A little time and a little hard work can make a dream home: The Story Line

I can't help it. When the newest edition of the phonebook lands on my doorstep, I have to yell like Steve Martin in the 1979 classic The Jerk.

"The new phonebook is here! The new phonebook is here!"

The new book is a little slimmer than my old 2016 edition, but it still does the trick.

I open it to a random page. I'm in the New London section. I close my eyes and stab my finger at a name. 

Makinson, Wayne. North Granville.

I do this every month.

"Everybody's got a story," is the theory I'm working on. So far, the P.E.I. phonebook has never let me down.

'We bought the house sight unseen'

Wayne is more than happy to chat. He and his wife moved to P.E.I. just a few years ago from Ontario. They came to the Island on vacation and fell in love with the place. They decided to retire here.

They found their dream home online — a beautiful American four square-style house with a balcony on the second floor. The price was right and the pictures looked good, so they bought it.

Then they saw the place in person. They knew it would be a fixer-upper, but it was a much bigger job than they had believed.

"My wife cried," said Makinson, remembering walking through the doors for the first time.

"We bought the house sight unseen, except for the pictures and that. So it was a mess, an actual mess. There was cobwebs. There was mice. It was livable, but it was pretty grim."

Uncovering history

They've been working for two years on the house, and they're still not done. Each new job they undertake seems to uncover another job that needs doing. But it also uncovers some of the house's history. 

"I've traced the place back to 1872 in the records," said Makinson. "There was a blacksmith shop on the property, which is still standing. We call it the barn. And there was a grist mill. So there's a lot of history to the property."

The Makinsons are trying to stay true to that history as they restore the place. Under the floor tiles in the kitchen, Wayne found the original hardwood. He set to work sanding and refinishing.

"I left in a lot of the imperfections. You can see the burn marks from the original kitchen stove. They're still in the floor."
He also wanted to be historically accurate with the materials the house was built with.

"So I went online and learned how they would have finished their floors at the turn of the century. It turns out they would have used boiled linseed oil or tung oil."

'It's all grass now'

A few weeks after the Makinsons moved in, an old farmer named Eric Sinclair stopped by.

Sinclair, who has since passed away, shared some of what he knew about the old house — the kind of stories you can only learn by living next door your whole life.

He told them about Old Lady Mallett, who lived in the house when Sinclair was a boy.

She'd shout at the drivers of trucks running to the gristmill for spraying her house with gravel. The mill is long since gone, so Sinclair showed them the path which led to it.

"I mean, it's all grass now, but it used to be the road running down to the gristmill," said Makinson. "There used to be a dam there, but they took it out in the '80s. So the creek has returned to its original flow."

That bit of information peeled back another layer of the place's charm — one that's especially appealing to Makinson. That creek is now packed with brook trout.

"Last year, my two boys came up to visit," he says. "There were some that were 18 to 20 inches long. And could we catch them?" he laughs.

A little time and a little hard work

"Good luck. They're fast. I've never seen a fish move that fast, and I've been fishing all my life."

He's yet to catch one, but he's patient. Like the house, the work he's put in will make the end prize all the more valuable.

A little time and a little hard work, and they'll reveal their secrets. As the Makinson's house reveals more and more, it's feeling more like home. 

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