A Mountain Retreat

Since it is now officially spring!!!!!

let's leave Florida till next winter and go check out Vermont!!!!

I showed you Connie and Chris's Florida beach-side cottage, 

so now I'll reveal their mountain retreat.

This house is what brought Connie into my life...

(and it's never been the same.......)

She's the reason I own a home in Florida.

She's also the reason I play Words With Friends on my ipad.

The woman's a bad influence on me, I tell ya.....

She heard about me from a client I had in the Boston area.

When she first called me, she and Chris had just bought this home, and  she only wanted to do the living room and kitchen.

I ended up doing everything from the basement to the attic and all the out lying buildings as well.

She had no idea the can of worms she was opening when she made that first phone call.......

Some of you may have seen this house in Traditional Home in 2004.
Some of you may have seen pictures of it bopping around Pinterest.

I need to go back up to Woodstock and take some more pictures.

The ones I have here (other than the magazine shots) were taken by me before I became the stellar photographer that appears before you today.

I'll start with the outside, because that's what you see when you first pull up.

I worked with my trusty architect, Les Brown to transform this house.

He and I have been working together since 1981.

Please.....

don't do the math.....

This first shot is of the side sun porch.

It was an open porch when Les got his hands on it.

He had it enclosed, and now it's one of the most used rooms in the house.

It was framed to hold old fashioned screen door inserts as windows.

In the summer, some of them are changed out to the screens.

This way, the room has a lot of ventilation, but still protects the furniture from rain.

Below is the Magazine shot.

It shows the front of the house.

This was one of the most dramatic changes to how it looked when he and I first saw it.

He added the wrap around porch, which gave it more of an old farm house vibe.

If you want to hire him you can't, he's retired.....

Traditional Home 2004

Connie and I worked with a wonderful landscaper, who suggested planting peonies all along the front of the porch.

 I liked this idea soooooo much, that I did the same thing along the back of my own home by my terrace.

But enough about me.....

let's get back to Connie's house.....

Because she and Chris are old old old, she wanted the house to look like an old folks home with a row of rockers along the front porch.....

To make the house inviting!!!!!

Connie wanted a row of rockers along the front porch!!!!!

That's the gazebo on the pond that you can see down the little hill.

Off the enclosed sun porch Connie installed a brick terrace enclosed inside a fieldstone wall.

This is where she set up her gas grill.

Connie is a big griller, and it's convenient right off the porch, which is right off the kitchen.

The path goes up to an opening in the old existing stone wall on that little hill.

There's a path into the woods.

Not that Connie goes in the woods.

There are snakes (garders) in there, and she be afeared.

Now, if it were spiders, I'd understand.

After all, 

intelligent folks be afeared of spiders,

but snakes are cute!!!!!

Below is a shot of the gazebo.

I will be telling you more about that in days to come.

This is just a teaser.

Here's the second little pond.....

stocked with fish.

The herons love it.

A pretty little stream flows down from the first pond.

Connie had the landscaper transform it.

It was choked with mud and weeds.

Now it flows and is lined with beautiful plants. 

Across the pond is a little guest house.

More on this to come.

Just another teaser!!!!!

Just outside the guest house is the vegetable garden.

It's fenced in to keep critters out.

Raised beds help the old folks in their gardening endeavors.

You don't need to bend as far over to weed.

Connie and Chris have decided to downsize,

so they are putting this gem on the market this spring.

SOOOOOOO.....

if you're looking for a homestead near Woodstock Vermont, check with a local Realtor, I'm sure they'd know alllll about it!!!!!

On that note,

Latah, Gatah

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