spare oom

the twelfth letter

12 Jan 2025

Dear Sarah of the Shore,

Your recurring dream—of taking guests on a tour of your home only to discover a hidden room you’d forgotten—is riddled with delight. When I was young my family frequently moved, which meant many weekends of touring houses for rent or for sale. Being introduced to The Anchorage held the same anticipatory excitement. Where does this passage lead? What’s around that corner? Why is there a window here? Oh look—a closet under the stairs!

The upstairs (2nd story in America, 1st floor in England) of our snug farmhouse is composed of two rooms: a very small room partitioned off of the landing and a larger room directly over the library. When we moved in, thin panels enclosed a closet along one whole side of the large room. Inside that closet was a hobbit-height door that, unlatched and opened to an attic above the kitchen. A portal in the back of a wardrobe? Voila! Spare Oom. We painted “Fresh Pear” green over its maroon walls, and Brett and I took the smaller nook off the landing and let our kiddo and her toys occupy ‘Pear Oom for a few years …until we realized that her kingdom was become too unruly, whereupon we swapped bedrooms and reclaimed the nursery wasteland into office space. The clutter of stuffed animals exchanged for the clutter of electronics and paperwork.

Another surprise awaited us on the main level in the room that would become our library. Below the layer of musty carpet was a layer of tar-paper linoleum, and below the layer of linoleum was a wooden plank floor. We unearthed this archaeology by the sweat of our brow and the stiffening of our knees, as we stripped, scraped, sanded, and resealed the floor while the house was empty that first winter. The 3” floorboards span the full length of the 15’x15’ room, unlike most wood flooring which is segmented and staggered. Those uncut boards make us wonder if this two-story addition was the kind you could buy on a kit that came by train? Friends with an interest in history have hypothesized the trim style might set it in the 1920s.

Our homemaking takes the route of restoration whenever possible. Rough hewn, full-inched beams are treasured. There is a rare and patient character to old wood that can’t be imitated. I ache for longevity and density like I ache for immortality. Though amateur in xylology, I eschew the sagging shelves of “wood-product” and quickbeamed-pine and instead hanker after the solid weight of slow growth. For this reason, I’m grateful to the people who glued down linoleum and laid out carpeting, and in so doing preserved the planks beneath for us to find.

Many updates require demolition and reconstruction, new-and-supposedly-improved materials. A dozen single-pane windows have been replaced with double-pane vinyl. But we’ve kept two of the original wood casings with aluminum storm windows affixed outside, as reminders, albeit on a south wall where the wind isn’t as cold when it blows. For our siding we chose engineered wood, but when we installed flooring in the kitchen, we opted for maple despite the cost of a real hardwood.

Recurring dreams aside, what have you discovered about your house in the years you’ve lived there? How have you refitted its walls to your ways? How have its smooth and splintered spaces shaped you?