Here in New England, it is all about the maple trees, especially the sugar maples. There were two huge, old sugar maples in front and one in the back yard of our house when we bought it. They provided an elegance and leafy shade for our outdoor living. The two in front dated from early in the last century. Sadly they are gone, replaced by two October Glory red maples. In the fall, the October Glory maples show off by turning the brightest, most electric shade of red imaginable. I think of them as the sassy teenagers. I find myself missing the two old ones, though, with their fall color changing from yellow to bright orange.

The third sugar maple still graces our back yard. It sits about twenty feet off the back of the house and provides a wondrous canopy of foliage that cools our back deck and creates the effect of a room for our outdoor living space. We treasure this tree as much as anything in our house that reminds us of the past.

Two old fashioned lilacs, one purple and one white, came with the house. They bloom in the spring with a pretty display of old fashioned elegance. Their intoxicating scent smells of nostalgia to me. These little things are sometimes missed when you plant a modern cultivar of a tree or shrub to replace an old-fashioned variety. The newer plants may have been bred for characteristics like showier flowers at the expense of scent or other characteristics.

To keep up the tradition of planting beloved plants, we planted a couple of our favorites shortly after we moved in. Needless to say, there will be no spiral or pom-pom junipers for the foundation of this old house! In the backyard, we now have a flat-out gorgeous Cut-leaf Japanese maple and a Korean Spice viburnum, whose heady scent really has no rival. I like the idea that, as in the house, we have tried to work with what remains from the past, while adding our particular imprint on the sense of place here.

For more information on landscape plantings, old and new, I recommend the best. Dr. Michael Dirr’s books on hardy trees and shrubs have been the standard for many years. They are the definitive guide and discuss the merits of a plant in a straightforward manner. Try Dirr’s Hardy Trees and Shrubs: An Illustrated Encyclopedia. I have this book and my thirty-year-old copy of Manual of Woody Landscape Plants: Their Identification, Ornamental Characteristics, Culture, Propagation, and Uses , both still in heavy use in my reference library. Dirr’s Encyclopedia of Trees and Shrubs will be my third Dirr book. There is also an app called Dirr’s Tree and Shrub Finder, which I am sure is the excellent resource that all of his other works are. As one reviewer wrote, it’s “tree”mendous!

But it’s a good thing I don’t have any extra money!  However, if you are in the market….

Look here

We had moved into this beautiful old house nine months earlier with grand plans and dreams of renovation bliss. I had visions of myself as Renovation Girl – first designing and then competently implementing all that needed to be done to bring my old house into the twentieth century. We knew a lot needed to be done, but it would be a nice part-time hobby for the evenings. Reality came bubbling into my dream that morning when the sewer line started backing up into the downstairs bathroom.

Now, we knew the size and location of the sewer line because it was marked on our property survey. We had been very happy that the house was hooked up to city utilities, thinking that we would not have to replace an old and under-performing septic system after we moved in. How could we know that the pipe connecting our house to the sewer line in the street, an old clay pipe, was being invaded by tree and shrub roots over the years? Our first clue was the funny-colored, murky water coming up through the bathtub drain. Soon, the toilet and the vanity sink were involved. You get the picture. After many hours with the plumber, checking fixtures and snaking drains, it became apparent that we would have to replace the sewer line out to the street. But even that is not why we almost moved.

Sometime later, I was standing in the front yard, telling my tale of woe to my neighbor Bob. Now, Bob’s Victorian house is younger than ours, built by members of the same family, and he found $ 900 dollars in his dining room ceiling when he tore it down. These stories always happen to other people, but can spur on the renovator with a false sense of purpose. (When we tore ours down, we found a steel beam, held up by nothing, splicing together two timber beams.) As we’re commiserating about old houses, I can see the old lamp post, out by the street, begin to fall over in slow motion. Incredibly, the post had rusted out at ground level and fell over on this day, of all days. If the house had been burning down at that minute, I’m not sure I would have called the fire department.

Years later, this is one of the funny renovation stories that we tell during parties, or when visitors are admiring the house. So many other things have happened over the years to test our patience and perseverance, that this story seems almost whimsical. (Someday, I’ll tell you about the old tin signs used as roof flashing.) But for us, this renovation has been about making a home, a home with history, and has been worth it every day.

Here’s a story from today’s New York times about the life of, and life in, one of these grand old houses.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/22/garden/22hudson.html?th&emc=th

It tells the story of the life of an old house in the middle ground, between being strictly preserved and completely modernized, of a house that is lived in and valued for what it was and what it could be.  It’s a great story.

For more information on houses in the Hudson Valley, see “The Great Estates Region of the Hudson River Valley”  by McKelden Smith and published by Historic Hudson Valley Press.

For up-to-date listing of happenings in the region see the FB page of the Hudson River Valley National Heritage area.

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1589476742#!/pages/Hudson-River-Valley-National-Heritage-Area/143433620539

The Consumer Energy Efficiency Tax Credits are in effect until the end of 2010.  These tax credits may cover renovations like windows, doors, insulation and roofs.  Read more about it here.

Be an educated consumer when it comes to renovating your home!

Click here for the series.

Here’s a case of a renovation that is a success on many levels.  When I first saw this house in a small historic district, it was not hard to see the quality in spite of the layers of accumulated bad building materials.   The house dated back to the early 1900′s.  It was originally a Sears kit house, though we could never find an exact match for the plans and elevations.  Many significant original details are still intact, including the full 6x Gumwood trim and casing, and the beautiful french doors throughout the first floor.  My clients’ big issue with the house was that at 624 s.f. per floor, it was small, even for the two of them.  We added a master bedroom suite to the first floor, and renovated the kitchen and the exterior of the house.

