Aloft in the Loft

Working on this Greek Revival New England farmhouse I have learned important lessons, especially the frugality of the Yankee makers. When everything was hand hewn, nothing was wasted.  

The knee wall is a paragon of thrift; by adding 4’ to the exterior walls, the roof is raised enough to gain a room that otherwise would be a dark attic.  In 2018 we rebuilt the barn and I used this trick to gain – for the price of some 2×4 studs – 529 square feet of additional space.  I call this the loft, and built it with no specific use in mind.  Intuitively it made sense, and then covid came, the sheetrock having just been hung, so the loft became an office for my wife’s therapeutic counseling work. It was unfinished but providential. 

Lately I have pursued the finish work and the loft has been transformed. I put pine boarding on the ceiling, which required custom cuts around some of the original barn beams. Using old boards triples my labor but it seems worth the effort. 

To create a storage nook, I built a wall with its door framed using a barn beam carved by the makers and dated 1848. The barn boards on that wall come from trees cut down then, which means those trees sprouted from seed circa 1700.  George Washington was not yet born when our barn had taken root!

The barn boards are weathered and rough, with knots and worm holes; a poetry of the material. Several years ago I built furniture for Thos Moser, whose solid black cherry tables and chairs are American classics. Tom uses the heartwood only and rejects any sap wood, thus throwing 40% of his material away. An extravagant waste and testimony to the vanity of the buyer who seeks an unblemished life.  If only that were possible, but as a colleague often said to me, “How do you know you’ve been alive if you don’t have scars to show for it?!!!”  

I bought odd lot leftovers of prefinished flooring, a random mixture of five species – Ash, Cherry, White Oak, Maple, Douglas Fir – with varying stains and sheen. The floor will not be typically uniform but more like a smorgasbord charcuterie.  I paid about $0.15 on the $1.00 so the savings are substantial.  That is the next task.

For a window sill I made end-grain parquet, cutting a stout old beam – 12″ x 6″ – into thin slices, reglued them like a checkerboard, then planed down and used epoxy to fill the aged cracks, until finally I had a board that I could cut to fit the sill opening. It is aged and rough and wildly elegant. May I age so, too.

High overhead, in pride of place, is the pièce de résistance, a floating shelf of a burled Alder slab that I hauled East when we moved from Chicago decades ago.  Sitting upon the shelf is the self portrait of an artist made when she was 19-years old, and a second bust that she made as well.  That artist has long nurtured my own interest, encouraged me along this very winding path of making.  I saved her pieces when the family home was sold last autumn, and now they – she, symbolically – watches from high overhead, a sentry to our making in the loft art studio of our Art Farm.   

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In other news, this week we did more fermenting to make a le Roi Borgne special batch “MLKing-chi.” My son and I delivered them as night fell, a random act of kindness in times of darkness. Indeed, “What’s your dream?”