The River House

“I’m home!” Those are the words that I say whenever I arrive home. “I’m home” can also be used to denote one’s location at a given time. This is strictly locative in this sense. Our wonderful, down-to-earth customers, Tom and Linda, are “snowbirds.” They live in Florida eight months a year, and the remaining months of the year they live in New Hampshire. Linda loves to write. In the course of the past 5 months, Linda has emailed me some of her stories. This is one of the excerpts: The word “home” is sometimes amusing to me, sometimes emotional. After we bought the River House in 2018 and because we live there eight months of the year as declared Florida residents, I’ve come to think of the River House as my “home.” At the very least, it’s got equal status with New Hampshire as “home.” Tom definitely still considers New Hampshire our “home,” but I don’t have the New England roots that he does. I actually prefer the sense of freedom and simplicity of my life in Florida. It more closely offers what I want out of life—peace and tranquility. I guess I’m still defining what “home” means to me.

Until my mother died in 2018, I often referred to Asheville, NC where I was born and grew up as “home.” Tom and I both use “home” generically and often to refer to wherever we’re living at the moment. So if Tom goes to play golf whether in FL or NH, he’ll say, “I’ll be home by 5:00.” I first noticed a few years ago that there can be confusion with the word when a friend of mine in New England got all excited when I told her I was going “home.” She thought I was going to be back in New Hampshire very soon, but at that time I was referring to a trip to North Carolina. Ever since, I’ve been very aware of having so many places to call “home.”

Tom’s and Linda’s Port Charlotte home sits on a one-acre lot. It is surrounded by trees and the river flows peacefully at the foot of their property. The house, built in 1985, feels completely part of the glorious countryside that surrounds it. There’s a pair of outdoor reclining chairs underneath a large tree that is with dripping Spanish moss, where the homeowners can sit close to the river, to see and hear it whenever they please.

Linda wrote: After my mother’s death in 2018 (my father died in 1999), I grieved on many levels. As I got on the plane to leave Asheville after her funeral and closing down her “home,” I realized that for the first time ever I wasn’t going to have a “home” to go to in North Carolina. All through my adult life, when I came back to NC, I thought of my parents’ home as my home, too. Now, home was forever after going to have to be wherever I was living. Asheville native, “Thomas Wolf,” had penned that famous saying, “You can’t go home again.” At that moment, that was my reality. Add to that this past spring when we sold the family farm, I lost my last tie to my NC “home.”

I soon replaced that feeling of loss with a new adventure—plans for a new kitchen. A wise, elderly friend of mine once said, “Nothing’s ever so bad that something good doesn’t come from it.”

A good thing that’s coming from sale of the family farm is our kitchen and bathroom projects. I think of them as gifts from my parents. About a year ago when I knew we’d be selling the farm, I began to think about how we sure could use an update of our Florida kitchen with its dark cabinets and crumbling countertops. The same was true for the bathrooms. The River House is such a comfortable home and very user friendly, but it hasn’t had a kitchen or bath update since it was built in the 1980s. My parents were both very practical people and I know they would have loved that we’re getting new cabinets and countertops. They’d done something similar to their farmhouse years ago. Then when my mother downsized and moved to a condo, she relished her bright new kitchen and bathrooms. I enjoy thinking of how happy my parents would be that we’re doing our own renovations now.

Hoping to stay within a realistic budget, Linda prioritized the part of the house that mattered to her most: the kitchen. This is where I came into the picture. When I first met with Tom and Linda in their lovely home, one of the main concerns Linda had was how to blend the old with the new. She wanted cabinets and countertops that would flow seamlessly with the rest of their home. At first Linda was reluctant about removing the upper wall cabinets which hung over the peninsula in order to open the kitchen to the dining area. Linda was adamant about keeping the separation from the dining area because they really use their kitchen and didn’t want the kitchen workspace to be visible from the dining or great rooms. I pointed out that while the thought of more storage may be appealing; the short cabinets hurt this kitchen design. Even though the upper peninsula cabinets were short, they still blocked out light from other parts of the home and made the kitchen into an almost cave-like zone. I suggested we do away with the short upper cabinets and add base (lower) cabinets to the back of the peninsula. This would more than double her storage space.

Another excerpt: The old style fluorescent lighting in our kitchen, while efficient and so popular in decades past needed an update. Here again, we wondered how to update the lighting without making the kitchen a showplace? The focus of our home is our view of the river, so we wanted something that was light and airy but also subtle enough to blend in well with the rest of the house.

When you see the side-by-side of the “before” and “after” photos, you see an amazing transformation. The kitchen makeover looks a whole lot fresher and brighter! We removed the dome ceiling fixtures with its metal frame, the fluorescent light tubes, and upper peninsula cabinets. All this went a long way toward opening up the dining and great room and making the spaces feel cohesive. We replaced the dark stained cabinets with soft white painted cabinets, and latte highlights from Aspect Cabinetry. The homeowners selected the perfect slab of granite. As luck would have it, the color of granite was called Yellow River. Just Counters & other stuff also renovated two bathrooms, but I am out of room to discuss them in this blog.

I cannot say enough about the talented teams that made this transformation a reality: Just Counters’ Bill Daniels and Tommy McCaffrey, Imex Stone, and Pucci Tile & Marble.

There’s one more thing left to do before the kitchen makeover is completed. The homeowners plan to have the louvered closet pantry doors painted the same white shade as the cabinets. Then they will be all done. After all, they didn’t move to Florida to spend a bunch of time doing chores inside their house. If they aren’t on their pontoon boat on the river, I’m sure you’ll find them relaxing in the pair of recliners under the shade tree.