Fall home improvement composite esub

Home HudsonValley SEPT. 17, 2015

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Fall Home Improvement

The home we dream of

A look at how we adapt to where we live, make do and make better, and endlessly work to keep up with all the loving care our houses, gardens and dreams inevitably need.

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17, 2015 2 | Sept.

Home Hudson Valley

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The houses we dream of Plus the dreams through which our houses become homes

now? No, he said, some of its elements had aged too much. The once-rural dream we shared had shifted over the years. Now, we “no longer live in either city or country but in the neither/nor.”

Twenty years ago, gentrification was just spilling upward from Gotham, usurping whatever 19th-century aspirations and dreams still populated the local landscapes.

Dreams change. After those earlier homes.

I took up residence in the dream home my wife had constructed from an old schoolhouse with a previous partner. Years of renovations, additions and home improvements on the cheap followed.

When we had a kid, we found a new home to better match our newer family dreams.

By Paul Smart

T

he original image I wanted for our cover this issue was taken during a recent trip to France. It is a real chateau, though not the one we stayed in the night before. What I wanted to convey by this image was the ways in which our dreams affect the ways we think about improving the actual places where we live. This impulse is at the heart of all home improvement.

My view is that we try to match dreams of where we want to live with where we live. Eventually, dream and reality come together.

House dreams have long played a role in our region. Think of the vernacular styles of building the Dutch, the Huguenots and other settlers brought with them. Think of the longhouses of native tribes, where the communality of dreams played out over time.

Our region’s first grand homes, palace-like homes overlooking the Hudson, massive cabins up in the Catskills and even Moorish fantasies, became the dreams of others. Our grand hotels, built high on mountains with expansive views, took the idea of the American porch to a new level.

Even our more modern boom times, built on a base of new-home-owners coming north from New York City and its surroundings, have been built on dreams. My own move over a quarter-century ago was based on memories of previous homes in Vermont, the British countryside, rural Virginia, and the Alaskan panhandle. Phoenicia, and then the large country farmhouse one writer references obliquely in a story herein, provided various homes that for me seemed to match and then expand my dreams.

W PAUL SMART

Chateau de Chaumont, Loire Valley.

My friends’ Sue Daley and Steve Gross’ many books featuring local homes, starting with Old Houses and including Living With The Past and Catskills County Style, and helped spur our acceptance of a less gussied-up sensibility regarding renovations.

Decades ago, Luc Sante lent me a piece for a revival of the old Rural New Yorker I was editing.

He remarked about the depths of rumination one could find driving through this region back when it was more ruins than revival, and before many of the largest old barns had collapsed in on themselves. Would it be appropriate to re-run the piece

Our contributors this issue Susan Barnett, a licensed real-estate salesperson affiliated with Gary DiMauro Real Estate, lives in West Hurley. She has been an anchor, producer and reporter for WRGB-TV in the Capital District and was Hudson Valley Bureau Chief for WAMC Northeast Public Radio. She’s also the author of the short-story collection, “The View From Outside,” published by Hen House Press.

Ed Breslin is a writer and former book publisher who lives in New York City and in the Hudson River Valley with his wife, dog and cat.

Jennifer Brizzi writes on food and health for newspapers, magazines and books, and does recipe development, cooking demonstrations and teaching. Her website is www.jenniferbrizzi.com.

Lisa Carroll is a busy mama to two little girls, a wife and a reporter for the Shawangunk Journal.

She resides in a quaint upstate village with her family, a cat and a goldfish called Purply.

Eliza Clark is a lifestyle and reality television producer who has worked on American Pickers, Love It or List It, and Scare Tactics. She frequently works for HGTV where her passion for design and renovations comes in handy.

Frances Halsband, a lifelong Woodstock weekender, is an architect in New York and an artist in Woodstock. Her firm’s website is www.kliment-halsband.com.

Corinne Mol edited the University of Victoria student newspaper, “The Martlet,” named after a mythical footless bird that never lands. After living in Montreal, Thailand and off-the-grid on Lasqueti Island and Read Island in British Columbia, she finally landed in Woodstock when she met her husband.

Reginald Oberlag is a writer-realtor living the dream of combining his East Village and Catskills lifestyles. He is an Associate Broker at Coldwell Banker Timberland Properties in Margaretville.

Paul Smart, who writes for a living and edits several publications, is father to a nine-year-old, husband to an artist, and protector of two cats, a

turtle, and a puppy.

Violet Snow, a journalist, author and frequent Ulster Publishing presence, specializes in history, genealogy, suspense fiction and nature, and also expresses herself through photography, video and music.

Sparrow is an American poet, activist, musician, and rabblerouser. He is the author of several books of poetry and prose, is a frequent contributor to a number of publications, including Woodstock Times and The New York Times. He is known for having started the Slow Read Movement and is married to the journalist Violet Snow.

Jack Warren’s work has been featured in the Goodlife Youth Journal as well as the Woodstock Day and Onteora High School literary magazines, the latter of which he is co-editor-in-chief. He is a senior.

This issue’s cover photo was taken by reporter Lisa Carroll and features her daughters, Shelby and Samantha, learning about home improvement while helping their parents on their Ellenville home.

e worked a lot on our home before moving in. We kept working at it as we grew used to it, and then started thinking about possibly finding something closer to other parts of our lives. We started searching listings, doing drive-bys, on possibilities, and figuring out how to convince our nine-year-old that moving wouldn’t mean the end of the world.

We’ve kept an eye on what others do with their homes and home furnishings. We get our share of catalogues. We’ve known plenty who’ve risen, and held on, selling antiques to those who keep moving up here. Various communities have found their main streets filled with stores focused on furniture and furnishings, in a localized call and response to the rise of Ikea, West Elm and other big-box design outfits.

This past summer, we visited the new home of Hudson Home in the city of that same name in which Richard Bodin and Greg Feller have been lending guidance, and offering solid suggestions to residents of the Hudson Valley. “We either do someone’s place here first, and then New York City, or vice-versa,” Bodin says from the corner showroom in what used to be the local newspaper’s printing plant on Warren Street. “As people then make the transition from downstate to upstate, we hold their hands. It involves fluidity …. We’ve learned a great deal about how styles change over our eleven and a half years in business here.”

At the new Catskill Mill properties across the river, Etsy founder Rob Kalin is shepherding forth a vision of crafts ideology, making all the stuff for a hotel, convention, arts and media center in the old textile mill, department store and nearby fields and farms he’s bought in recent years. What will all that mean? All the linens for napkins and tablecloths will again be made on site, as well as the glassware and ceramics, the silverware and furnishings. Young people will establish a farm to feed everyone. A school for the young children of Kalin and his employees will start this autumn.

Talk about disparate visions sharing the same vistas!

