Rebuilding in Stages
It all began at 8 am on a Friday morning in August. It had been a long week of back-to-school-during-a-pandemic talks, debates, political opinions and negative social media feeds brimming with controversy. To say it mildly, it had been a long-ass week. I found my emotions going through vast valleys of self-reflection, denial and worry, unable to find my climb back to the peaks of optimism. My typical outlets of anxiety release through exercise seemed unattainable due to kids’ schedules, sport practices, a lingering back injury and just plain lack of motivation. In an effort to combat the blues, I made the conscious decision to avoid all social media every morning. By 7 am I could be found endlessly scrolling through all the muck of strong-willed opinions… again.
Bleary eyed, I pour my second cup of coffee. As my cup fills with the promise of steaming liquid energy, I hear it. The sound of truck tires rolling down the loose gravel of my dead-end street. I grimace in anticipation of what was about to ascend upon my peaceful morning coffee. Within minutes, my front porch fills with men clad in contractor belts; yielding drills, saws, ladders and fresh timber. Each man with a faithful cup of Dunkin Donuts coffee in hand. This is the life of living through a never-ending home renovation. And it happens around here every 3-6 months.
When Rich and I agreed to buy our own fixer upper a few years ago, we agreed that the updates would need to happen in stages. We knew we did not have the advantage of unlimited financial flow to actually complete our vision within the initial years of our purchase and accepted the years of work ahead of us. My naivete lay in believing we would be able to accomplish this without living in an ongoing construction zone. Rich and I swore to complete projects before initiating new ones. In hind-sight, this was unrealistic and I think I knew it even back then. It is nearly impossible to finalize every last detail before looking towards the next. We are always waiting for a different contractor’s schedule to free up, a shipment to arrive, a free weekend or more money to allocate to the project. The reality of buying a home that was built in 1866, lacked love for nearly 50 years and needed renovations from the foundation to the attic means nothing is 100% “done”.
For safety reasons and in order to avoid too much disturbance for our family, we completed a few of the major ticket items prior to moving in. The first floor was given an overhaul of enormous proportions – all new kitchen, mudroom, new floors and walls throughout. Since I give a lot of credit to the HGTV network for our renovation endeavor, I can’t help but relate our circumstances to those of all those Fixer Upper, Hometown and Good Bones episodes of the past. Similar to some of our favorite shows, many of the items considered necessary for move in were placed on someday list due to budgetary constraints. That “someday list” grows longer and longer with each year. Unlike the popular home improvement shows, there are still many fine details that require attention prior to revealing the before and after pictures of the completed project (painting moldings, capping off baseboards, etc.)
The arrival of our contractor is the promise of a mass of heavy equipment and dusty surfaces. Regardless of the size of a project, a construction job takes over your home from the time the first work boot passes your threshold. The banging, sawing and drilling rattle through the house making it hard to think straight. You feel restricted to areas of your home in order to simply stay out of the way. You watch walls taken apart and put back together. There is side chatter as they work and their choice of music becomes the background of your day to day life. You hold your breath and hope they really understood your vision when you described the renovation over a month ago. You pray that they will be able to bring that vision to life. And you anxiously wait for it to be all over.
This time, we are beginning the work on the exterior front side of the house. After living for over a year with only one side of our house freshly resided (the other 3 stripped down and covered with TYVEK) … it is time to focus on the enormous task of updating the front of the house. And it’s starting with the 3-day task of replacing our outdated solid front door with a trendy, big windowed set of farmhouse French doors to add light to the foyer and enhance our view. I admit, it is exciting. This is one of my most anticipated updates we are making to the house since we bought it 3 years ago. It doesn’t matter how anxiously I awaited this project to be tackled, the time it takes to reconstruct part of your house is always invasive and often a frustrating intrusion of space. On this starting date of what is promised to be a yearlong project, I am still in my pajama bottoms and my kids are lounging on any horizontal surface throughout the house. I take a deep breath and plaster a smile on my face as I welcome the carpenters and friends into our home. Here we go…
We are now in the midst of the exterior project. The new door is in and is everything I imagined. The outside of the door is stained but we have to wait until the winter months when our painter moves to his indoor projects. The porch reconstruction was set to begin a week ago but has been delayed until November with no definitive date… just November. Somedays I want to give up and find a nice newly constructed home. But I love this home and everything I can see it becoming – step by agonizing step.
