I had the pleasure, a few days ago, of visiting this house,
Even asking was a breach of Southern politeness, but it was that or listen to a two hour discussion of horse pedigrees and relative values viewed in todays market, (This crap is mind numbingly boring) so politeness be damned. Anyway, the owner only stays there a couple of days a month with her primary residence in FL, so it wasn't quite the same as asking to prowl around someones full time home.
It doesn't appear that the restoration/renovation work that has been done over the decades burdened itself too much with historical accuracy, however the place is impressive.
I did have the displeasure of seeing a set of 8, black forest carved chairs with boar's head backs that had been painted, (white paint and then spritzed with gold for highlighting) there are some sick twisted individuals in this world.
The doors all appear original and are 96¡x 36¡ x 3¡ quarter sawn white oak, each rail and stile joint is MT with 4 tenons going completely through the stile, this was no small feat as the tenons are about the cross section of a
1x4 and the stiles are about 8¡ wide. The hinges were about 8¡ long with plates 3/8¡ thick and 3¡ wide.In spite of their age, there was not an open open joint in any of the doors. There is something very satisfying in closing a 300lb door and having it snick shut with just minimal finger pressure.
The floors in the house are all vertical grain heart pine, a lot of the flooring is 18-20' long, there were no visible repairs that I could see.
The brickwork is massive, my best guess about the size of the house and thicknesss of the walls would put the number of bricks somewhere around 500,000, at todays prices just the cost of the brickwork alone would swallow the cost of most present day mansions whole.
While poking around the grounds, I looked in one the the out buildings(I believe that it was orignally a smoke house) and there were great stacks of crown moldings, post, beams and assorted woodwork, I suppose left over from past rework of the house. After some internal discussion I finally had to admit to myself that, ´do whatever I liked¡ did not include backing the truck up to the smokehouse and helping myself to a load of woodwork, :(
One observation I made was the presence of 2 1000 gallon propane tanks, there wasn't a generator set, undoubtedly this place takes a metric shitload of money to heat, even in cold challenged Alabama.
I was glad to get to see it up close and personal and even happier to find out I didn't own another horse when I left.
basilisk