Victorian eaves and gable trim obstructed it. I corrected the Victorian alterations and repositioned the windows in their original location, tight under the eaves. Several windows on the north and east sides of the house had been removed and filled in at a very early date. I removed the six-by-six hewn log infill in these framed openings and re-installed the missing windows. Forty-nine windows and their sashes were repaired, rebuilt or replaced.

Interior carpentry, plastering and painting comprised the second phase of restoration after the exterior of the house and foundation were stabilized. Hardware was reproduced locally or imported. I purchased two eighteenth-century box locks from an antique dealer in West Chester, Pennsylvania. I had one existing lock in the house repaired. The box locks are iron, measure nine by five inches and have a pair of six-inch keys apiece. There were still three original thumb-latches in the house, and I had ten more made by our local blacksmith, Vernon Walters, just before he retired. He was probably the last practicing blacksmith in North America from the first half of this century.

At the turn of the century, the building had been converted to four flats. I uncovered the original floor plan by studying marks in the floors, ceilings and walls. Several doors were hidden behind fake walls, while other doorways had been more seriously altered. After more research and the removal of the recent partitions, the Lennox Tavern was restored to the configuration of eight rooms on the first and second floors.

An 1817 inventory of rooms and furnishings, drawn up after the death of John Lennox, also shed light on the interior arrangement.

The inventory has about two hundred entries and was written in elegant copperplate handwriting. Although not specified, "the Large Room up Stairs" was probably a dining room. The ''Waiter (Japanned)" valued at one shilling was presumably a tray. It is interesting to note the difference in price between Windsor chairs (five shillings each) and the wooden chairs (one shilling and three pence). An earlier entry for The Garret suggests an explanation. '~Number 85--22 Old Broken Chairs."

The longest list in the inventory is of the contents of the shop, which supplied the people of Lunenburg with household goods, the major item being fabric for both clothing and upholstery. The list also includes entries for eighteen fans, a box of artificial flowers and six snuff boxes. The final room inventoried is the most Intriguing. identified as "The Bedroom Downstairs, it contained "A set of Drawers')~ priced at ten pounds (the most expensive single item in the entire inventory), an iron stove, and twenty-seven books, each separately listed by title.

The appraisers, Mr. Ernst and Mr. Wollenhaupt, valued the building's contents at two hundred and eighty-three pounds, ten shillings and three pence (£283.10s.3d).  Discoveries of people, places and things were the reward for the painstaking work of paint stripping and other restoration activities. As I removed layers of paint from the pine board and batten wall in the hall, I uncovered a scratch etching of an eighteenth-century sailing craft. This small illustration resembled a Tancook whaler or a New England pinky, but with older spritsail rig and a long bowsprit. An old-fashioned German "A" was carved in the wall close to the front entry, probably representing Andreas Jung, the original owner of the land, and likely builder of the house. When I cleaned out the garret I found, between the floor joists, an order list of wine and rum from Halifax to John Lennox. Wallpaper found behind mantels and trim also came from an early period. Some discoveries were the result of other people's comments, a hunch, or the unravelling of clues over time. I accidentally discovered the location of the cage bar in the tap room during the process of repairing a large crack in the ceiling. In this case the bar slats were left in the ceiling above the plaster. Through each step of this restoration I have learned something new: plastering; the use of an antique bead and jack planes; rock wall construction; brick laying with lime mortar, and landscaping. Skills such as wiring, plumbing, roofing, window repair and carpentry I already had when I started the restoration. The rewards in finishing this project are more than I expected. My greatest reward was that the completion of my restoration in 1997 coincided with the declaration by UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Social and Cultural Organization) of Lunenburg old town as a World Heritage Site. My advice to those planning to buy an old house is to stick to the original room and floor plan intended for the structure. Renovating the original layout and changing the original interior fabric is difficult, costly and the end result is often out of harmony with the building. A pre-1820s house renovation is usually no more valuable when completed than when started, and often less valuable. Old houses were constructed with intelligence, hard work and honesty. An arrogant assumption that the past is inferior will lead to muddled renovation. Modern amenities such as electrical, plumbing and heating systems can be easily installed without disturbing the fabric of an old house. The twentieth-century additions to the Lennox Tavern are wiring, plumbing, and electric heat. Aluminum eavestroughing is concealed in a wooden gutter. The Lennox Tavern is now functioning as the Lennox Inn. It is the oldest operating inn in Canada. Plans are in place to increase the Inn's capacity to six original rooms. Recognition of the restoration is seen daily as guests enjoy their surroundings at the Inn. The Lennox Tavern became a registered provincial heritage property in 1992, during the restoration. In 1998, the building was the winner in the Historical Restoration category of the Nova Scotia Home Awards program. Once the work on the tavern was completed I built a federal-style picket fence around the property to enclose my backyard garden. Although this is not my last house restoration, it could turn out to be the largest-scale restoration I complete. Three floor levels, a full sized cellar with kitchen fireplace and a six-foot diameter bake oven, and a 42-by-38 foot perimeter house frame is a lot of work for one person. I am currently working on an eighteenth-century gambrel roofed house in Lunenburg.