The unsung success of this renovation is the added space on the second floor.  The second floor originally contained two small, cramped bedrooms with varied ceiling heights, and a tiny full bath.   By bumping out a few feet on the rear, and rebuilding the roof, we added 160 s.f. of new space to the second floor.  This is not a lot, until you consider the results.  Now, we have two roomy, airy bedrooms and a completely renovated full bath with room for a second floor laundry.  So the tiny house with beautiful details ends up with three new bedrooms, two full baths and a powder room.   Perfect for the current owners, or a new family in the future!

In our house, we don’t have a problem with insects, except the occasional ant. All of the wood is dry and solid. I’d like to see something try to gnaw through the chestnut posts or beams that frame the house. They are solid as a rock and difficult to even nail or screw into.

We have had more than our share of the four-legged and winged type of critter. We are always stopping up holes and slots and tunnels, whenever we find one of the seemingly endless ways they manage to get in. Of course, having a rubble foundation just about guarantees that this is a constant problem. I would talk about what a big help our cats are here…but they aren’t. Mostly the cats just bring the mice up into the house to show us what big hunters they are. Picture walking into a room to find your two-year-old swinging a dead and bloody mouse by the tail, while the two cats look on envy… or approval… or something.

We have had an attic full of bats, and a chipmunk (brought up from the basement by my buddies, the cats, who then abandoned me) so fast and elusive that I had to call the fire department (my brother, Rich) for help. We’ve gotten to be good customers for a couple of the animal control guys around here. I do count us lucky, though, because I hear that in some of the old houses around here, people used to find snakes quite often. I don’t mind snakes so much, so long as they’re living somewhere else.

I have noticed a drop in the mice population in the last few years, maybe because there are more red-tailed hawks, or stray cats, or even the occasional owl. As the cold weather moves in, some bigger critters start to show up. Thankfully, they can’t get into the main basement, but mostly set up a den under an old porch. Last year, it was the Woodchuck, who munched his way through the potted vegetables during the summer. I hope he enjoyed the jalapenos and habaneros I grow. Last fall, he deflowered fifty dollars worth of mums in a single night, leaving one of them with a mohawk because he couldn’t reach all they way. I have to say, he was pretty darn cute. I was almost disappointed when he didn’t show up this year.

After many years, we are slowly winning the battle, with Mother Nature’s help. We are planning to tear down that old porch soon, but meanwhile, we keep filling up the critter holes with stones and gravel to keep them out. This year, I decorated my pots with dried perennials and other cuttings from the woods.
While I was out cutting the perennials, I noticed that a new hole has been dug under the porch. Now I have to go find the pest guy’s number.

Renovating an older home has good sustainability karma. You start with an existing structure, which with luck is sound and dry and pest-free. As a first decision, it is a more sensible choice than a tear-down or new construction.

Several of my projects in the last few years have involved adding onto and renovating smaller cottage-sized homes. In each case, there were many reasons, economic and romantic, for the choice to keep part or all of the original structure. The challenge and the beauty of the project is to integrate the old with the new in a natural way.

My clients, Sarah and Shandy, lived in their tiny lake cottage with their young daughter. At about 680 square feet, it did not even qualify as a legal dwelling unit in our state, according to the building code. The two-story addition we planned would just about bring the house into scale with the surrounding neighborhood. As I started sketching possible layouts for the addition, the plan of the new construction started to look like it was overwhelming the existing cottage. I started to get the sense that I was designing a behemoth. Time to switch to elevations, which brought me back to reality. The size of the windows in the wall reinforced the modest size of the addition. This was a good thing, because the new construction retained a cottage-like feel in part because of the window/wall ratio.

Sometimes when I’m designing a renovation I have a crisis of scale like this one. All good and talented architects have an innate sense of space and scale. This skill allows us to visualize a space we’re designing, so that we’re able to walk through it in our mind’s eye and get it right. Once in a while, it’s healthy to have this sensibility shaken up and tested. And it’s nice to know that it may also contribute to a greater good.

Designing a renovation of an old house is one of my favorite kinds of projects. When I start, I feel like I’m solving a three-dimensional puzzle. Space needs to be added, mass and volume need to worked out, floor plans need to circulate, existing space needs to be tweaked. All of this needs to be done with a sense and sensibility that respects and charms the old house into a new century. There are a lot of balls to keep in the air, and I love it.

Before all of that is the beginning, and the homeowner’s love of something about their particular old house. That something that they fell in love with in the first place. For me and my old house, it was a sense of spaciousness, the flow of rooms, and the big windows set low on the walls that did it. Those windows let in streams of sunshine which bounce off the floor and flood the south facing rooms with light. I love the kitchen fireplace with the beehive oven, and wood floors, the wainscot and beaded corner boards, too; but it was the sense of space, not the details, that hooked me. The day we moved in, I walked through the house feeling an expansiveness and sense of belonging that I still have nineteen years later.
My first working meeting with homeowners is usually the programming meeting. We discuss their needs and wants for the new design. I always encourage them to dream big and keep an open mind about what the house may end up being. For my part, I am listening to hear the unspoken desires of the owners. I want to figure out what made them fall in love with this house, and why they want to stay, when new construction would be easier to live in. If I nail this, I can end up designing a home that is more than the sum of its parts.

Old house are a labor of love. If you’re reading this, you probably know that, and I’m preaching to the choir. I feel about old houses that way some people feel about cute puppy dogs: they just need someone to love them. Five years and tens of thousands of dollars later, the charm of the old house may be thinner. But if you’re still there, chances are the magic is still there, too. Good design respects that magic, and if we’re lucky, clarifies it and makes it shine.