Tag: Old House New Home
-
Ready or Not
At the outset we bought Rosslyn envisioning a 1-4 year timeline. Resuscitate the house and outbuildings while rebooting our lives, and then move on. Ready or not, on we’d go. Tidy. Viable. Or so we thought. But our timeline stretched and our ambitions mushroomed. We became romantically involved and our perspective shifted, fish-eyed, and grew…
-
TMB March 8, 2007
Flashback seventeen years to the first winter of discouraging setbacks as we tried desperately to advance our dream of revitalizing this old house into our new home.
-
Rhyming Relics
I was just looking at a pair of glass artifacts, two Rosslyn relics among so many we’ve discovered and inherited since the summer of 2006 when this old house became our new home. Remember the ferry posters in my “Relics Rhymed” post? These are similar. And different. While the differences are apparent, perhaps the similarity…
-
One Year of Daily Journaling!
Eureka! A year ago I set out on a personal quest to post an update each day without fail for one year, journaling deep into our Rosslyn story in the hopes of ascertaining what comes next. Today we celebrate 365 consecutive daily updates starting on August 1, 2022 and ending yesterday, July 31, 2023. What…
-
Rosslyn & Reinvention
Reinvention is woven intricately, inextricably into Rosslyn’s DNA. This home, this property, this history endure some two hundred years (and more) after W.D. Ross first built his home on the Champlain Valley’s fertile shore in no small part because of this legacy of renewal. It’s as if Rosslyn, in addition to historic buildings and generous…
-
The Story of a House
At the outset of this sprawling experiment I call Rosslyn Redux I needed a way to describe the vision (as much for myself as for visitors to the About page.) So, in the springtime of this journey I settled on the only real point of clarity: Rosslyn Redux would be the story of a house.…
-
ChatGPT & “Dear John” Letter Writing
Another peculiar — I prefer *idiosyncratic* — post this evening. Humor me? Yesterday I related an anecdotal jumble about gathering with friends, artificial intelligence, Essex, Westport, and a poem composed by ChatGPT. No clear takeaways. No conclusions. Just a voyeuristic glimpse into the overlap of buddies jawboning IRL and an AI chatbot weaving words into a…
-
Historic Rehabilitation
Once upon a time—starting in about 2005 or 2006 and concluding about a dozen years ago, if memory serves—I was on the board on Historic Essex (formerly Essex Community Heritage Organization, ECHO). Todd Goff, a fellow director, Essex neighbor, and friend, took it upon himself to correct me, differentiating for me “historic preservation” from ”…
-
Old House, New Home
I’ve lived much, perhaps even *most* of my life in old houses. With the exception of late middle and high school, 3/4 of college, briefly in Santa Fe (1996-9), and briefly in Paris and Rome, my homes have been within old houses. And, come to think of it, some of my boarding school years were…
-
Old House Journaling
Yesterday marked ten weeks of old house journaling. Every. Single. Day. Two months and ten days back at the helm of this wayward, meandering, sometimes unruly experiment I call Rosslyn Redux. I emphasize the daily component of this benchmark because it’s been an important part of the goal I committed to at the end of…