Peek inside this 1700s Nova Scotia home restored to its roots

Robert McGregor showed hundreds of houses in his career as a real estate agent, but none quite like the little old house in Belmont, N.S.

And it's not for sale; it's almost never for sale. 

The humble grey house set amid rolling farmland near Windsor dates back to the Planters, the New Englanders who immigrated to Nova Scotia in the 1750s and 1760s. 

The old house on Belmont Road became the new home for the Church family some time in the 1700s, and it remained known as the Church Farm and occupied by a Church up into the 1970s. 

It's built of birch and pine, likely hewn by the same hands that first called it home. McGregor's parents, James and Jane, bought the house on a whim in 1971. His father was an immigrant, too, having moved from northern Scotland to Nova Scotia. 

James McGregor was on a business trip to a Windsor pharmacy when the elderly pharmacist surprised him by asking if he was interested in buying a farm. 

"And my father wasn't at the time," his son says.

But something about the old man's description of the house intrigued him and he drove out to visit. It reminded him of a traditional Scottish croft and he bought it. It came with one unusual closing condition: the last Church, Dexter Church, could live in the house for the rest of his life. 

The McGregors agreed and began parking a camper on the property for the first few summers.

McGregor says Dexter Church half-hoped the house would fall down on him and dismissed his parents' renovation efforts as putting "rags upon rags."

McGregor says the words became a family mantra. In fact, his parents were more interested in removing some of the "rags."

"When my parents got the property, there were layers, layers, layers of wallpaper on here, which they were able to remove by steaming and chemicals and eventually got down to what's called an ochre paint, where you can see the red, which is basically the clay that's in the river," he explains, holding a chunk of some of the dozen or so layers they removed to get down to the original wood. 

They dug through about 18 layers of linoleum and other faux floors to get to the original wood. They modernized it a bit, adding an indoor toilet.

"When my father was working on the outhouse, taking down a wall, he found this document between the boards," McGregor says, showing a now-framed letter from former prime minister John Diefenbaker to Dexter Church, thanking him for a poem.