Windsor Cottage Chronicles

We still don’t have all the concrete, and the weather is freezing, so I won’t bore you with that (you’re welcome). But— hey hey hey —my heart positively sang when I learned from our loyal community that seven, yes SEVEN , building framers were hard at work on our house today while we’re away. The beat goes on… even without a slab.. There is real hope—actual, tangible, don’t-jinx-it hope—that we might have this expansion buttoned up before the depths of February. Hope is doing a lot of heavy lifting these days, but we’re sticking with it. With that optimism firmly in place, I wanted to pause and wish all of you—mostly close friends, neighbors, and a sprinkling of distant relatives—an absolutely fabulous, joyful, and, in these complicated global times, especially peaceful Christmas. Peaceful in the physical sense, and peaceful in the psychological sense too (the harder one). Since the slab has become something of a taboo subject, I’ll pivot to what is decidedly not taboo: travel. We mana...

Zoom ba-dee-zoom—we fled! After weeks of house-project intensity (All work and no play make Jack a dull boy), our youngest daughter wisely booked us a Thanksgiving escape. Not to the Overlook Hotel—no ghost twins inviting us to “come play”—but to the Mountain View Grand Resort & Spa in Whitefield, NH , a Norman Rockwell sort of place that still had quaint dial up phones on each floor. The Thanksgiving feast was superb, at least one busy bartender tried hard to adopt us, and our bedroom window framed  Mt. Washington like a very expensive screensaver. We even saw a Christmas play, visited the  longest candy counter in the world,  and I vigilantly watched hubbie take up double-blade axe throwing with suspicious enthusiasm. But the prize moment? Driving past the Old Man of the Mountain —or more accurately, where he used to be. For thousands of years he perched on that cliff, becoming a legend of Native People's folklore, and unofficial mascot of New Hampshire, seen...

I went quiet for a bit because I swore I wouldn’t write about concrete again. If you’ve ever seen Peppa Pig , you may remember Daddy Pig’s favorite overdue library book: The Wonderful World of Concrete , which he discreetly used to read his collection of girlie magazines. When he actually read the book out loud, he reliably put the entire family to sleep. I didn’t want my blog to have the same effect. But neighbors have been asking what the holdup is. So, here we are. Concrete again (we've been told). Our first real construction crisis hit when the nights turned freezing and the local concrete company couldn’t fit us in until what felt like the next Ice Age. Because of our tricky access, getting a concrete truck in would require closing down Lake Avenue, special rigging and a special pump truck, with a very long hose on supports or swung over the house into the wall molds. Translation: slow, expensive, and scheduled perilously close to deep winter. So the team decided to do it t...