Doug Towle considers old homes his children. The lifelong bachelor has spent much of his adult life restoring antique buildings, including one of his most recent: a 1665 Pilgrim house that had been in the same Billerica, Massachusetts, family for 12 generations. The house had to be moved, so Towle carefully documented and disassembled the structure, then spent the next three and a half years restoring it.

He dug up some 35,000 bricks that were buried outside of 18th-century homes, knocked on strangers’ doors in search of vintage glass and straightened 100 salvaged handmade rosette nails every night before bed. “I don’t have any children and grandchildren,” says Towle, who’s vice president of marketing at Globe Firefighter Suits. “It’s a legacy thing.”

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