family – Little House on the Fairy Hill

New Year’s Abundance

3 days into my just-before-Christmas bout with the flu, I woke up with something resembling inner peace.

I hadn’t slept much – being able to breathe out of both sides of my nose is typically a component of sleep for me – but I was ok. It’s not that I was completely ready for Christmas, quite the contrary. I had tons of presents left to wrap, and we hadn’t even really decorated.

It also wasn’t that we were financially in great shape. Renovation has stretched our finances so tightly that even small-dollar purchases have to be considered. I mean we knew this was going to happen, but it’s still pretty scary.

It was something else. A change of mindset, a reminder that I needed to have some real gratitude for where we are.

When I bought Sithean, I was in my early 40s, recently separated, with 2 little kids, and we were moving 1500 miles to return home to Massachusetts.

I fell in love with this place. It was small, on an acre and a quarter, and in need of updating for almost everything.

I didn’t care. Set back from the road, and looking like a fairy tale house, It had a climbing tree in the back yard, space for a playset and a garden, and it was next to Greenbelt land, only separated by a stone wall and an access road for the town’s water tower. The kids were small – 4 and 6 going on 7 – and it was just us.

It stretched our finances to the bone just to be here, and there were more than a few times where there was more month than money. Sensible, this was not. But it was home.

Still, as the kids got older, and we added Eli, a dog, chickens and a bunny named Marshmallow, it became clear that while we loved this place, love was not enough. It was poorly insulated and the the heating system was old and kept some rooms too warm while others were freezing in the winter.

We were crammed in, despite getting rid of things as much as possible there was just no closets and no room to put anything. My daughter’s room literally had no closet, just an improvised clothes-hanging system. And the house was not suited to aging in place – if something happened that limited our mobility, we would have to leave.

We replaced the roof after a tree fell on the house. We replaced the pipe stack, the appliances, and painted and worked to make it cozy, but the house was chopped up, not working, and every fall the field mice just moved right into the holes in the foundation walls, despite spending literally thousands of dollars to deal with them. My office space was 3.5 feet across, and I couldn’t have a keyboard, a breakfast plate and a mug on the desk at the same time without something falling.

At a point a few years ago, we admitted that despite our love for this place we were completely stressed out trying to make it work, freshened up the house and tried to sell, but anything that worked for us was out of our budget and we hated even the idea of leaving. But every quote we got for renovation and an addition was also out of our means.

Finally when I closed down the business line for my prior job last year I was incentivized to stay on, and we were able to pull together the deposits we needed, and borrow the rest.

We still weren’t able to do everything, but here’s what we chose to do.

Replace the on-the-edge-of-failing heating system, and add cooling
Replace all the windows in the existing and new house, preserving the old hand-blown ones for future stained glass projects
Insulate, insulate, insulate
Renovate the kitchen completely
Renovate the upstairs bathroom, one of 2 in the house
Add a great room off the back of the kitchen with sliding glass across a span of it so that we could look outside. One of my greatest enjoyments when I lived in Florida was that sense of outdoors and indoors merging, and I wanted that here
Added an in-law suite with its own full bath with a curbless shower, entrance and closet – between our kids, extended family – we have space for those who need it or single-floor living for us as we age. For now, it’s intended to be my daughter’s room
Added a master bedroom with it’s own bathroom and closets – we’re crammed into what was once the dining room and it isn’t working
Added an office for me
Added a powder room and a mud room, allowing us to move the laundry to the first floor and out of the basement, helpful for aging in place
Full paint of all but one of the the addition rooms, the existing hallways, and the exterior of the house.
Replace the crumbling end of the driveway
Added a soapstone woodstove to the new great room to supplement our new heating system
Replaced the porch decking with no-maintenance TimberTech and added 3 wet-rated ceiling fans to the now extended porch so that we can sit out there in the heat with some relief. I love our porch quite a lot in the warm weather but it gets meltingly hot quickly

This isn’t everything by a long shot. We’ll do all the patching and painting of the existing spaces, add a patio and walkways and pull out the soon-to-be-defunct baseboard heating in the front of the house over time. We’ll also do all the landscaping and paint my daughter’s new room as well as all built-ins – we couldn’t afford to add any during construction. We didn’t manage to add wood storage either, something we both regret but is easily remedied.

And we did manage to add some quality of life items and luxuries. In almost all of the new spaces we’ll have ceiling fans, which are long term investments in frugal cooling. While we couldn’t afford a fancy gas wall fireplace in the master bedroom, we did find a 5’ long electric fireplace – basically a very long heater – for about $200 and built a space for it.