Here at our own home, all this activity is leading us to appreciate again what we have, and thus reconnect with our house’s dreams. Which in turn, has allowed us to expand our kid’s dreams, and his ability to appreciate them.

As for that original cover of a true castle, we ended up running it here, and a younger vision of home up front.

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Home Hudson Valley

“House with bonus hotel for sale�

Things we learned in renovating our inn

By Eliza Clark

T

his is an unlikely romance, my version of “Love Story� except that no one dies at the end and that the theme music consists of an orchestral swelling of saws and drills. First Tim and I fell in love. He’s a handsome chef and incredibly smart and kind, what more is there to say?

Then together we fell in love with the Catskills: the mountains, winding rivers and inspiring people who live here. Then (this is the unlikely part) we fell in love with a crumbling century-old inn with a leaky roof, a sloped and rotted veranda, and mile-high piles of junk in every room. The real-estate listing for the property termed it a “house with bonus hotel for sale.� The hotel, in the condition it was in, didn’t count as having value. Yet there it was.

On a rainy day in November three years ago, we pulled up in front of a once-grand white three-story building with a belfry on top. A little cottage was nestled beside it. The ten acres were surrounded by woods that backed onto forever-wild state land. We joined our real-estate agent and went inside. Less than five minutes later, I was outside again and heading for the car, with Tim trawling behind me.

The place needed an unbelievable amount of

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The new FoxďŹ re Mountain Inn started life as the Mountain Breeze House in the Shandaken hamlet of Mt. Pleasant over a hundred years ago. work. It was neglected and sorry-looking, cobwebs everywhere, cracked windows, water damage on the walls. I saw enough in five minutes to know it was beyond our home-handyman skill set.

My always-optimistic, can-do, gung-ho husband offered some thoughtful considerations. Despite appearances (which he admitted were pretty bad), the building didn’t smell of mildew. There was no mold. The electrical was in good shape by and large, and the structure was sound. Empty and dark as it was, it didn’t have a creepy vibe.

Tim pointed these things out as we drove away with me still shaking my head uh-uh, nope, no, can’t happen.

Long story short, we saw a bunch of other derelict buildings. All of a sudden “ours� didn’t look so bad. None of the others were as, um, nice.

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Ours had a romantic belfry and a pond with a sweet bridge and a partly destroyed swimming pool that I could already picture filled with lilies and bulrushes to take advantage of its faded grandeur in a Great Expectations kind of way. Ours had a gorgeous long veranda with columns on which I could imagine the ladies and gentlemen from the early 1900s sitting in the shade of an evening to catch a soft summer breeze. Suddenly, all I saw was the potential. Incredibly, the rooms no longer looked like what they were, only what they could be.

We started the renovation process the way you head into the ocean when it’s still really too cold to swim. We edged in a foot at a time, waiting to acclimatize ourselves before going in a little further.

We talked about design plans obsessively. The roof was repaired, a major expense. While we saved up money for more work, it gave us time

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Home Hudson Valley Fall Home Improvement Editorial EDITOR: Paul Smart LAYOUT: Joe Morgan CONTRIBUTORS: Susan Barnett, Ed Breslin, Jennifer Brizzi, Lisa Carroll, Eliza Clark, Frances Halsband, Corinne Mol, Reginald Oberlag, Violet Snow, Sparrow, Jack Warren

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Sept. 17, 2015 Home Hudson Valley

| 5

are great, and we like yard sales.

4. We’re thrifters, so we had to be prepared to change the design plan when we found amazing salvaged items like reclaimed windows or doors (we made a whole new entrance in the lobby from old windows). Tim found patterned cement tiles on Craigslist that we used on the veranda, in the bathrooms, and as risers going up the main staircase. We used some glazed ones on the kitchen wall. Plus, we still have a shed full! Stay open to inspiration based on what you find. Repurposing and reusing just makes sense.

5. For all that we do on a tight budget, we do splurge sometimes on pieces that will elevate everything else.

6. Keep materials real – metals, glass, leather, concrete, wool. They develop a patina and softness that ages beautifully.

7. Youtube is fantastic for how-to videos on just about everything. It’s all possible, but practice first where it doesn’t matter.

8. Primer is your friend. Tint it to the color you’re painting.

9. Inspiration needs a spark. Pinterest is a key resource, as are design blogs. Some of my favorites are: remodelista.com; desiretoinspire.net; sfgirlbybay.com; designsponge.com; jerseyicecreamco. com.

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Television producer Eliza Clark and chef Tim Trojian have made their Catskills’ home improvements into a full lifestyle change. to get to know the place. Where were the drafts?

Which doorways could benefit from being widened? Might shared bathrooms to keep the rates down be a good idea for some of the guest rooms?

We kept modifying our plans for the better. We discovered a gorgeous stone fireplace in the lounge that was hidden behind drywall. One snowy winter night, with just Tim and I rattling around the empty inn, my chef made a roaring fire, wrapped scallops in tinfoil, and cooked them in the fireplace by burying them in the hot ashes.

We’ve learned a lot along the way. Here are some of our key tips:

1. Having a theme for the décor makes all the choices easier and the end result more cohesive.

We wanted the place to look and feel like your distant uncle’s country estate: full of worldly collectibles and serving rustic global food. To that end, we have vintage Persian rugs, antlers, shells, butterflies, and other natural wonders to serve as “art.”

2. Every room needs something alive in it. A simple branch with leaves in a glass of water will add serenity and loveliness.

3. Every room also needs a vintage item, or more, for uniqueness and soul. We love Craigslist the most. The Habitat for Humanity Re-Stores

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17, 2015 6 | Sept.

Home Hudson Valley

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Delaware County real estate, like that of much of the region, is driven by the second-home market, where homes tend to stay in buyersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; hands for an average seven years.

The house-whisperer In which our intrepid surreal-estate agent delves into house porn

By Reginald Oberlag

I

know there are folks who think of all the glossy home dĂŠcor books and magazines as â&#x20AC;&#x153;House Porn.â&#x20AC;? This genre gets us all worked up to go out and find something better, find our perfect match, and get some satisfaction. Like sex, which is the prime but unmentioned basic need in the Food, Shelter and Clothing holy trinity of the essential requirements for continued existence, we crave a home that lets us feel safe and happy and fulfilled. A home that is sexy and cozy.

Our dream house is just like a dreamboat.

Look at those gorgeous and sexy pictures of all the perfect and tidy living rooms, stainless steel kitchens and glass tile baths. Feel the sumptuous and fluffedup Ralph Lauren bedrooms. Examine the exotic bluestone terraces, ipe wood decking and heirloom flower gardens. They arouse a yearning, an almost erotic pull, to find our very own dream house.

