House that state considered not worth saving is reborn, thanks to years of hard labor [updated]

The Ash House, purchased and moved by Greg Cichowski, has come a long way since the days when it was considered fodder for the bulldozer.

The magnificent “old” house rising up in a field on Old Turnpike Road is a far cry from the collapsing, rotted,  circa 1742 building that used to sit beside Mansfield Supply on Route 195.  And yet, its bones and its heart have survived.

The Ash House was slated for demolition by the University of Connecticut in the year 2000, after the state determined it was beyond saving.

Before bringing in the bulldozers, however, UConn offered to let someone remove the house.

Among the six bidders who recognized an opportunity was Greg Cichowski.

He and his wife Emine are pharmacists who owned the Mansfield Apothecary until they closed the business in 1998.  Greg also served on the Mansfield Planning & Zoning Commisson. And Emine is a well-known potter.

Cichowski’s bid of about $6,000 for the house was three times higher than the next guy. Maybe those other bidders should thank Cichowski. It would take him two-and-a-half years to dismantle and move the Ash House.

Cichowski transported the stone from the basement and removed all the wood, plank-by-plank.

Cichowski had some experience with saving old structures. He renovated the 1813 home his family now lives in, and rebuilt an old sugar house on the property.

Rebuilding a stone foundation in a fashion true to the history of the Ash House - that is, without the use of mortar - was a new and sometimes intimidating challenge.

What made the project possible was the friendship and guidance of Larry Mooney,  a mason from the old days when a person learned everything by doing. Mooney began his training after graduating from high school in 1954.

“I started as a hod carrier,” he said, referring to the apprentice’s job of carrying supplies to the masons. He went on to learn every aspect of the job, from brick and stone-laying to plastering.

A puzzle made of stone

The foundation of the rebuilt Ash House has been created by carefully fitting stone to stone, like a jigsaw puzzle.

The only part of the foundation that is secured with mortar is the “set stones.” These massive blocks of granite - 15 to 20 inches high and about 8 inches thick - are what the house rests on.  The blocks were salvaged from the site where CVS at Four Corners was built.

As the foundation project progressed, Cichowski realized he didn’t have enough material from the old house, but he was able to harvest more stones from an old farm field.

Cichowski wasn’t as lucky with salvaging the lumber from the original house; most of it was useless, but some served as templates - and along with photographs taken before the house was disassembled - they were used to fashion new oak timbers. Some of the posts, for example, taper like gun stocks,  just as in the original house.

Doctor’s diagnosis: “you’re nuts”

Rebuilding this old house has been both an act of love and an obsession.

Cichowski, who loves the details of American history, and is prone to doing things “right,” would be the first one to tell you he is crazy.

As an example, he tells a story about when, in 1995, Mooney first agreed to let Cichowski help with the job of plastering his 1813 home, in order to cut down on labor costs.

Mooney wasn’t confident that Cichowski could handle the grunt work. “He looked at not-so-muscular me and he was dubious. He told me, ‘Any slacking off, and the deal’s off,’ ” Cichowski said.

On the very first day of working together, as Cichowski was hauling plaster,  he lost his footing on the stone stairs in front of the house and broke an ankle.

While Mooney wanted to take him to the hospital, Cichowski was more worried about wasting the plaster and having to postpone finishing the house. So, he put on a pair of high-top work boots and laced them tightly to keep his ankle from moving too much, and continued working for another four hours.

Later, Cichowski’s doctor said the ankle would have to be put in a plaster cast. And when the doctor heard he had worked all day with a broken bone, he diagnosed Cichowski as “nuts.”

But Cichowski insisted on an air-cast so he could continue working.

“The doctor said, ‘You’re not going to be able to do anything,’” Cichowski recalled. “I said, ‘Oh yeah? Watch me.’” He continued to work on the house, in the air cast, for about a month and half.

Doing it the old-school way

Mooney has long since come to accept his buddy’s “crazy” side. “He knows I’m a nut and that I will do anything,” Cichowski said.

“That makes two of us,” Mooney said from inside the house, where the wirey 72-year-old was at work last week on their latest project.

Mooney, who recently moved from Windham Center to Chaplin, is helping build four authentic stone fireplaces - again without the use of mortar.  However, some brick and cinderblock will be used, and mortered, to meet today’s fire codes.

“Mr. Mooney is mentoring me. He’s picking the stone and showing me what to do,” Cichowski said.

He added that using stone is the way it would have been done by farmers in the 1700s, something he’s learned about from another mentor, Don Aitken.

Aitken, Cichowski and their old friend, the late Peter Newcomer, used to tackle projects like this in the past. “We worked on my house, and on Pete’s house in Woodstock and Don’s house,” Cichowski said. Aitken is a walking encyclopedia of knowledge about old houses, he said.

Using stone for the fireplaces is, again, about keeping some of the history of the house alive. “In the 1700s, very few farmers would have had bricks although sometimes, they were able to get them from ships, because the bricks were used for ballast,” Cichowski said.

This week, the three men expect to install the lintel stone on the first completed fireplace, which includes a small oven. The stone weighs about 1,000 pounds.

Cichowski hopes that all this hard work will be appreciated by future generations. He has at least one likely candidate for that bequest, and that’s his four-and-a-half-year-old grandson, Arri, who very proudly likes to tell his dad and other visitors, “Look at the house grandpa is building for me.”

To read an account of raising the frame of the Ash House, check out: http://david-morse.com/docs/ashhouse.pdf

Other photos accompanying this story show Larry Mooney and Greg Cichowski standing outside the rebuilt house; Mooney working on one of the chimneys; Cichowski as he built the foundation stone-by-stone and standing in the foundation of the house in 2003, before the frame was erected; and Cichowski standing in the completed basement  on Aug. 14, 2008  next to the chimney block (to his front-left) which is the base upon which the fireplaces are built, and which includes a stone baking oven.

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Posted Aug. 17, 2008 - new photos taken on Aug. 19: Progress made on fireplace - Larry Mooney; and Don Aitken working on beehive oven.

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