New Life For An Old Home

When Walter Herbert describes what his new/old home will look like you can imagine the tone from the baby grand’s hammers and the scrape from the kitchen chairs scooching to the table.

Then, in the background, the whine and grate of a carpenter’s screw gun interrupts. It’s clear this old house is months away from being a home again.

End-of-the day light pokes through old barn-board sheathing in an interior stripped of its former self but for the frame. Gone is the wallboard and ceiling, and plumbing, wiring, heating and ventilation.

The carpenters fasten plywood to openings that eventually will hold windows, sealing out a rainstorm predicted for the overnight.

Water already did a number on the house at the corner of Burrill and New Ocean.

So did fire. The interior smells faintly of charcoal under the dominant sawdust smell. Black scales remain on some boards and posts.

An electrical fire that raged July 17, 2010, and the water from firefighters' hoses, left the house uninhabitable and boarded up for almost a year and a half.

The architect for the restoration, Morris Schopf, says many owners would have opted to knock the circa 1890 home from its stone foundation and start building from scratch.

But this was Walter Herbert’s family home growing up and into adulthood.

A place where important decisions were made at the kitchen table.

He grew up with his two brothers and sister, his mother, and older relatives.

Later, in 1979, he bought the home from his mother and lived there.

He always had plans of making the house over, eliminating cold drafts and adding warmth.

Now he and his wife, Christine, are constructing a dream home for them and their daughter, 21/2-year-old Vanessa Scarlett Herbert.

The two-family home will include a rental property, just as it did when he was a kid walking to and from .

It’ll have a library, music room, and kitchen with a dual-fuel stove— gas burners on top/an electric oven below.

His wife is a master chef.

And just as the kitchen was the heart of the household growing up, the kitchen will be the heart beat of the restored home when the family moves back in around July 4.

That will be two years from when they left the house to go to Georgia for the Fourth of July in 2010.

Two weeks later, on vacation in Georgia, they got calls from half the town of Swampscott telling them about the fire. His sister was about the 60th person to break the news.

Five months later Walter returned and, seeing the house for the first time, thought, ”Oh my God, we’ve lost everything.”

Eventually the insurance check arrived. The financial advisor and his family got the design underway, and then the demolition.

Later came approvals from the town. Construction started in November.

The big boarded house on the corner is taking shape under the tools of Matt Beane, owner of M. Beane Construction.

He grew up in Swampscott, too.

He built his first boat as a senior in high school, and shaped some of his carpentry skills through the boat builder’s craft.

The Herbert house’s custom roof reminds him of the custom work that goes into boat building.

The new roof is very complex and has only two whole sheets of plywood in it.

The rest are all cut to fit the custom design.

The carpenter calls it the House of Seven Gables.

Below one of the gables is a new-found view, Walter Herbert said.

Since they last lived in the house the old church two properties away has been demolished and the open space offers a distant and narrow view of the ocean and Egg Rock, he said.

The neighborhood is taking on a new look.

A new building will go up in the empty church lot.

Up the street, a developer is rebuilding what was another place where people prayed, a church that soon will be a place for people to live.

And now the boarded up Herbert house is getting new life, a new look.

A place to raise a family. To read, to talk, and sit at a kitchen table.