In order to manage what we have, we’ve once again stretched our finances to the edge and between that, life that is busy beyond belief, and construction delays, I’ve been a ball of stress for months now.

But I woke up, even though I felt like complete garbage, somewhat less stressed. It was Christmas week. We are blessed with warmth (as long as no one spends too much time in the uninsulated addition shell) plenty of food, a loving family, and generally, our health, except this flu that ran through the house.

Fast forward to the first day of the new year. While the stress returned, it didn’t linger. We had an amazing Christmas in one of the new spaces in the house after our site foreman/lead carpenter Ryan took it upon himself to seal off what will be our bedroom with zipper walls, hang heaters and add lights that we are fairly sure he bought himself. Magic exists, and so do Santa’s elves. I’ve met one, and he’s a carpenter by trade.

Last week I ordered toiletries to keep us for a while, and we got a half of a cord of firewood delivered. Wood heating is an integral part of our plan for surviving the last few weeks until insulation and interior walls are up in the house with our existing wood stove in the living room, and then soon enough in the new space, our gorgeous, bought-the-floor-model-at-a-huge-discount-on-tax-free-weekend soapstone woodstove will go in, and supplement heating the new addition for years to come

This should keep us in wood until sometime next winter.

January is our Uber Frugal Month, where we eat down the pantry and freezers, and I expect to keep that going well into the spring. We’ll also eat healthier after the indulgences of the holiday season, and while I won’t have a completely dry January, it will be just a wee bit damp. When the weather is good we’ll start mowing down the raspberry canes and the trench bed and maybe even start a few seeds.

But today it’s snowing, we have everything we need, and no one has to do anything in particular. New years day is, and should be a day of rest, although I will at least get a run in.

Every day I just remind myself to breathe. This is the home stretch of the worst of it, financially and otherwise. While our budget will be so tight it squeaks for some time to come, we’ll also have immense quality of life.
My word for the year is Abundance, and I feel that life is just that right now. Each Christmas is better than the last. Our kids just get more amazing. We’re blessed in so many ways. And I believe 2026 will bring all the joy, love and growth we need.

Happy New Year to you and yours.

It’s a quiet Sunday morning in the back half of October, the beginning of week 6 of construction. Other than a couple of quiet weekends our life has been moving at double-time for months now, and we really don’t stop until November. This weekend has been errand-heavy, and today we’ve got to get the house tidier in between commitments. The fair is over in our town, and the weather is starting to get chillier at night.

The back half of the house has been gutted for over a month, the vast majority of the excavation is done, and part of the foundation walls are up. We’re about 2 weeks away from new windows and replacement of our current furnace with a new hydro heating/cooling system. Our existing windows, the ones with the handblown mullions, will be saved aside and likely turned into stained glass over the next several years.

Our living room is kitchen, dining room, pantry and living room combined, and we have one functioning sink and shower for the whole house. When they gutted the upstairs bathroom they left us the toilet so we have that at least. Eli’s studio and our bedroom are filled with clutter and clothes, because there’s not enough places to put things.

I don’t like clutter, so it’s a lot sometimes, but we’re dealing with it.

The kids rooms are generally intact, and the zipper walls keep out most of the dust on our side of the house, at least for now. While it’s weird, it’s surprisingly not awful. An inconvenience, rather than a problem, living in a construction zone.

And it’s fascinating to watch the transformation up close. We have an amazing team, too. Our excavator, Jacob, who is magically turning a dirt pile into a house shape. Our lead carpenter, Ryan who keeps everything moving. Colin, who patiently explains the construction as it happens. The foundation guys, whose names we don’t know because they are quiet and refuse our efforts to bring them cold drinks, walking atop 9 foot tall foundation forms like they are stilts. Alan, the master plumber and Dana, his assistant. We get the sense that they are as committed to this project as we are.

Artisans, all of them. I have endless respect for people who can build things, can take a drawing and turn it into reality. It’s one of the things that drew me to Eli.

Throughout the process, the folks who have worked with us to painstakingly make every choice have been wonderful, from the supply folks who took us through faucets and shower heads, and then found less-expensive versions when necessary, to the flooring folks who pressured us not at all and instead showed us flooring that we immediately fell in love with. We have been so blessed to really like these folks, and we can’t wait to invite them all back when we’re finished so they can see what their hard work has wrought.

So far we’ve had over $19k in extra infrastructure costs, from burial of the propane tank to having to move a water line and pour one wall of the foundation higher than planned. I’m guessing there’s a little more out there – none of it the ‘fun’ stuff, but all of it things that will make the house what it needs to be.

