Restoring a 155-year-old house means hours of back-breaking labor. The end’s always just beyond the bend, even if the house is around the corner or down the street.

Doris and “Pee Wee” Murphy could tell you all about that. They’ve made regular 350-mile trips between New Bern and Ashe County for more than four years!

They’ve also been blessed in several areas, not the least of which are incredible friendships through their church. After buying the old house, they asked their Sunday school class for prayer support. They got that and seventeen people who followed them up the mountains to help clean out twenty years of stuff left behind.

The two-story frame home sits halfway up a grassy hillside. Hand-crafted “gingerbread” supports the eaves with gently curved quarter-arches. In between, flared half-arches draw attention to decorative wood spindles. Neat triangles beneath roof peaks are covered with alternating rounded and pointed wood shingles arranged like fish scales.

The first floor hallway and a staircase separate two large rooms, both upstairs and down. Across the hall, what was once a community store is now a spacious bedroom. An outside door allowed customers access to the store without tromping through the house. The walls and ceilings were covered with cheesecloth, then wallpapered. In a front room two men carefully stripped away the ceiling’s first layer, uncovering a flowered wallpaper disc around the old light fixture.

Stairs sweep up from the foyer, the banister rising gracefully beyond a quietly ornate bottom column. Pickets, stained light and dark to match the wainscot across the steps, draw an admirer to the second-floor landing. A hallway to the left leads to a front door between two bedrooms. Harvest-time field hands once stayed in those rooms - men on one side and women on the other.

The original log home began at the hallway’s far end, where sunlight streams through a side door opening onto the porch. The old chimney bricks are visible beyond missing wallboards. Years ago a beekeeper asked for a large hive of honeybees between the inner and outer walls. He promised to come back and replace the boards, but never did.

The tin roof is supported by stout saplings, some with bark attached. Meeting at the top, they’re pair-marked in Roman numerals more easily shaped with a penknife. Carved wood pegs clamp their tenon-joints together. A large center floor beam shows the work of an adz. Hand-chiseled holes anchor the ceiling joists, each fastened by a wood wedge driven in and sawn flush at the top.

The maid/cook’s small bedroom and bath above the kitchen are accessible by a narrow and very steep staircase. Between it and the old sitting room was another bedroom. The previous owner’s sister had a spinal defect from birth and lived there until she passed away at sixty-five. Hot pink wallpaper labeled it “the red room.”

Downstairs, a fair-sized dining room separates the front parlor and kitchen. Just those three rooms were home to the owner’s mother. Everything else was closed off. One winter day, her son and grandson found her in the bedroom dressed in a coat and shawl as if to go visiting. When she explained that she was trying to stay warm, they stoked the wood stove to raise the temperature above a very chilly 45 degrees. The lady was no stranger to the house and cold winters, having been the daughter of the house’s original owners. The man she later married bought the place and they moved back into her childhood home. The Murphys’ first mountain winter introduced them to an unexpected visitor.

“Before we went home for the weekend, we wrapped the whole house in plastic,” Doris recalls, with a wry smile. “It took almost a thousand staples. The wind stripped off all that plastic and wadded it into a ball against the back fence!”

Labors of love pay great dividends after the muscles stop hurting. Two couples from the Sunday school class join them almost every trip. One’s been so dependable they were given first choice of bedroom.

“Pee Wee, you’ve replaced all the wiring in this house,” I said. “You’ve stripped and refinished doors and door frames, mantles, ceilings, walls, stairs, pickets, the banister and wainscot. You’ve replaced all the pipes, added one room and dismantled another, built several bathrooms with showers, extended part of the roof and built a second-floor porch floor where one never was. Is there anything you can’t do?”

“I’ve been fortunate to know how to do those things,” he said, self-consciously, “or we wouldn’t be able to live here.” The thought choked him up. “The Lord’s blessed us with friends who’ve wanted to be a part of it. None of this would have happened without them and God’s blessings.”

A house I’d seen crumble for decades has come a long way in a relatively short time. Its 1849 builders would be pleased. Amazed, but pleased.