I stumbled into the business of selling the country-life dream to urbanites as a way to support my severely under-monetized bohemian writer-artist lifestyle. As a real-estate broker who specializes in finding country-homes for city folk, I play the role of procurer and matchmaker. Perhaps you could even call me a dream-catcher, which dovetails well with my other self-aggrandizing self-anointed title: The Surreal-Estate Agent.

According to my many satisfied customers who feel their lives were immeasurably improved by our searching for and finding their specific dream

house, Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve been a great success. So despite my misgivings I do feel some satisfaction in this otherwise prosaic business.

Of course, buying a second home in the country is a luxury, not a necessity. A property truly needs to be a dream-fulfilling experience to motivate my suburban or city-based customers to spend all this money to invest in a country retreat.

It also means I must be something of a psychoanalyst who can perceive and sort through the dreams and desires of these folks, particularly because they donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t usually know how to tell you what their dream is. The usual suspects (view, privacy, pond, stream, wooded and open, rustic or mod) are summoned to the lineup. We then make the rounds looking at all manner of properties. Youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d be amazed at how different the final house may be from what they start out looking for.

It is usually a couple who are looking to buy their country dream in our Catskills. Extremely rare is the single person who wants to move away from the happy hunting ground of the plentiful urban or suburban mate-market scene into the slim pickings of the rural singles scene.

Having a pair of individuals, each with their own id-ego-superego drives and desires, trying to come to common ground on what their joint dream-house dream will be means looking at a lot of different types of properties. They will agree or argue about what they do and donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t like, about the house, and often about themselves and each other.

Some couples agree easily on shared visions and others are total opposites. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve learned that my odds of selling to a couple with extreme differences are probably low. My input may actually expedite their inevitable split. Usually the more typical divorce cycle doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t occur until after two or three years of their escape to their country dreamhouse. By then the realities of living together and

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I did know one long-reluctant bachelor who lived in a giant 100-year-old farmhouse with five bedrooms. There were great parties and plenty of room for the revelers to crash overnight rather than drive the scary winter roads to get to homes a half-hour or more away. Though he always yearned for the loving wife and big family, he was pushing 40, and his prospects were dim. Though he did finally get engaged to an old college friend, their different visions of what the country dreamhouse should be were starkly at odds.

The old funky kitchen with tilting floors and linoleum countertops and crooked cabinets was not her ideal. She yearned for a clean and contemporary Ikea kitchen, while he liked things authentic and earthy. While she was away working in the city to pay the houseâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s enormous heating bills, her betrothed writer-boyfriend was left alone in the rambling house to face his writerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s block. He decided to bestow upon her the Ikea kitchen experience. He bought a couple of gallons of the brilliant primary yellow and blue paint (the colors of both the Swedish flag and the Scandinavian furnishings giant). He set about painting the crooked kitchen cabinets, crackling-counters and roughplank floors. The result was a bad cartoon version of an Ikea catalog kitchen.

When his fiancĂŠ returned for the weekend, she burst into tears at this abomination of the houseporn esthetic. She packed her bags and left. My old friend returned to the lonesome life of the woebegone bachelor.

Only about a third of these weekend-rusticant relationships dissolve in rural acrimony. Another third continue in the ecstasy of this bucolic idyll.

The final third get bored or go broke after a couple of years. The outcomes vary. Some couples find their childrenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s team sports and extracurricular overindulgence make it impossible for the country-home owners ever to use their beloved rural refuge.

I was told by our most experienced associate broker that the average ownership term for our Catskill country homes is seven years. Which means I can expect to come back into the picture and earn another commission.

We are presently experiencing a generational change in Catskill country-home ownership. A great number of homes are now coming to market from owners who bought their country dreams in the 1970s and 1980s. They are now old and downsizing, or moving to Florida or other sunny climes. Their children donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have the time, money or inclination to maintain their parentsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; country dream house.

Luckily for me there is the new generation of Hicksters from Brooklyn and Hoboken who need my house-whispering skills to help find their dream.

Sept. 17, 2015 Home Ho m Hudson Valley

| 7

Our negotiation We start with an allchalkboard room and one with a water-floor

By Violet Snow and Sparrow

C

ouples often have to do a lot of negotiating to live together. We do.

For years I, Violet, wanted to live in the country, while Sparrow preferred urban life. (We’re still working on that little problem.) When asked to describe our dream house, we had trouble reaching consensus.

Sparrow started out with some preliminary thoughts. Here they are:

1) I am still, at the age of 61, a graffiti artist.

Don’t tell the cops, but sometimes when I’m in New York City and no one’s watching I’ll write: “Legalize counterfeit money!” – or some such inspiring adage – on a poster for Time Warner. I’d also like to write on my own walls, but without inflicting permanent damage. The solution: an all-chalkboard room, with erasable surfaces instead of walls. Then I could emulate the character in Chuck Berry’s brilliant “Memphis, Tennessee:” “My uncle took the message and he wrote it on the wall.”

2) Here at the foot of Mount Romer winds come pouring around the slope quite often. If I could channel those gusts, I’d never have to sweep my house again! Two wind portals, one at each end of my doublewide trailer, would accomplish this pleasing task. “My cleaning lady is invisible,” I could correctly remark.

3) I find the solidity of floors a little disconcerting. (Also I have bunions.) It would be nice to provide a room with a water-floor: a room-sized waterbed, only two or three inches deep, which would massage your feet while you danced to Rihanna’s new song, “American Oxygen:” Breathe out, breathe in American oxygen; Every breath I breathe Chasin’ this American Dream…

4) It’s the isolation of American life that most rankles me. In 1897 Manhattan installed a series of pneumatic tubes connecting office buildings so they could communicate with enormous speed (These tubes functioned until 1953). How much easier to connect all the houses here on High Street in Phoenicia! Any time you wanted to talk to a neighbor you could just shoot them a little high-speed note. (Yes, I’ve heard of email, but it lacks the physicality of an actual folded-up page.

Besides, with the High Street Pneumatic Tube one might send small quantities of sugar, salt, marijuana, postcards, etc.)

And wouldn’t it be pleasant if people had movable houses, which could connect like Lego pieces, allowing you to live communally for several days or weeks until you got sick of each other? Imagine if our friends Maurice and Ann could just link their house to ours, and we could have chatty card games and dinners for the next week!

5) My favorite religion is Islam (though I myself am not a Muslim). I’d enjoy having a small mosque in my backyard, to enter several times a day, during reverential moments.

6) I spend a lot of time in bed, daydreaming – so I could use three beds, in three bedrooms: one for thinking in English, one for French, and one for Hebrew.

Yikes! When I was asked about my dream home, I thought of, let’s see — it would be nice to have tile on the bathroom floor instead of vinyl. Sparrow would never think of that.