The unknowns financially scare us, but we’re rolling with them one at a time, and rolling with this whole crazy ride one day at a time. There’s nothing else we can do – the kitchen is gutted, the things for the house are ordered, there’s a giant pit in our backyard – this is happening, and we’ll figure it out. Every time I get freaked out I remind myself that we have a 100% success rate of figuring it out in our lives so far. That’s not bad.

We are renting 2 storage spaces for all the things, but we’re hoping to consolidate to 1 by mid-December when the stove gets moved to our kitchen. Very early on we made the decision to have everything we needed to buy – light fixtures, cabinet handles, fittings – in storage and staged so that when the time came to install there was no mad rush to stores. By and large, we’ve done that, with just one light fixture, chosen but left to buy, as we are cash flowing our purchases.

Similarly, we’re almost done picking paint colors, several months in advance. In most cases we’ve gone with soft creams, but with bursts of color – deep green with dark grey trim and a slightly lighter green ceiling in the hallway and mudroom, my office ceiling will be Benjamin Moore’s Tapestry Gold, a rich yellow that reminds me of autumn leaves, paired with softer walls in Benjamin Moore’s Rich Cream. The kitchen cabinets are Farrow and Ball’s Down Pipe, a dark grey that has both green and blue undertones.

And we’ve bought richly colored wallpapers for the powder room, the upstairs hall bathroom and the master bath. A particularly fun find for the upstairs hallway was Mind the Gap’s The Station View wallpaper, which makes me delighted every time I think about it. Another fun find was Claret & Key, wallpaper in which you get to pick the ‘season’ color scheme – there are 4 for every pattern, and then the background color, of which there are over 35.

The only room we truly had design help with was the kitchen, so we’ve been mentally putting all our choices together, but I think we’ve done a pretty good job.

We’re cooking in 99% of the time, between instant pot, air fryer, grill, and hot plate. The crock pot got packed in the mad dash to get the kitchen emptied when it was demolished a week ahead of schedule, so we’ll probably not see that until we move back in. We’ve spent more on groceries than I had originally planned to, but I think we’ll see that temper itself shortly.

While dinners are not frequently fancy, they occasionally are. Eli has taken our camp cooking situation as a challenge and has turned out some truly amazing meals. The salsa, salsa verde, jam and various and assorted items we preserved in the freezer, like pesto, peaches, shredded zucchini and raspberries this summer are coming in handy.

The other night I came home from a work trip to homemade black bean soup and cornbread cooked on the grill. Last night we cooked some hamburger with onion combined that with pumpkin ravioli, pesto, toasted almonds and parmesan.

We’re hardly suffering.

These are the golden hours, watching the home we dreamed about be created. Every piece and part, every color, every fitting will have been chosen by us. While it’s not our hands doing most of the building, it’s our creation – from my inspiration to build out in an L-shape, to Eli manifesting that in a 3-D model, the changes we worked through of that model due to budget constraints – everything in this house will be made for us. That’s an astounding thought, and sometimes to me, it feels like too much – that I’m too fortunate, that no one should be this lucky.

I remember our first day here, after days of traveling – both filled with adventure and exhaustion. My Mom took the trip with us, and I will be grateful for her presence for the rest of my days.

That first morning, the kids found their way straight to – and we named – Oona, the eminently climbable mother-tree in the backyard before even eating breakfast. My son’s melt down when the promised playset arrived in pieces and boxes in the pouring rain because I couldn’t build it right then and there, and them pulling up their chairs and watching their father put it together, because we both agreed despite our divorce that our childen needed home. I remember watching the magical landscape change, and that June watching flowers drift across the driveway from the Honey Locust that is our fairy tree, home to the fairies that Sithean, The Fairy Hill, is named for. Eli’s first visits, and eventually permanent arrival, our missing piece.

It hasn’t all been delightful – a 70 foot pine tree fell on the house our first autumn here, I lost a job, we lost people we love, and animals we love. We’ve had financial challenges, mental health challenges, all of it, but we’ve come out the other side, every time.

And life is changing now. The kids are growing up, life is busier and more complicated. Never again will they crawl across the snow after a storm, pretending to be foxes. We are slowly packing away their childhoods while we pack away the house for the renovations. It’s a little sad at times, but also delightful to watch them grow up.

But it’s still magic. I feel like my life has been an endless series of transformations, and here we are in another chrysalis of change. And my children will carry the magic of this place with them always, no matter how they evolve.

I can’t wait to see what’s next.