Kitchen Deboarding (December 4, 2011)

Our house has inspired lots of local speculation. Surrounded by horse farms and historic mansions, across from a tony private school, it’s conspicuously unkempt on its grassy pedestal, with its peeling paint and boarded windows. Yet while plenty of people have called it spooky, more have said that it’s too pretty to have sat abandoned, as it did for ten years—before we took over the lease and let in some light on this sunny afternoon in December. We don’t have a ladder to reach the second floor yet, so we started with the single-story kitchen addition on the back side of the house. 

Each window board was bolted in place with four nine-inch screws that didn’t exit easily.

It took us an hour to free five of the six kitchen windows, facing north and west. The last one, facing east, will have to wait until we tear down an adjacent shed, which we’ll replace with a greenhouse once the project is further along. It was tremendously satisfying to let in the light. The results will be even more dramatic once we deboard the south-facing front side of the building. NB: We took this last shot a week after the deboarding, when we razed the paneled partition on the floor here (Battle of Jericho).