While I had once considered architecture as a career, I’m surprised how little I know about what makes a home work or, through the eyes of my coconspirators in this venture, how much a few imaginative strokes can transform an existing structure. Not all of them are budget-busters for folks in the lower half of the income bell curve, either.
It’s a long way from my ingrained tastes shaped by the clean 20th century lines of the Bauhaus school of design as well as my admired Shaker and Zen aesthetics. Historic New England home styles have come as a more recent appreciation along the lines of an “This Old House” public television series dimension. Still, after owning a traditional New Englander described in many of the earlier blog posts here, I had jokingly promised myself that the next house would be concrete, glass, and steel – nothing that would rot or need maintenance. At least, with the move to Eastport, it wasn’t in the pine box I had once jokingly expected at the end of my Dover sojourn.
At least I’m no longer left with a state of anxiety each time a nor’easter barrels our way. Despite all the asphalt shingles on the sidewalks and streets I had found after each of those, fortunately most of ours stayed in place. As we’ve since discovered, the biggest wonder was that our roof itself had withstood so much for so long in its condition.
But I’ve also been haunted by an “This Old House” series that followed a renovation of a Nantucket Island home, if I recall right, and the way it overran budget and led to its sale shortly afterward.
You would have thought we would have had our plan down pat long before the renovations began. Maybe it was a good thing we didn’t.
I mean, with three years of looking for a contractor, there was lots of time for planning. Except that we kept it in the nebulous dream stage rather than some hard decisions.
And then, once we found one, we had hoped to have the entire roof component buttoned up before last winter but had to settle on getting the back half done first and then tackling the front come springtime, as you’ve seen in these weekly posts. So here we are, more than a year later.
We’ve made some mistakes, of course. We spent money on CAD specifications in a design done through a local lumberyard only to find out what our contractor needed wasn’t what we thought he was looking for. Looking back, I’m not sure they could have delivered, considering what we were really facing and then revised as we went..
And the wood stove’s metal chimney didn’t have to go up next to the brick chimney, meaning that it had more bending than was necessary. Oops. At least it draws the smoke well.
On the other hand, much of the rest has been pretty straight-forward.
We even know that it will never, ever, really be finished.
Jnana's Red Barn 