brickoven

To Kathleen1B...Thanks, I'm glad you enjoyed and appreciated the story of this house. You could build a library of books about old houses, but there are two books (specific to Pennsylvania) I'd definitely recommend to start with that will help answer your questions about 18th century hardware, doors, and millwork.
In 1977, Schiffer Publishing (a PA company) reprinted a book from the 1930's titled "Early Domestic Architecture of Pennsylvania" by Eleanor Raymond, AIA. It has a lot of B&W photographs of interiors, exteriors, and doors. There's also a good sized section of measured drawings that illustrate excellent details of interior woodwork and mouldings (millwork). You can find the book online at specialized booksellers, maybe even on ebay (ISBN: 0-916838-11-0)
For hardware, Don Plummer's 1999 book "Colonial Wrought Iron - the Sorber Collection" has much more than just hardware (SkipJack Press, ISBN: 1-879535-16-5). It is so extensive, though, as to still be one of the best sources for lots of photos of diffent architectural hardware. James Sorber (a PA resident) included a large number of pieces made in Pennsylvania in his collection.
Hope this helps you with your project.

Here's a couple of thoughts for barnmover...marketing the concept is a struggle because it's a one-on-one relationship between somebody who loves old houses and a house. Concepts like adaptive use, historic districts and preservation variances in building codes help, but we're swimming against the tide. Hopefully, more people will see the beauty and value in restoration results others have had and some number will be won over.
About the 8-over-12 windows, there were a couple of guiding principles. 1) What was originally there from the evidence; 2) What would have been correct for a house of that age in the part of Connecticut it was built in; and 3) What looked right. First, in the upstairs of the oldest part of the house we had evidence that the original window size would have held 8-over-12 double-hung sash windows (and 12-over-12 on the first floor). Second, a pioneering New England architectural historian at Yale, named J. Fredrick Kelly, published a book in the early 1900s with many pictures of old houses and many measured drawings from an available wealth of early houses that hadn't been too messed with yet. The book, The Early Domestic Architecture of Connecticut, has been a bible and handbook for restorers here. From the book, it was obvious that many houses of the period of ours used 8-over-12 windows. Third, in the new gambrel-roofed addition, we used sash sizes that looked right for the positions they were in, such as 8-over-12 in the downstairs and 6-over-6 in the upstairs peaked dormers.

To answer a couple of recent comments / questions...
to b a 5_1 - I've already lent them out once and they didn't come back. I figured I wasn't going to do this again any time soon and that I wouldn't need the tools. I guess the guy I lent them to figured the same. Sorry.
to barnmover - I reused only the original window glass (along with some equally old glass from another source) not the whole windows. The window frames and sash were reproduced by a specialty millworker in Glastonbury, CT who does correct copies of period architectural woodwork. We glazed in the 18thC. glass and everything is as good as old.

There are several answers to the question Ellipse asked about our budget. First, a lot of the work on a project of such a personal nature I did myself...including all of the masonry...and I can't really count those hours or put a price to it. Also, I had already owned the land for several years. On the expense side, we hired contractors for excavation, landscaping, concrete foundation and poured floor, electrical, heating/AC, plumbing, roofing and siding, painting, well-drilling, and the crane work to help put up the frame. For the carpentry, throughout the project I was guided by the expertise and craftsmanship of an older and wiser carpenter who had moved to Connecticut years before from the French-speaking part of Canada. From the framing to the finish work I was his wingman and helper. I learned a lot. Out-of-pocket costs for all work and materials came in under the $300K construction loan. While I was able to manage the dollars spent pretty well, another budget came in way over. That was the time it took to complete the project. Easily, it was nearly three-times as long as I had thought. So long that when we got our C.O. the local building department gave it to us framed!