We decided to start this project in the midst of quarantine. Like many other people in the US, we jumped on the porch-rait bandwagon of local fundraising. We planned a funny pose to exemplify our time in quarantine as a family. On the day of the photo session Rich and I tried to persuade the photographer to use our pretty forsythia as a backdrop instead of our home. The thought of using the backdrop of our TYVEK clad front porch made both of us cringe and was not anything we wanted to memorialize. It is easy to become blind to the unfinished, broken-down façade of an unfinished project. It helps to know that is on the “someday” list and will be tended to… eventually. However, memorializing the family during COVID on a porch that looks mid construction… well let’s just say it was a swift reminder of how our home looked from the outside while we were blindly quarantined inside. This photo session sparked a new desire to get this project going. We started asking the question, how much? How much will it cost and how much can we afford? This is how most of our conversations start and then we break it down to phases. The house is big and meant to be grand. To do it justice, all projects are go-big or go-home. This ideal typically means each job is broken up into smaller, more affordable jobs. Bringing us back to my earlier statement – nothing is ever done!
Below is a picture of our #andrewscastleonthehill as it stood when we purchased it in 2017. If I had water color skills like Erin on Home Town, I would paint a pretty picture for you to see the vision in my head when we finally reach completion. However, my talent has never been in the visually artistic arena. If I was Joanna, I would pull up an architectural computer program and lay it out for you in detail. This is also not a skillset I hold. Therefore, I will try to describe to you my vision of our farmhouse revival.
What we have done…
Summer 2019 – we removed the sliding glass doors; opening up the porch and allow fresh air into the house.
Fall 2019 – The large picture windows on the first floor were replaced with 4 large individual windows (a pair in each living room)
Summer 2020 – The solid red front door was replaced with 2 large windowed farmhouse style French doors
When I say stages…
What is left…
The plan is to remove the entire enclosed front porch and replace it with a 2-story deck that will provide optimal viewings of our serene, yet active harbor and community firework displays throughout the summer. I envision us relaxing on our front porch, a cocktail in hand, listening to live music that plays in the park adjacent to our property (daydreaming to our pre-COVID summer days). We will remove the dulled white aluminum siding that stretches from base to roof and replace is with a durable Hardy board in a creamy, warm yellow color. The window moldings are set to get replace by beefier, more substantial ones and will be adorned with black wood shutters. When I visualize this end product, I exhale. It is a dream at this point and one that requires a lot of patience to get to. After receiving the answer to our “how much” question, we realized our caviar dreams for this project were approximately double the cost we had hoped. Once again, we had no choice but to break the project into stages – 5 stages to be exact with a completion date well into 2022.
Proposed Stages to operation Castle on the Hill facelift:
- Front door – August 2020 (check)
- Removal of front porch and reface siding – October 2020 (cancelled) reschedule for November
- Build First Floor of new deck – May 2021
- Add Second Floor – September 2021
- Put French doors from 2 upstairs Bedrooms to second story deck 2022 (???)
Phew! It’s a lot. I know. We are determined not to compromise the vision we have for this home. Our home. So, stages it is.
As a bunch of hammer-yielding men invade my home to make my farmhouse entryway dreams come true, this is what I am trying to focus my attention on. The vision. The final product. The funny thing about living in a life of home restoration is finding the balance between not looking at all that still needs to be done, but focusing on all you have already done. Yet, keeping your eye on the ball and the vision in your mind as to what you want the finished product to be. The “why the heck you got yourself here in the first place”. Balance, patience, determination and vision. The push and pull to remain sane and optimistic.
I can see it so clearly. My grand yellow farmhouse sitting high above the harbor while the Atlantic Ocean glistens in the foreground. A large Charleston style double-decker porch inviting guests to visit and enjoy the ocean breeze with us over a cocktail (or 2). Music from festivals and concerts wafting through the trees that separate us from the park where musicians gather to play all summer long. July 4th firework viewing parties with our friends and family from the upper deck. And in the winter months, adorning the porches, windows and doors with greenery, twinkle lights and wreaths for the holidays.
A porch swing, endless cookouts, morning coffees, watching the sun rise on the left and set to the right of our beautiful dream home. Reading a novel or writing my own from the front porch while the kids come and go. These are the visions I have for my farmhouse; my “castle on the hill”. I have fiercely held onto them for 3 years and am proud of the leaps we have made to make it happen.
Wait! Do you hear that? Tires on the gravel driveway and swarms of workers taking over my porch. Balance. Patience. Determination. Vision. You’ve got this, Erika.
To be continued…
