My 30 picture frame recs for ALL those family photosAnd the carafe that helps me stay hydrated in style.
We’re heading back to Ojai in September, so I have a few supplies and organizational projects (spice drawer, garage) in the works. I could use your help with one of them: I need a bicycle! I’m not a cyclist or mountain biker, this bike will be for toodling around town and hauling food from the farmers’ market. Here are my specs:
Got any recs?! Leave them in the comments or dm me. Thanks! (In the spirit of trading recs, if you’re looking for a durable beach cruiser, this one is great. We’ve had them in Wainscott for 5 years and they don’t have a lick of rust.)
Tad and his two siblings own a summer house in Wainscott, New York. They are more stewards than owners, really, because the house has been in his family since 1915, when their great-great uncle, Charles Pierson, a New York corporate lawyer who argued in front of the Supreme Court, bought the house. All of our kids will become the next stewards. Steward is a noble-minded word for what can feel like being nursemaid to a feeble and unruly patient. The house, nestled among pitch pines, looks out over Georgica Pond and the beach and the Atlantic beyond. We say that it’s in Wainscott because situating it in “the Hamptons” suggests a whole bunch of other things, but not the locale’s beauty and serenity. The house was built as a summer house, so there was no heating system and no insulation. At the end of the season, the family would drain the water from the pipes and throw sheets over the furniture. They’d lock the house and hope for the best during Long Island’s raw, damp winters.
When I first started dating Tad, the house was in a low period of deferred maintenance. It was suffering from too many family members involved in the decision-making (thus no decisions were made) and a collective aversion to throwing anything out. I had a hard time appreciating the beauty among the clutter, or seeing the charm of lots of handwritten signs admonishing you, the user of the toilet, to beware of the fragile septic system. Why not just fix the system? But then I’m not a WASP. When Tad and his siblings finally took over the house, things began to change. We used money earned from renting the house during June and July to improve it. First, we pared back the clutter and unearthed the handsome, sturdy bones of the place. We updated the kitchen and shifted the layout from a wildly outdated servants-areas and family-areas arrangement to one with unified and open spaces. We modernized the kitchen, added HVAC, and stuffed insulation wherever we could, making the house usable for 8 months of the year.
A lot of the work was unsexy, like the year we replaced all the plaster walls with drywall and stripped and refinished the floors. The house looked nearly the same, but our bank account did not. There have been fun projects, too, like when we replaced bedroom furnishings, renovated the kids’ bathroom, and updated the lighting fixtures throughout. Once the house had been opened up, simplified, and nicely finished, we were able to focus on smaller and more personal things, and to better preserve the family history that used to be strewn among boxes in the eaves of the house. Tad took on the enormous task of going through hundreds of files, letters, and photos to do a rough cut of what we might want to save. His sister Timmie, and I, who have teamed up for most of the interior work (she’s an accomplished interior designer in San Francisco), have since been plugging away at getting things framed and hung around the house. Let me show you what we’ve done so far: ... Subscribe to Homeward to unlock the rest.Become a paying subscriber of Homeward to get access to this post and other subscriber-only content. A subscription gets you:
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