I mean, I like our house. It’s not too big, so it doesn’t take a lot of maintenance, but it’s big enough for us to have offices at opposite ends of the house, so we can both write without bothering each other. He uses a voice-recognition program on his computer.

Mushroom house dream by Sparrow.

But my office is right next to our bedroom, and he beds down and rises much later than I do, so soundproofing the office would allow me to play videos when he’s asleep without putting on earphones.

Hmm. Not very ambitious. I’ll go with a chalkboard room, if Sparrow insists, and a water-floor sounds entertaining. When our six-year-old neighbor, Eleanor, comes by to jump on the beds, she’ll have fun with a water-floor. But I think it would have to be deeper than three inches. You can see who is the practical one in this family. Maybe too practical.

Okay, Violet, think big. Think dreamy. An attached aviary, with a window the birds can fly in and out of, and nesting places we can observe through a glass wall. A massive maple tree growing up through the living room floor. A staircase to the roof so I can climb into the upper branches and meditate among the leaves while Sparrow is hanging out in the mosque.

And while we’re dreaming, why should our dream house be an actual house? How much nicer to live in a large balloon, and to gaze out at the world through its translucent walls. (I would prefer yellow.) A balloon is waterproof, and, more importantly, round. Within its rubbery walls, one escapes the horrible rectangularity of modern liv-

ing. And once you consume all the air within the house, you simply burst it with a pin, before you asphyxiate. Then hook up the air pump to your next balloon-home!

I assume, dear Sparrow, that you don’t require furniture, electricity for your laptop, a stove. Dear me, I’m not getting into the spirit of things here.

Maybe the balloon comes with all that stuff pre-installed. Maybe the house can even float, like a hotair balloon, and we can travel to Paris and back before the air gives out. We can gaze upon our yellow world from above, free to wander over every continent.

How about a mushroom? Thanks to gene-splicing, geneticists could easily create a fungus that grows 30 feet in diameter within a couple of days.

Then you simply carve out an interior space – including doors and windows, even a table for your laptop – and move in! As with a balloon, you’re liberated from the rectilinear, plus your home is an organic being. Once your dwelling decays, you move out, or grow another one!

Ah, finally he’s coming around to my point of view, fusing home with nature. I’ll go with a giant mushroom. Let’s get those geneticists down to work! Soon our dream house will be a reality!

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Home Hudson Valley

RUGGERO VANNI

New York University’s Languages & Literature Building, Kliment Halsband Architects. Elena Climent mural, At Home with Their Books, 2008. Edith Wharton panel is second from the left.

Dream studio Creative souls need creation-minded spaces

By Frances Halsband

W

oodstock: Colony of the Arts got its artistic start in 1903 with the opening of Byrdcliffe, and then the Maverick.

Painters, writers, musicians, craftspeople came to work in a natural setting. More than a hundred years later, creative artists keep coming, seeking a place in nature. Much is the same, but much has changed.

The original Byrdcliffe studios were big spaces for group work, simply constructed of native wood and stone, directly connected to the out-of-doors.

Now we are beginning to think about how to accommodate a new generation of artists seeking nature, yet immersed in modern technologies that make their art possible. More often than not, today’s artists choose to work in collaborative inter-

Top left, George Bernard Shaw’s Rotating Studio, St. Albans, Hertfordshire, England; top right, Gustave Courbet, The Artist’s Studio, 1855; above left, Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild, The Forge; above right, Monet’s Studio, Giverny, 1920.

disciplinary groups.

Always, we are keenly aware of our effect on nature; minimizing intervention seems essential.

Next summer we hope to invite artists and architects to imagine what new Byrdcliffe studios could look like, and how they might function.

Meanwhile, here’s a glimpse of my personal collection of great studios: When I look at Gustave Courbet’s allegorical painting of his studio, I see the painter and his model surrounded by children, dogs, musicians, friends, onlookers. Courbet appears to work at the busy heart of his community, rather than isolated from it.

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Monet’s studio at Giverny, on the other hand, is a pristine skylit box. He seems to have isolated himself from the immediate landscape and the gardens that he so beautifully created.

At New York University’s Language and Literature building, we worked with painter Elena Climent. She was fascinated by New York writers, researching and painting their studios. Edith Wharton, as imagined by Climent, wrote in bed surrounded by things she loved, memorabilia, books and more books. Her windows open on views of her gardens at The Mount.

Woodstock writer Gail Godwin built a studio in

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There, she is surrounded by tools of her trade, essential mementos, books. She looks out on a view of the mountains.

Edna St. Vincent Millay, living across the river at Austerlitz, had a big country house, but she walked across the lawn and into the woods to work in a tiny rustic studio, just big enough for a desk and chair.

George Bernard Shaw had a tiny writing room that was, famously, on a turntable, so he could

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capture the sun.

A kit of parts emerges from these glimpses, a group of essential elements, separate from architectural style or interior design, but integral to the creative process.

A floor, a door, a window, a roof. Enclosing walls, or perhaps just enclosing windows. Inside, a chair, a table, and, I am guessing, a computer and a place to plug in. 60 square feet, or 600 square feet, or 1200 square feet.

An art studio we designed at Zen Mountain Monastery has all the essentials in a ten-footby-20-foot space; big table, big window, view of the woods. It’s all about daylight, and then some choices: looking out at the landscape or not, familiar objects or bare minimal surroundings, cozy or grand.

Whatever it takes to invoke the muses.

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Home Hudson Valley

A home has to breathe Four elements to make your house come alive

By Jack Warren

I

â&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve lived in my house for 13 years. While the echoes of our Manhattan apartment and our Chichester cabin ricochet through my memory, it is the chipped paint, slanted floors and Victorian grandeur of the Big Blue House that I call home that have stayed vivid throughout my childhood and adolescence. Our house is alive, our walls as full with energy as it is with rodents.

It takes time for a home to become a living entity. Japanese myth says it takes a century for objects to accrue a soul. But this is the 21st century, and there is nothing my generation canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t streamline. To speed up the soul-crafting process I have listed below four ingredients for your home.

PHOTOS BY JACK WARREN

Equally important as the stuff a home holds is the way it hosts friends, as seen on a recent â&#x20AC;&#x153;home aloneâ&#x20AC;? night here.

Quirks No house is perfect, and people love to complain. The highest apartment has the longest elevator ride. The quaintest cottage requires a 20-minute drive to the nearest convenience store.

Although these micro-strifes may aggravate you, they will help you characterize your house as something more than a place to sleep. Your house will begin to feel like a family member, full of faults lovable and otherwise, and bound to you by

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circumstance. Your housemates, if you have them, will rally around these common grievances, and youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll grow closer as a unit. Nothing unites people like complaining.

