Origin Story, Part 2: Renovations

On purposefully rejecting my home's true potential

May 17, 2023

You can get used to the sound of a territorial woodpecker drumming against your rain gutter at 5 am every morning during mating season, the swollen bodies of ticks nestled among your dog’s fur and the quiet snap when you pull them off with your fingers, the way the cold anesthetizes your hands/feet/face, the utter silence of winter, the uproarious cacophony of peepers in spring.

You can get used to the sound of a saw, a sander, a nail gun, the murmur of builders taking their lunch break on the other side of a translucent piece of plastic that serves as a makeshift wall. You can not only get used to the regular appearance of a mouse who strolls across your makeshift kitchen floor, removes a single morsel of dog food from the dish, and then skitters away, but actually grow fond of him.

You can get used to it all—far more than you would’ve ever believed possible.

We bought the farm “back into the family” after receiving the blessing of my mother-in-law, just days before she died. She was famously frugal and practical but also deeply inspired by rural life—she spent every spare moment at her own far away shack, deep in the Australian bush, on a property she’d bought in her twenties and loved for many decades. It seems impossible that she could’ve sensed how important this farm would become to us, as sick as she was, but she did have a knack for knowing things so I wouldn’t put it past her. No doubt she could see that we were drifting, that we needed solid ground—a definitive answer for our future, even a distant one. I don’t know what made her urge us forward so strongly, and never will, but we were surprised enough by her certainty that we took it as a sign. We made a full-price offer and the farm was ours.

Over the next year, after we said goodbye to my mother-in-law and moved to San Francisco, we went to the farm whenever we had time off, but we always wanted more. We furnished it with an apartment’s worth of stuff we’d placed in a storage unit on the East Coast (stashed when we hastily left Brooklyn for Australia after news of my mother-in-law’s diagnosis two years prior). We had one mattress and a faded Ikea coach, but our table was a cardboard card table, our chairs were coolers, and our lights were string lights from the hardware store. We had some coffee mugs, a collection of paper plates, and a small stack of refurbished cast iron pans that my Dad gleaned from the scrap metal yard where he worked.

I spent a lot of time during our vacations at the farm working on small projects—stripping wallpaper, scrubbing floors, painting everything I could reach—and dreaming about what it could look like someday. Pinterest boards were made. We each secretly dreamed about living at the farm—my husband worked remotely, and I wanted to go to grad school—but it wasn’t until about a year and a half in SF that we decided to go for it.

At this point, we’d moved enough times (and I’d furnished enough apartments from scratch) that I considered myself adept enough at decorating, but not nearly skilled enough to be in charge of the renovation the house needed. The layout was less than ideal, the kitchen was barely functional, and the laundry room wasn’t winterized, just to name a few things.

A dear family friend, an architect, agreed to help us out. She visited the house while we were away and drew up some plans. We met to go over them one cold spring day at the halfway point between our farm and hers, in an empty diner with a brusque waitress who might’ve gotten my anxiety off to a roaring start. It was clear even before our coffee cups were filled that our friend was very inspired and excited about all of the potential the house held. She spread her meticulously hand-drawn plans on the table and began to walk us through her ideas. She had re-imagined the house in its best possible form—the kitchen could be moved to the back so it opened onto the garden, the front door could be deleted, the dining room could become the new entryway, and so on. There were so many brilliant ideas. But as the meeting went on, I found myself feeling progressively more unwell. By the end of the meeting, I was moments away from what felt like a panic attack. I managed to keep the tears in only until the car door closed beside me.

This would be my first lesson in the constraints of buying a family property. I knew, within five minutes of meeting with our friend, that I couldn’t do a single thing she was suggesting. I couldn’t demolish the bedroom where my great-grandmother once slept so that we could open up the stairs. I couldn’t move the kitchen where my mother sat drinking fresh milk from the dairy barn as a little girl so that we could have french doors onto a patio. I couldn’t put a wall in the middle of the dining room where my family had celebrated decades of birthdays. I would have to get used to things the way they were.

We tried to work through a few more iterations of the plan with our friend, but it became clear to me (and to her, I’m sure) that I didn’t have the heart to change much at all. The structure of the house would have to remain. As bad as the flow was, as great as it could be—this could never be the idealized farmhouse I thought I wanted.

Kitchen: before, during and now (Photo credit to my kid, always snapping secret photos of me.)

We hired a local contractor and proceeded—a new kitchen was in order with a slightly larger opening into the dining room, a full bath that opened into the kitchen would now open into the bedroom, and the second, very steep set of stairs was deleted to make a pantry. Even with this dramatically scaled-back renovation plan, I ended up with elements that seemed like a betrayal of the original house. There were too many pot lights in the kitchen, the new windows looked too new, the miniature sink necessary to meet code in the powder room was painfully modern. Even though we had enacted a plan that we had chosen, there was still much to get used to or, perhaps more accurately, make peace with.

I had, at least, insisted on keeping everything else: the crumbling and cracked horsehair plaster walls, the nail-pocked original floors beneath the linoleum, my great-grandmother’s original five-foot-long cast iron sink that takes up most of the counter space, and the exact positioning of the wood stove (the same spot my great-grandmother’s cooking/heating stove once stood). What choice did I have? Everything in this stupid, beloved house is imbued with so much meaning.

My grandfather's room before; my son's room now.

There are times when I long to live in a place with no story of its own—a place I can wholly and unreservedly imprint onto. But then I watch my children playing cars or reading books or doing Cosmic Kids yoga in the room where my grandfather listened to his favorite radio show as a boy, hoping against hope that the battery (which could only be charged at the store at the end of the road, since the house had no electricity) wouldn’t run out before he got to the end of his program, and it feels so important and so beautiful, this keeping of memories.

I stand at my grandmother’s sink—my sink—and I accept it all.

Next week: Origin Story Part 3: Making a farm, in which I write about the animals who live here (numerous), the raising of our barn (in three days!), and the before/after of our gardens over the years.