As I posted a year ago, this would be the first time I’ve had a tailor-made personal space. How heavenly! Look at those two windows higher up on the wall, allowing for shelving below and cross-circulation of air in the warmer months in addition to natural light.
Roughly 12-by-14 feet, including the closet and writing corner, much of it would be taken up with a very comfy double-sized bed, but the room was also intended to enclose my 200-plus journals, rows of LPs and CDs, a turntable and Bose stereo, hundreds of books, plus clothing, filing cabinets, and a writing corner. Hey, I’ve been downsizing.
The room is isolated, tucked away from everything, unlike the previous space where I could keep an eye on passers-by on the street and deliveries to the back door, the entry that got 98 percent of our use. I could even see the deer in our yard. The new room, in contrast, feels more like a treehouse, even with that double-sash window that displays a corner of the ocean and all of its changes.
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My bedroom is the smallest of the four, but it fits me like the proverbial glove. If I sometimes think of it as being like a treehouse, that was something I never had as a kid, though I did climb often to the top of the elm in our back yard. I can nearly clamber to its tippy top in my sleep, almost 70 years later, hundreds of miles to the east.
In our renovations, the room is also envisioned as a place for my continuing downsizing, a consideration for my heirs who have no interest in my journals, manuscripts, recorded music, clothing, or ancestral snapshots and formal photographs. I don’t want to burden them with any of that. Still, despite my previous efforts, there’s so much I still need to sort through in my remaining time. Back to those journals, manuscripts, recordings, clothes, and photos. Some of that labor may even lead to future posts here.
Back when we moved into our Dover house, the one with the red barn in New Hampshire, I needed tons of space for my literary projects – everything was on paper. Not so now, especially after so much of that paper is now available to readers in digital publication.
What we did with the wall between mine and the front bedroom is especially delightful. Originally, the space was supposed to be divided between the two bedrooms, but then she who must be obeyed ceded it all to me, except for the space overhead. Her reason was that this was the wall where she decided her bed should go, and the bed would have obstructed the closet. OK, then.
Gee, I had been thinking about what might go up my side of the space. Instead, I have a bit of upper wall, which makes me wonder what might be displayed there instead. My Far West cow skull, perchance? Or a moose antler rack from around here?
My proudest part of my upstairs quarters is the writing center carved out of what would have been closet, up against an outside window. Here I can see a corner of the harbor and yet also have so much at hand overhead.
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The back two bedrooms – mine and the one we’re designating as guest room – are largely square in their floorplan but were to have a signature charred beam running upward along the exterior wall, a reminder of the 1886 downtown fire that charred our rafters but didn’t get further than that. For us, these are also reminders of a chimney fire or two that the house also survived. For the most part, the rooms are mirror images of each other, except for differences in the wall that has the closets. More on that in a later post or two.
When it came time for the drywall to go up, we yielded on preserving that detail and instead went for an unbroken wall, mostly because of the expense of the labor needed to execute the details. Alas.
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In the renovations, my room took priority because so much stuff from where we were dwelling downstairs had to move up to make room for ongoing work as it shifted to the first floor.
Besides, I was tiring of trying to sleep and write in the same chamber as the clothes washer and its noise. That future dining room was getting very crowded. We would need it as a staging area for the next stages of renovation.
Jnana's Red Barn 