Living On Curry Road: The Long Awaited "Sun Porch"

Welcome to the Adventures of Living On Curry Road

Rye, Arkansas is located eleven miles north of Warren, AR, fifteen miles west of Monticello, AR and approximately thirty miles south of Pine Bluff, AR. Rye has been the home of the Curry family for over five generations. This family has farmed this land producing cattle, chickens, timber. The area is beautiful and the family culture is equally impressive with its generations of family that continue to live by the standards that made America a great country.

Rye, AR and the Curry family are a story of strong American values and the building of personal character, the love of God and a lot of very hard dedicated work. Donald Curry and Kay Curry are the current owners of most of the original farm land originally developed by the generations of Curry family. Kay Curry is the daughter of Jimmy and Hazel Baker and married Donald over fifty years ago. Both have continued the legacy of the farm life on Curry Road. Donald and Kay have raised a family of two daughters and one son. Mark Curry currently operates a cattle operation as well as four chicken houses on his part of the property. Lisa Tooke, wife of Dennis Tooke of Lake Charles, La and Donna Curry, of Little Rock, AR plan to retire back to the farm land when thier retirement time comes.

Jane and I were asked to help in a restoration of the 104 year old house shown above. We are so blessed to be allowed to have input as well as provide a labor of love to help restore this house to its original beauty for Donald and Kay Curry

As Jane and I came into the property with our RV, we came down the gravel road leading to Curry Road. We came down this gravel road and had to stop and take a picture. We are including that picture with this overview so you too can see the beauty of this area.

It reminded us of the book “The Painted House” by John Grisham and we hope you will get the same response.

Jane, Carl and Charlie Pierce

Thursday, September 1, 2011

The Long Awaited "Sun Porch"

Well, we've finally gotten to the back of the house in the remodeling and are we excited. One of the major reasons we have been so excited about being allowed to remodel this ole house was the expectations of getting the Sun Porch Room completed.

As you may know, the Sun Porch was sometimes called a "Sleeping Porch" in olden days. The room is on the south and west corner of the house and that's where the primary winds come from. In the days before air conditioners people would line the walls with windows and open them up in the summer to enjoy the summer breezes and sleep in comfort.

As you may remember we had some pictures of the sun room with the windows being replaced. This was one of the first things we did when we got here because the old room was in such bad shape we were afraid that we'd loose the windows and the room. We had to remove all the windows on the west end of the house, rebuild the sash board and most of the windows and put them back in place.

Took all of us as you may remember, including Kay to help get them back in place and re-installed. We put off any more restoration of the room as we worked from the front of the house to the back taking care of the bath, kitchen and bedrooms as our initial priorities.

We used this room for our work area and store room for about 14 months until we could get the other rooms completed. This was Jane's painting room, my sawing and framing room and storage for everything we could get in there during the past winter.

For most of the time the room was not heated or cooled while we used it for the storage and work area.

We, we haven't finished the room totally yet, but, we've got it cooled, heated, the flooring down, the ceiling repaired and all of this is painted. We just finished installing our wall mounted TV and got some furniture moving in. Couldn't wait to "show it off". We'll do more and write about it later but we can finally see some progress and closure to the room.

The room is a bright green with all white wood work and floor is Oak laminate. This shows a few of the west windows and the door opening from the "mud room" and back door.

The couch-ottoman and chairs were given by Donna (thanks again) and the glass table came from the "River" property that Donald and Kay add for several years. This view is the southwest corner looking from the TV wall.

This view is coming in from the hall way and the front of the house. There are more doors in this house than Chin's in a Chinese phone book! But,,,,, we use every one of them, doors that is, not Chin's.