Our house, as I mentioned, is host to an infestation of rodents, specifically, flying squirrels (a bizarrely common occurrence in the Hudson Valley, from what Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve heard). For years my family bemoaned the presentation of these (and other creaturesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;) entrails to us by our cat, Sis. Now, Sis is too elderly to hunt, and the flying squirrels can be heard nearly every night, doing God-knows-what behind every wall and ceiling.

Stories Our house was built by a local family called the McGraths. We donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know much about them. To me, they sound straight out of a storybook, perhaps a rich and mysterious family of vampires or a diabolical coven of witches. Folks in our neighborhood insist the McGraths are neither of those things. That doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t stop me from imagining. The stained-glass windows and period architecture that were the products of their dreams seemed to me all the more magical.

My fantasies have faded a bit. Recently, both my parents were out and about, leaving the house

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The author’s house, which he will be leaving soon for college, is full of parental knickknacks, as well as his own memorabilia, which together make it a home.

to me and my friends. There was a knock at the door, and two middle-aged women stepped in, barely waiting for our consent. They were sisters, they explained, and that they had stayed “at the old McGrath house” when they were kids. One, who wasn’t completely sold that this was the place, continually referenced an incident in which someone fell out a window, which couldn’t have possibly happened here, it just couldn’t have, because of the slanted roof. The other, however, was absolutely positive, citing an “aura” the place gave off. (She told me that she was the spiritual one of the two) There had been a massive portrait of Old Grandfather McGrath in the dining room that had captured her on multiple occasions with its arresting glare. She would become catatonic, she further shared, not responding to her friends and family because she was possessed by the dark power of the dead McGrath.

I remembered the time I had heard, lying in my bed at age eight, footsteps in an empty hallway. At age ten, I had distinctly heard the tinkling of silverware in the kitchen when the whole house was asleep. Could these have been night terrors, or the rodents crawling out of their dens to scavenge for food? Maybe. Could these women be crazy people?

Absolutely. But the story of an old spirit haunting his home for generations to come is far more compelling.

Ghosts Not everyone can find a specter or poltergeist to give their place of residence that special sparkle, but there are other kinds of ghosts that act as a fine substitute. Old photographs of ancestors and family members (even if they’re not like Old Grandfather McGrath) can bring with them the warm presence of times past. I like to think spirits clump together to form a sort of Frankenstein-spirit, or an “aura,” to use somebody else’s words.

Ghosts can be taken in a less literal sense. If art and stories are the sum of their creators’ thoughts, then they too offer a mystical piece of the metaphysical pie. Our shelves are cluttered with books and CDs, and I can’t imagine the house without them. My mom also keeps a mind bogglingly massive collection of tiny figurines, salt and pepper shakers, knickknacks resembling hillbillies, cowboys, and occasionally politically incorrect caricatures. All carry a sense of surreal life.

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confused fellow six-year-olds. My seventh birthday party had a pinata but no place to hang it, sp we beat it into the ground with sticks and our fists. At the end of the sixth grade, I crashed into the bushes, expecting them to be flowers and cushiness, and finding myself poked by a thousand angry nettles.

Staying up past bedtime, hiding under the covers illuminated by laptop light, studying and Facebook chatting. Reading book after book and watching movie after movie. All-nighter sleepovers, talking in the darkness about girlfriends and the universe.

Scribbling down homework last minute, and writing feverishly for hours on end.

If you want to bring your home to life, you must spend your life in it. Make memories in your house. Invite friends over. Stay in bed and study the ceiling. Cook a meal, or get Chinese take-out.

I’m leaving this house soon, which will be strange. But I can go with confidence that I will be leaving a living, breathing being behind me. A big, cluttered, fantastic, rodent-filled friend.

Although not so much a presence in my home, religious artifacts can provide a similar effect as well. My great- grandmother kept a shrine to the Virgin Mary in her bedroom, and the palpable faith surrounding it is one of the few things I remember of that house.

Memories Thirteen years is a long time. The Big Blue House has been a backdrop for countless milestones, from first kisses to graduation days. Even more importantly, it’s been home to millions of moments.

Shortly after we bought the house, a young, limber cat, our most effective tour guide to date, led us from room to room. We adopted her. Contemplating a name for our new pet, I quickly arrived at Sis, to compensate for a lack of siblings.

Sifting through dozens of colorful CDs with my dad in order to make my first mixtape, which we handed out at my birthday party to a bunch of my

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Home Hudson Valley

PHOTOS COURTESY OF WIKICOMMONS

The wildness of a Pacific Northwest home has its attractions, but so do the basic comforts of a more standard house.

A history of adopted homes Home improvement includes lessons in what’s yours

By Corinne Moi

I

can’t say that I’ve ever attempted to create my own dream house. My dream houses have been other people’s dream houses. I have only daydreamed of my own dream house. The houses that I’ve lived in have had a dream-like quality only because I have had the privilege of living in them. I didn’t try to make them into dream houses. I accepted them on their terms and loved them.

My father, who worked as a house builder, framed houses and handled the subcontractors on his clients’ dream houses. But he built dream houses for each of his three wives. My favorite was the one he built for my mother. It perched on a small, precarious clay cliff 50 feet above the Saanich Inlet on Vancouver Island, in Mill Bay, British Columbia.

Dad had a knack for inding lots that were dif icult to build on and then convincing banks to inance construction.

I lived in my four-bedroom, three-story, faux-tudor house from age ten to age 18. It had expansive views of a dramatic inlet, and dark forests running up its shores. A sandy beach went out a long way during low tide, and the sun-baked sand warmed the water as the tide came in.

I chose purple for the color of my bedroom walls and carpet. We had a ping-pong table and a pool table in the basement, a big kitchen with lots of counter space, and a living room and dining room with ocean views. At the time, unable to appreciate the beauty and wonder of my parents’ dream home, I took it for granted,.

My parents divorced when I was 20. The house was sold.

When I was in university, I rebelled against the prevailing consumerism and materialism of our society. I identi ied myself as an eco-feminist anar-

Island living is a contrast to the closeness of a Hudson Valley community. chist. During my twenties and thirties I dreamed of and lived in houses that it my ideals of back-to-theland, meditative simplicity.

When I worked in a refugee camp teaching English in the small town of Phanat Nikhom in Thailand, I lived in a traditional wooden teak house on stilts which lifted the rooms above the monsoon loods. The walls were slatted with four-inch wide gaps for the breeze to blow through. Neighbors could see clearly into my house at night. Their clucking chickens ran under my loorboards.

I dozed in my hammock while the monsoon downpours plucked music on my tin roof. The geckos chirped on my walls and ate the dengue fever-carrying mosquitoes that bred in my bathroom water reservoir. I bathed by pouring a long-handled bucket of water over my head and lushed the squat toilet by dumping water into it. I’d occasionally squeeze past the scorpions on my bathroom walls.

