In the spirit of recent retrospective posts remembering early days at the outset of our Rosslyn adventure, I offer you a chillier, snowier version of today. Meet March 8, 2007 when we were slightly more than half a year into transforming an old house into our new home.
Lots of snow on the lawn. Lots of ice on Lake Champlain. Winter exceeding its welcome and spring not near enough to ease the daily struggle of rehabilitating a needy property sans adequate weatherproofing, heat, insulation, functional plumbing, or clarity about the path forward. Each day a new discovery — ice dams leaking through slate roof, entire hydronic circuits installed and functioning without solder, live wires bitter-ended loosely in walls without wire nuts, living room and master bedroom floors structurally unsound, rotten, hung from cables in the attic — that amounted to a further setback, a timeline extension, a budget buster.
These snapshots taken from the west and southwest reveal the abbreviated ell, unresolved 1st story roofs, partial-clapboard-partial-shingle west elevation, brick infilled window on south elevation, rhymeless-reasonless exterior grade changes, and hundreds of peculiarities pleading for poetic integration.
Structural stumbling blocks. Architectural anomalies. Design incongruities. Hardscape and landscape idiosyncrasies. Cohesion obstacles…
We’d bitten off a whole lot more than we anticipated. And each day, each week, each month we felt as if we were slipping further away from the pipe dream that had seduced us like a technicolor mirage dancing almost close enough to touch.
But we soldiered on. And our team soldiered on. And winter too soldiered on, unremitting and snowy and arduous.
But despite the strain and discouragement, despite the omnipresent angst, despite the all-consuming home renovation that had smothered out virtually every other aspect of our lives, there were moments like the sunset above, day drifting into evening, pastels backlighting the carriage barn, the icehouse, and the trees beyond, moments that offered a minute glimpse of the beauty and grace that lay ahead if we could muster the resolve and endurance.
Resolve. Endurance.
Even the driveway at Rosslyn, once hedged with cedars (above) that had overgrown their tidy purview during a century or more of neglected pruning, was coming apart at the seams. Root-bound evergreens toppling whenever windstorms whipped, clods of driveway and limestone drywalls wrought asunder by heaving root balls, and timeworn wheel ruts blurred by heavy equipment and constant traffic.
Resolve. Endurance. Perseverance…
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