From Old Farmhouse to Modern Townhouse

A tour of my home

I’ve always been drawn to old houses, homes with high ceilings, moldings, wood floors, old fixtures and interesting, quirky spaces. The charm of old houses is sometimes at odds with the kind of rooms I want to spend time in, rooms with light, bright walls and furnishings. Nothing gloomy. There was no question that I’ve always had a house disease - I would stumble upon some lovely forgotten house and feel an overwhelming need to transform a maze of rundown rooms into the lovely places I wanted to live. 

My last big renovation project was my farmhouse in rural Ontario. It was dilapidated, unloved, slightly broken. It also didn’t have any significant architectural features inside, it was just old but felt good and most importantly, the surrounding land, rolling hills, open fields, distant water; it felt calming. I’ll have to cover the details of that renovation project in another post. After living at the farm for over 16 years, I’m now living in a modern townhouse in the City of Peterborough.

The decision to leave the farm was not an easy one

Change isn’t always easy. It was 2021, we had worked through a year of the pandemic, offering grocery boxes to go and many elopements and micro weddings at the farm, and the girls were basically launched and on their own. I was so proud of what we had built, but with the pandemic looking to continue for at least another year and feeling the magnitude of physical work to keep the farm running come down upon me. I weighed out my options, and eventually made the decision to leave the farm to new hands, to bring their own creativity and ideas to what I had created these last 16 years. While this was such a difficult decision, it was also very exciting to move into a new chapter of my life (dare I say in my sixties), with time now to pursue new endeavours.