I loved that house, and was completely content.

Another Thai house I lived in in Phanat Nikhom

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had beautiful teak loors. It was built over a pool of water that kept the interior cool. In the pool were mosquito-eating carp, which I’d hear splashing under the loorboards as they leapt up for insects.

I fell asleep to that sound, curled on a traditional Thai two-inch cotton mattress a few inches above them. My mattress was covered by a canopied mosquito net, and I sometimes dreamt that the refugees watched me through the limsy gauze while I slept.

I returned to Canada after that year in Thailand.

I had been horri ied by the suffering and poverty of the refugee camps.

When I stayed in the new house my father built for his second wife, a perfectly insulated suburban home with gray vinyl siding, thick gray carpet, and a wet bar in the basement, I felt like I couldn’t breathe. I wanted to elbow holes in the walls to let in the jungly aliveness I had felt in my Thai homes.

My boyfriend and I moved as close to a jungle as we could, to Lasqueti Island, an off-the-grid community in B.C. We bought a one-bedroom handhewn cabin, which was perhaps coincidentally built on stilts. The person who sold us the place left her chickens. They pecked and clucked beneath the house. We never found a single egg. One by one, the chicken vanished into the forest at night, never to return, until there was only one chicken left standLandscaping Lawn installation Ponds Retaining walls Stone work ...and much more

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existed. I hesitantly explore, discovering uneasy secrets. Sometimes my parents appear, singly, then together, then singly again.

These dream houses are often half- inished, or in partial states of decay. They are murky, illed with strange energies and premonitions. Concealed passageways open and then go nowhere.

Crumbling rooms lead to overgrown gardens and sun-splashed terrariums. I walk wrapped in mosquito gauze. Wind rattles the panes. Refugees look inward, iling past. Carp swim in the bathtub. Scorpions emerge from the drains.

My guitar case lies open. Inside it is a single broken egg.

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manding and austere life. It took a whole day to go to civilization on Vancouver Island and then return.

We traveled off island by passenger ferry, often over rough seas that left us feeling woozy with seasickness.

I am proud of having lived off the grid for ive years. I loved it while I loved it. Slowly, it dawned on me, however, that this was not my dream. There were other things I wanted to do with my life. And I also wanted the convenience of hot water on demand and a lush toilet rather than a mosquito-ridden outhouse with unexpected bites to the tush.

Still, these houses of my younger years continue to haunt my dreams. They are strangely altered, illed with subterranean rooms that I did not know

Gre Cap

ing. It would roost in my guitar case on our porch.

We had no telephone or electricity. The deep peace we experience when the power goes out was mine all the time. I delighted in the deep quiet of forest living. We went to bed shortly after it got dark.

The wind seeped in through the rattling single-pane windows during storms. We heated the house and bath water on a wood stove and lit kerosene lamps.

Our driveway led to a trail past a swamp. We showered outside, pouring pots of steaming water over us. Mountain-biking friend and neighbors called greetings as we stood dripping and naked in the unkempt yard.

We had no refrigeration. A cold box on the north side of the house kept our perishables cool from October through April. In the summer we dealt with limp carrots and sour soymilk.

I was proud to be roughing it, living a physically de-

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PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR & WIKICOMMONS

The trick to successful home improvement can be as simple as a fresh attention to detail.

When are you really home?

Even a rental can carry the stuff of dreams

y dream home has morphed throughout my life, changing shape and size and configuration as the years fly swiftly by. But it is always made of stucco, and on four or five acres of wooded land with a pond and gardens bursting with vegetables, fruits and flowers. It is in the country with quick access to a city and the sea. Inside is a large kitchen, plenty of living, sleeping and work space, but most importantly plenty of character. Only this last descriptor for a dream home has so far come to pass.

Perhaps you have a similar dream home, or maybe for you it’s a log cabin on a mountaintop, or a full-floor penthouse in a huge city, or a tidy brown-shingled cape. Only some of us are lucky enough to live in our dream houses. Many of us inhabit at least part of that dream and are working to make our dwellings fall in step with our personal and unique ideal.

Architect Kathy Braun of Hopewell Junction is part-way there.

“I often feel like the cobbler who has no shoes,” she says, “an architect who lives in a less-thanideal house that needs all of the additions and updates that my clients get. I have spent so much time and energy on the dreams of my clients that I have not spent much time on my own. My dream house is currently a quarter-inch scale model sit-

ting on top of a book shelf covered in dust! I figure once I retire I can concentrate on me.

“Of course, the home that I live in currently is a very unusual home and fits my architectural personality, and I do love it. But even with that, I have been designing my kitchen reno since we bought the house, eight years ago. So you see the pattern.

My guess is that I am not alone in this dilemma.”

She isn’t. I’ve been planning detailed dream homes as long as I can remember. Quite possibly, you have, too.

I grew up in a large colonial brick house on an acre of land in Vermont (now on the market if anyone’s looking). As a kid I took for granted the gorgeous rural setting, babbling stream, huge organic garden, blueberry bushes, extensive rose bushes and venerable willow tree (the last four now gone). My childhood home had plenty of indoor space, with high ceilings, many fireplaces upstairs and down, and a finished attic.

These things don’t really matter when you’re a kid, though. But sometimes I would dream of the future, spending hours in the big dilapidated blue barn behind the house, sketching a renovation in which I could live. Later I wanted to have four, five or six children and the big stucco house with rooms for all of them. It would also have a studio/ study for me, whose purpose — in my dreams — evolved as my ambitions changed from actor to artist to architect and finally to writer. I would sketch the exterior and the floor plans of those dream houses, sketches that this pack rat probably still has around somewhere but can’t find. It was such fun that I ordered pencils stamped with “Harington Renovation Consulting” to inspire myself for a future career when I worked as a nurse in my twenties.

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After many, many years of rentals and no will to renovate them, in my late thirties I finally became a homeowner with my then-husband of a tiny, cheap, very old, half-renovated house in Rhinecliff. The kitchen and living room were super-small, there were only two bedrooms and you couldn’t stand up in the basement, but it was ours.

With help we did a lot of work on the house to make it more livable, gutted and redid the bathroom, put in a half-bath upstairs, and made a decent, basic, serviceable kitchen where I cranked out many good meals. We spruced the house up nicely for our adoption home studies, and it looked pretty good. Like at my childhood home there was an old barn out back that I dreamed of renovating. I spent several years designing an addition/renovation project to the last detail, down to the brand and model of cooktop and dishwasher, and the brands and colors of flooring, ceiling and countertop materials. Although I got town approval for the addition, for a variety of complex reasons after 12 years there I am no longer in the house and renting again.

