When our renovations finished, we “moved in” in a matter of hours. In retrospect, I should have waited, photographed the space clean and uncluttered, but oh well. Maybe someday I’ll tidy everything up and photograph it properly, but for now if you’d like to see the work we’ve done there are beautiful professional photographs.

I love this photo more than any professional, tidy photo though. It shows our favorite part of our entire renovation, the windows. Every day, dozens of times a day, we stand at this sink and gaze out over the gently rolling meadow beside the house. The light streams in in the afternoon, and we can’t see anything but nature, and as the grass grows, the leaves fall, and the snow blankets the landscape, we watch it all, still not sure this could be ours.

We were supposed to meet our friends Katie and Will for brunch one hot summer morning but that didn’t exactly happen. Oli and I were working in New York for a few weeks in between our time in Sydney and San Francisco, and taking advantage of that time to stay in our old neighborhood and catch up with our friends.

We were both putting off leaving the air-conditioned bedroom for the sticky rest of the house (you go, no you go) when I spotted a post from my aunt on Facebook. It’s long gone now, but it said something like, “The original family Munson farm is up for sale! I wish someone in our family could buy it!” There was a link to a real estate ad, one of my favorite kind of links.

The listing wasn’t impressive, but I wanted to see it anyway. “Let’s skip brunch and go see it,” I said to Oli, flopping over on my side. “Oh yeah?” he said, continuing to look at his phone. “Yes! We could rent a car, drive halfway, stay the night, go see it and then come back. It’ll be a weekend getaway!” I texted Katie and Will to convince them to go with us. The jist of their message was, “Give us 30 minutes to pack, we’ll meet you at the bagel shop.”

We stayed in an Airbnb in the Catskills, had a lovely dinner at a farm to table restaurant in a tiny town, and made our way away from the “cool” part of upstate New York and into the farmland of central New York. By the time we walked through the house and were on our way back to New York, I was convinced we had to buy the place. Now I just had to convince Oli.

We made a handful of pilgrimages to central New York when I was a kid. I remember endless hours in the car (Dad took out all the seats in the van one year and set up a TV and nintendo) and the overwhelming feeling of well-being when one stands in the sun, in perfect temperature without sweating or shivering. My parents would catch up with various relatives and we’d spend hours and hours outside, emerald-green grass crunching under bare feet, the sun benevolently warming our shoulders. We’d order gigantic, greasy pizzas, and I watched my “northern” cousins sop up the grease on their slices with a napkin (what??).

Inevitably my mom would pack us into the car and make us drive to the “hole in the rock”. It’s exactly what it sounds like–it’s a large boulder on the side of a road that has an inexplicably perfect 3 foot wide hole in it. No one knows why, no one knows how it got there, but we all knew that it was family tradition to pull over on this nameless country road and take a picture with the hole in the rock.

The second stop of this mini pilgrimage was right around the corner, to a road sign that read “Munson Road”. We lined up in front of the sign and smiled for our parents–it wasn’t our last name, but it was my Mom’s last name and as kids I think we thought it was a mere coincidence. After posing with the road sign, the adults would drive down Munson Road and point out a white house sitting just off the road. At this point, we were tired of being treated like monkeys, so we’d make affirmative sounds and barely look out of the window. My memory of the house was of a stately place, surrounded by lush trees, the shaded yard around it looking tended to, but lonely.

Read pt 2 –>

When we first walked through the farmhouse, before we decided to buy it, we knew it would need updating. The house was dim and muted, covered in floral wallpaper and wall to wall brown carpets. There were cracked pull-down shades in every window, and more linoleum than I’d seen since my childhood home.

But as we rolled up the carpets and ripped down the shades, we realized that the house had beautiful bones–big windows, perfectly preserved wooden floors and elaborate trim. The only parts of the house that really needed updating were parts that had already been updated–the bathrooms, the kitchen and the laundry room. The rest of the house was perfect, if still covered in flowers and beige trim paint.

The brave architect mother of a good friend helped us work through many of our dreams and questions. We found, through all stages of the renovation (planning, hiring, and execution), it was neither has hard nor as easy as we thought. I know, it makes no sense–but you’ll see what I mean.