Thanks for the comments and compliments. To answer a couple of your questions:

msoeden - It's a tremendous advantage to have the house totally apart, as we did, to plan and install the "modern" stuff...something most owners of an antique house struggle with when restoring an existing structure. I don't know how much access you have to the areas that need insulation, but here's what we did. We installed rigid foam in the original house (areas where the old exterior wall studs were reused) and in the newer part (kitchen / bath addition) put 6 inches of insulation in the outside walls combining rigid foam and pink Owens-Corning rolls. Because we restored the attic to look like it would have originally (it's pictured in my first video) we insulated the attic by building up the floor. First, the original flooring and sub-flooring boards (visible and exposed in the second floor beamed-ceiling rooms) had a layer of rigid foam laid over it, then 2X10 floor joists to raise the attic floor with 10 inches of rolled fiberglass laid in between, and finished with the original wide-width attic floor boards nailed over everything. And, I forgot to mention, vapor barriers were installed with the wall and attic insulation. Hope that helps, but the best advice for a fellow New Englander is to go for the best rating you can achieve.

fisk5 - The yellow and red were colors we found in the house, though aged and faded. Much of what I've read and seen lately about original colors indicates that they were much brighter and bolder than we once thought. The 18th century use of colors and their combinations were even at times what we would consider garrish, such as painting the bevels on raised paneling a color brightly contrasting against the field of the panels. We chose to make the yellow and red bold rather than muted, but don't know for certain if they "match" the original colors. The blue we chose on our own, based on some rooms we'd seen at various restorations. It's bold, too, and fits the theme of doing that throughout the house. The walls are sheetrock with a finish skim coat of plaster that was left unpainted. As for the intensity of the colors in the photos, three reasons: 1) we chose bold colors, as mentioned; 2) the house, like many in the 18th century, is oriented facing south and a number of photos were taken on bright days with the sun streaming in; 3) my skill level for shooting is "snapshot" not studio quality, so no filtering or color balancing...sorry.

Hope I answered your questions.

To all who commented - Thanks, and there will be more to come about some of the other aspects of the process and finished product. A couple of specific answers, though, to:

bigswede69 - The lack of shutters is partly my taste and uncertainty about accuracy. I like the starkness of the walls (reminds me of how straight-forward life was back then) but also we couldn't find evidence of there being any exterior hardware around the windows or other indications that there were ever shutters on this particular house. So for both reasons, we chose to leave them off.

decorhappy - Well, after we laid everything out with all the beams correctly placed on the new house deck and pre-assembled the 4 timber bents (each one 2 posts connected by a single girt...think football goalposts), then it took just two days to pull everything up into place and re-peg the frame.

WilliamRoss - The house was originally built in the 1700's in a section of Farmington that, subsequently, was split off in 1868 to form part of the town of Plainville, CT. The house was within the borders of Plainville when dismantled. The historic society there supported the removal and reconstruction as more desirable than having the house bulldozed.

MisterChairman - Secrets of the heating, AC, electrical, and plumbing to come! It's a tremendous advantage to have the house totally apart to plan and install the "modern" mechanicals...something most owners of an antique house struggle with when restoring an existing structure.

spitfiremk5 - The siding is commercial #1 red cedar, but with the mill-finished side turned inward to let the rougher cut (more rustic?) side show. It gave the siding a bit more of an aged look as it weathered, too.

Bruski - We went to a metal working shop and had them create a set of 1"; 1.5"; 2" and 2.5" diameter hardened steel rods, each with a deep conical indention cut into one end, to fit over the protruding points of the old pegs. That way we could wail-away at driving the pegs out (a lot harder after 300 years than one might think) without busting up the old pegs and making them undriveable. Where the pegs were cut off flush with the beams, we used a similar set of solid rods. We knew we were going to make new green pegs for the reassembly, but chose to drive the old pegs out (rather than drill them out), not to save them, but to preserve the integrity of the peg holes...most of which were set somewhat off-center to pull the joints tight when the house was framed originally. I have a nice souvenir collection of slightly-crooked antique oak pegs, if anyone is interested.