But the dream homes keep on coming relentlessly. The early-Seventies-era apartment I currently live in -- with my teenagers part-time -- is on acres of woods, and quiet, with nice neighbors, a deck, picture windows, a fireplace, wood floors and an open plan, which I love, for the living room and kitchen. The bathroom and kitchen are still tiny (and still no dishwasher), and there are only two bedrooms, insufficient space for two teenage kids of opposite genders to have their own rooms (one sleeps on the sofabed). My office and my sleeping space share a room.

But it’s home, and I may be here a while before the real dream house happens. Besides, priorities have shifted, with any “extra” money going to enhance the well-being and happiness of my kids, as I enjoy their presence for the few years left before they fly the coop, and for traveling. Sometimes, when luck is with me, I can accomplish all those goals at once, and then, I think, the dream home can wait.

My editor asked for home improvement tips, but the only one I can offer is a philosophical shift.

If your allotment of money or time doesn’t allow for the new house or renovation projects that improve your quality of life, if getting a new bathroom sink or kitchen cabinets from this century isn’t doable this year, then in the meantime just make sure what surrounds you is you.

Like Kathy Braun, who loves the way her unusual house fits her architectural personality, you can come to terms with the specialness of your dwelling. Cover your walls and floors and the corners of your rooms with objects that truly please you and reflect your uniqueness. Your favorite colors and patterns, your art, things that remind you of special trips and the best moments of your life, and of course plenty of images — big ones — of the people you love the most. So that when you are home you are really home. And then your home will be the stuff of dreams.

Sept. 17, 2015 Home Hudson Valley

| 17

A starter home can be forever The joys of a family’s first nest

By Lisa Carroll

M

y husband and I often sit on our front porch, coffee in hand, discussing what our dream home would be, and how much a stretch it would be to make our 1940s village Cape fit the bill.

When we were looking for our home — almost four years ago now — our requirements were few: affordability and reasonable condition. We were working with a shoestring budget and could afford neither a hefty mortgage nor renovations.

Whatever we purchased had to be as turnkey as possible.

But we also had a growing family. At that time, Shelby was two-and-a-half and Sammie was six months old. And we had to consider their needs.

We realized we might end up on our starter home longer than we anticipated.

Our real-estate agent took us to many homes.

Some fit, others didn’t. But when we walked into the 1940 Cape Cod on a dead end street in the village of Ellenville I got the sense that I was home.

It helped that a family had lived there. Their boys were about the same age as our girls. And the house seemed lived in, cared for and comfortable.

There was a fenced-in side yard. The reasonable mortgage was a big selling point.

We moved in a few weeks later.

We’ve had three Christmases here. Shelby learned to make pancakes and started school.

Sammie took her first steps, spoke her first words.

Tom and I have gone to bed many nights thankful that we could afford our home.

We’ve started gardens and installed a swing set.

We’re friends with all our neighbors. Even the cat has found her special niche, sprawled out on a rock ledge in the summer sun.

It’s turned out to be our dream home. Even with its antiquated electric, its peeling sticky-tile kitchen floor, the draft out the front door during the winter and the bathroom door that doesn’t close tight all summer.

Like its last owner, we feel that if we could just pick the house up and plop it down on some acreage — a field with more trees for the girls to build a tree house, hunting accessibility for Tom — it would be nearly perfect.

And that’s what we talk about over coffee. What do we need in our next home — our “forever” home — that can’t be created in this one?

More land tops the list. Our current quarter-acre is just not enough. I want a homestead the girls could come back to — if they need or want to — when they’re older. Enough acreage to build another home or two or an addition off the main house if conditions don’t allow the girls to thrive on their own.

We also need a walk-out basement. We need some accommodation for my mom, who will eventually get on in years and need to live with us.

I promised her that.

And if we could find a home outside of the village tax line, all the better.

But leaving the home where we’re building memories is a saddening thought. I always wanted a family home that was just that — a family home.

People get so mucked up with titles — “starter,” “forever,” “dream” — that they forget what’s going on inside those four walls.

It’s hard to live in the present, if you’re constantly planning for the future.

So we’re making our two-bedroom, bath and a quarter home work for us. The present us.

Last weekend, we painted the dining room — went from an awful yellow to a serene blue-gray — and installed a bronze chandelier. We ripped out the stained beige carpet, revealing the original hardwood floor.

All this, because I found some awesome curtains on sale.

We imagine taking up the carpet in our entryway and in the living room, but school’s about to

PHOTOS BY LISA CARROLL

A bit of paint, a new fixture or two, and that first house starts gaining its own familial memories. start and that will probably be put on the back burner.

Because we have that same shoestring budget we started with, many of our improvements over the past four years have been small-scaled.

We painted the girls’ room purple — their favorite color. And we installed outside lights and one in the kitchen. But doing electrical work is tricky in our home. Any time we change something, it’s on a wing and a prayer.

We pay attention to what we change and what we keep. There are some beautiful architectural design elements in our home — an arched doorway that leads from the kitchen to the living room, a brick fireplace, a plethora of old-fashioned pulley windows. And then there’s the quirky — like the downstairs bathroom I’ve dubbed the indoor outhouse. Probably once used as a pantry, it’s a closet off the kitchen with just a light and a john.

It’s awkward, in that it doesn’t have a sink within the space. But it was insanely helpful for potty training.

As for our home improvements, we try to pick changes that appeal to us as the current owners, that will do well for resale, and that retains the original charm of the home.

This spring our garage roof leaked. We had to dismantle the interior ceiling and replace it. With all its contents strewed across the driveway and into the yard, it looked like our garage had exploded. Our neighbor stopped by to see what was going on and apologized for our leaking roof — see, his grandfather had built the house.

These things happen, I told him. It’s nothing

to do with the original workmanship. Maybe the years of “renovations” afterwards, but his grandfather had done a good job.

I promised to bring down pictures I had found.

Of the first homeowners —ones that showed our six-foot hedges barely knee-high to an unknown toddler. Of a 1950s couple in the living room, standing in front of our fireplace. Of grandparents sitting in a chair in our side yard, surrounded by kids — the driveway still dirt.

We love our house. While it may not be our “dream” home, it was somebody’s a long time ago.

Until we can move on to our “forever” home, we’ll keep this “starter” one safe and comfortable.

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Home Hudson Valley

Always dream big It is all about home improvements in the end

By Ed Breslin

O

wning one’s dream house ranks high among universal fantasies. Who among us has not been gratified, especially when arriving early for lunch or dinner, to browse the windows of the real-estate offices on either side of the village green? The photos of the quaint, stately, charming or grand houses on display in the windows is great fun.

Fantasies of owning and living in one’s favorites spring to mind.

