My daughter and I spent an hour at the Vincent Allen house yesterday. Mr. Amato did tell me he had done a lot of exterior work. I have to say I was very impressed! The last time we were there you couldn’t see the house from the road due to all of the vegetation. In fact, we said it looked like a jungle.
He even created a parking lot for all of the volunteers on Saturday. That is our big clean up day. We will have an exterior group cleaning up the property. We will also have a group inside starting the daunting task of clearing the house out. It is filled with so much stuff. We believe it is a combination of hoarding and also people going inside and trashing it. What is the fun in that? I will never understand.
The summer kitchen still remains my favorite part of this property. Not sure what it is about it that calls to me. The fireplaces inside it are so huge! It is a two room structure. Would love to know the complete history of it. To me it looks older than the main house. At some point there was plaster inside which is unusual for a summer kitchen. Makes me wonder if it was used as a primary residence while the main house was being built? One fireplace inside is so large it goes up to the top of my shoulder and I am almost 5’7″. Sadly, that structure is also filled with items!
My daughter and I were determined to at least get a portion cleaned inside the main house so we could see what the wood floors look like. It took us a solid hour to clean a four foot by four foot portion of the upstairs hallway. When we finally saw the wide planks of the wood floors it was so worth it!! They will be beautiful!
The previous owner raised alpacas. There is a rather large loom inside the house. It was still a bit strange to find bags and bags of alpaca fur upstairs in the hallway. She must have been turning the alpaca fur into alpaca yarn.
She was also an avid reader! There are books everywhere! I am a book collector so I am always drawn to them in houses. She had quite an eclectic taste in books. There were a few pertaining to the human body. We saw one where she was learning Arabic. There were a couple about Nostradamus.
It will be very interesting on Saturday when we have many hands inside to see what else we discover! I will be sure to take more pictures and videos for those that can only be there with us in spirit!
