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 20^th 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.

Naturally, you must be curious about our new bathroom – what we’ve called our real bathroom, in contrast to the water closet on the first floor.

Well, for now, so are we.

As we considered our shrinking funding options, we admitted we didn’t have to finish the upstairs bathroom at this point, though having it done would deliver a definite quality of life improvement.

We wanted a tub that would be deep enough for a real soak – one that I could actually fit into without attempting hatha yoga with water. The tub also had to have a left-hand drain if we were to avoid having the pipe run against the outside wall, where it might freeze and burst in deep winter.

Our original choice, built-in or alcove, switched to a free-standing model after seeing one in a neighbor’s home during a party. We went back a week later to get a second look and measurements.

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The toilet had to be a back-flushing model due to a shallow space in the flooring.

Having lighting above the sink and electrical outlets in the room would be huge advances over the water closet downstairs, as we learned in the 4½ years of its being our only option. Do note that having a carpenter who was also a licensed electrician meant that all of the lines and outlets would be in place before the drywall went up.

As for storage? A large medicine cabinet and a vanity for the sink are considered boffo additions, ones you probably take for granted in your own digs.

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But once the bathroom and laundry room were plumbed, awaiting the next steps, we ran into complications.

First was actually ordering the tub and toilet and getting them delivered to our remote locale. Getting agreement on some of the selections added to our delay. Our plumber kept delaying, too, especially once in took a lucrative gig out in Indiana and then further out in Seattle. A potential replacement wasn’t interested in delivering what we wanted rather than the generic stuff they had it stock. All the while, our available money went to other parts of the renovation. So for, now, alas, this is moved over the next phase, whenever.

 

When the upstairs finally became available, we began moving items from the first floor and a few boxes from the storage units.

My new bedroom/studio was the first one to be fully ready for occupancy. It’s the smallest of the four, while the front two rooms were still being used by the carpenters as they worked on the front exterior. They still have some tweaks before coming into their intended use. The fourth, our guestroom, is at the moment mostly storage. This does seem to feel like musical chairs.

Still, things that had long been packed away have finally came out into daylight and become accessible. We’ve even had some more room to stir about in.

Not for long, though. The future dining room aka my former bedroom/studio was quickly designated as a staging area when we cleared out our storage unit at the other end of the state. In time, it will likely be a storage space when we get to renovating the kitchen and downstairs bathroom. Those Ikea kitchen cabinets, for one, will take up a lot of room somewhere before they go up on the wall. As for appliances? Or an extra sawhorse or two?

And we thought we were done with that sense of camping in this house?

Get ready for Phase Two, hopefully still in my lifetime.

You may have guessed we’ve taken tons of photos of the renovations in our historic home. You’ve been viewing some as progress reports in this weekly series, but those show steps along the way.

Sometimes it’s helpful to skip over those, going straight from how things looked at the beginning and then leaping to what the work delivered in the upstairs phase of renovations.

Should you be interested in that comparison, I’ve assembled a gallery of before-and-after contrasts in a free photo album, one I’m making available to you, should you be interested.

As I’ll explain next week, we’re hardly as far along as we had hoped. So I’m calling the album “Before & Midway After.”

In assembling the photographs, I was emotionally overrun in seeing how dramatic some of the advances have been. It’s helpful in facing the remaining work ahead.

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That said, check out the free tour at Thistle Finch editions.

You’ll also find the history of the house and its previous residents in another booklet, should you be curious.