FARMINGTON – Everyone in Tom and Pat Mellen’s Main Street home was fast asleep a little before 8 Wednesday morning when a loud crash reverberated through the house.

“It was a big thunder boom,” Pat Mellen said. “My husband ran to the window.”

And saw that a pickup truck had rammed through their fence, across their yard, and into a tree a couple of feet away from the side of their nearly 200-year-old house.

“He ran out in his bathrobe, and I ran to the phone and dialed 911,” Mellen said.

The driver of the pickup, 21-year-old Raymond Zimmerman of Georgetown, was shaken up and apologizing in their yard below. Zimmerman fell asleep at the wheel on his way through town from a friend’s house, police officer Rick Billian said. “The road curves, and he went straight into somebody’s front yard.”

No estimate of damage to the truck was readily available, Billian said Wednesday, but Mellen received a quote on the fence.

“It’s just a fence,” she said. But it will cost around $3,000 to fix it, because it was custom made out of cedar. Insurance will take care of that, she said.

Both Zimmerman and the Mellens are fortunate, she said. The car landed at most a few feet away from the house, and was only stopped from shooting down a hill into a shallow ravine by the tree out front. No one was injured.

“He’s a nice boy,” she said of Zimmerman. “He was very concerned.”

Her son, Jon Mellen, 26, visiting from Denver, Colo., said he thought the accident could have been much worse than it was. If Zimmerman’s truck had been even a foot or so to the left, he and the house might be much worse for wear.