You see yourself lounging poolside, or reclining on the deck with the incomparable mountain view, or sitting on the hearth of the walk-in fieldstone fireplace, flames leaping, firewood crackling, favorite beverage in hand, listening to the wind howl outside as the flurries whirl down against the cathedral skylights. Something similar happens every time you spot a new copy of Architectural Digest while waiting for the dentist to clean your teeth or the shrink to scrub your brain.

The hidden architect and the secret designer in you catapult to the forefront of the imagination and release endorphins even when the rush is short-lived and you realize rapidly you’re currently living deep in a bosky, damp and sunless grove next to the town dump in a snail-back trailer slightly roomier than a rabbit hutch. Yet this dream house fantasizing, while it lasts, is magical.

But the truth for nearly everyone is that the dream-house fantasy will prove elusive. Compromises will have to be made. The concept of the dream house will evolve and shift as your lifestyle and circumstances change. There’s the old standby of the starter house proving inadequate as the family expands, or simply because one’s means have become more substantial, or both.

If it’s the case of the family expanding as well as the means increasing, major shifts in school and educational requirements can be triggered. Perhaps you need to find a house in a more sophisticated school district, or a house nearer to the private school you can now afford for your scholar-offspring, albeit on a daily commuting, not on a room-and-board-residential, basis.

Then again, once you exhaust the starter-house fantasy and attain the full family upgrade, you might next, years later, find yourself overly burdened, especially financially. This is true most of all once the empty-nest syndrome sets in. You’re then confronted with the retirement-dream-house decision. Provided your health holds out, you can get lucky and end up in a smaller, self-contained house, cozy and relaxed, with lower taxes and lower maintenance costs. This is a good time to go Thoreau and simplify, simplify, simplify.

If you have the means to buy the retirement dream house outright and avoid a new mortgage, your costs can be amazingly reduced in terms of monthly cash-flow requirements. If you can avoid crippling arthritis and high blood pressure, if you’re spared diabetes, shattering strokes and debilitating heart attacks, you can enjoy some great years in the right retirement dream house while maintaining dignity, having fun, and actually enjoying the so-called golden years.

I know artists who have taken this path and continue to live and work in their smaller houses and studios in Woodstock itself, and in Bearsville, Hurley, Lake Hill and the other glorious hamlets in and around Woodstock. Remember: Art and the quest for knowledge are better fountains of youth than anything Ponce de Leon ever found.

Remember Ralph Waldo Emerson’s remark that every time he awoke after age 50 and wasn’t in pain he feared that he’d died in the night. Get into art, music, dance, film, yoga or pottery. Take up French or piano or guitar lessons, start your novel or memoir or sonnet, or do whatever else your heart desires that you’ve too often put off.

LYNN DREESE BRESLIN

The houses we dream of change over a lifetime, often simplifying as one ages.

If you take this grab-life-by-the-horns approach, your requirements for happiness in the retirement dream house will diminish as the pursuit and grasp of your passions gain momentum.

When the quest for the dream house arises during any phase of life, bear in mind the imaginative options of making substantial improvements, of undertaking spatial rearrangements, or of underwriting additions. These options apply to the house you currently own or to the one you intend to buy.

Don’t be reluctant to consult professionals when doing any of this. Architects and interior decorators, builders and real-estate professionals, artists and designers can be invaluable.

Stay alert. A ramshackle barn or a rusted doublewide or an abandoned hunting lodge or fishing cabin might at present occupy your dream-house site. Or, upon closer inspection, your dream house may lack only an interior makeover, or a landscaping update outside, or a few replaced clapboards, or a new roof atop a spiffy new paint job.

The addition of a sun deck or screened-in porch or glassed-in conservatory could be all that’s needed.

If stairs have become a problem, you can buy a downsized ranch house and add a room or two for living space or for sleeping accommodations. Or you might need only to build a practical, low-maintenance but substantial artist’s studio out back.

If your dream house is a classic Victorian farmhouse, that handyman special you or your agent spotted off the beaten path on a tertiary road, despite a collapsed porch, a perforated roof, and boards long silvered and desperately in need of patching, sanding, caulking, primer and paint, might be ideal. It might just be well disguised and discouragingly camouflaged.

That cruddy and abandoned Cape Cod, once you raise the roof, convert the attic to two medium-sized bedrooms, and add a modest overall makeover inside and out might be the answer to your expanding family’s needs. This solution also applies to neglected and underdeveloped Eyebrow Colonials, those prominent and attractive remnants of the Hudson River Valley’s enduring Dutch heritage.

If you are fortunate and in deep funds, go for it no matter the cost. You may dream of building a Frank Lloyd Wright prairie house or a modernist masterpiece like his Fallingwater. You may long for a Philip-Johnson-like glass house sited per-

fectly for wraparound rustic vistas. Or you might covet owning a geometric marvel in sculpted concrete a la Corbusier, dominating a dramatic hilltop or perched on a high cliff above a breathtaking valley or ravine, Nor should the handy, the patient and the visionary restrain their dreams when it comes to rehabbing and repurposing a barn. A converted barn makes for a blissful dream house, especially when it’s so spacious that an in-home office, a writer’s study, or a sizable artist’s studio can be housed under its roof and share one heating system.

On the other hand, if your budget is limited and you’re not handy, maximize your imagination, exhaust your creative options, rely on professional friends — even if you have to cadge their advice or bargain or barter for their services — and exploit what you can afford to its fullest potential.

In the meantime, all the time, inform yourself.

Browse magazines like the previously mentioned Architectural Digest, breeze Southern Living, flip through Better Homes and Gardens. When you visit Lowe’s or Home Depot, or your local hardware or paint store, study the color charts and wheels and slides.

In Ikea or in Crate and Barrel or Bed, Bath and Beyond, touch and assess the curtains, flop into the furniture, fingertip the towels, and be sure to scan the bed linens, comforters, duvets, and other fabrics and furnishings on display. If you’re merely window-shopping, factor in that you’re also researching your future purchases and decorating your future domicile — if only, for the time being, by impatient proxy. Do this whenever you can.

Rummage garage and yard sales, attend estate auctions, haunt antique shops.

Whatever else you do when it comes to striving for your dream house, never accept the dismal verdict that what you can now afford is the limit on what you can attain in the future. Within reason, without risking bankruptcy, spend the money for improvements or upgrades. Keep in mind that old saying dear to all optimists: When you spend money, you find money.

As with anything worthwhile in life, when it comes to achieving the dream house, anyone who says he or she never had a chance never took a chance. Happy hunting. Never ever give in or give up. And, most of all, every chance you get, dream big as you study those glossy and alluring photos displayed in the windows of real-estate offices.

Sept. 17, 2015 Home Hudson Valley

| 19

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