Two: My
God, what have we done?!Two: My
God, what have we done?!
Reality hit hard after we moved in. The core of the house was an old hunting camp, on shallow piers, pieced togther from scraps of salvaged lumber. The kitchen and the bedrooms were add-ons, and the latter was particularly shabby. Our bed barely fit into our tiny bedroom, and it was drafty enough to blow dust bunnies right out the door. The roof had odd bumps and sags. We later discovered it was framed out of rough-cut 2x4s, some sistered together to span 14 feet, and that there had been a fire -- the rafters above the woodstove were charred. We were lucky our first winter was a mild one or it could well have collapsed on us. On muggy summer afternoons, the cathedral ceiling of the main room broke out in sweat as the roof passed into shade and cooled off -- the already scant insulation had been done in by squirrels. Other than the window, the main source of natural light in the living area was a row of low windows, made from salved sashes and covered with years-old stapled-on plastic sheeting heavily laced with cobwebs, on the opposite side of the house. With the dark wood walls it was downright gloomy. This place was going to need a lot of work.
Nancy's belly grew as summer passed into atumn, and we thought and talked and planned about how to make IT into aomething like a real house. We took an evening course in home design and construction. Rick tacked on a wee porch and a too-small mud room.
Molly arrived on November 29, 1990, and we hunkered down for a long drafty winter, and kept on planning. The trash heap of bad ideas grew. It seemed there would be no way to make the place liveable. We knew we would have to do something about the roof, but its shallow pitch and low ends and hillside location made it hard to add on to the ends. Since we would have to take the roof off anayway, why not add a second floor? No, that would put a floor right across our beautiful window and ruin the symmetry of the roof over it. Driven to despair, we started working with diagonal slashes in the floor plan to somehow cut the second floor out around the window, and something clicked. The present design, with its odd angles and roof lines, began to come together.
Our first real move was to call in a tree service to remove a hemlock and a big white pine that were growing right next to the house. They used a boom truck to swing sections of the trees right over the fragile roof of our little shack.
The real work began in September. Rick gutted the ceiling of the main room and tore the shoddy addition off.
At about this stage we called in a contractor, Tom Desautels, to do the heavy work...