Insurmountable sounds slightly sinister. Or ominous, at least. An unconquerable mountain peak piercing the clouds. A mission too impossible to even conceive, much less execute. At the outset, clearing out Rosslyn’s carriage seemed insurmountable. I mean, in the beginning of our custodianship, back in 2006. And we almost immediately began to add more to the original inheritance of miscellaneous windows and doors, shutters and screens, bits and pieces of long forgotten lawn care tools and woodworking machines. So much stuff.
We shuffled architectural salvage and old lumber, a mysterious menagerie of boat parts, and ancient looking artifacts too intriguing to jettison from room-to-room and floor-to-floor as needed.
We rebuilt the main room (aka carriage garage) back in 2006, entirely restructured the building about fifteen years ago, rebuilt the floors in the back room and stalls in about 2009 and 2010, and finally finished the interior and exterior punchlist in the summer of 2023. But purging, decluttering, and organizing is still incomplete. Although the stash of leftover building materials in the snapshot above was used in the icehouse rehab (or rehomed for adaptive reuse), the second story is still mid-purge.
Clearing out the carriage barn has been an intermittent, multistage project spanning many years. But like the icehouse, we’re transforming the space.
That’s right, baked into our recipe for transforming this historic icehouse into a flex workspace, studio, and outdoor entertaining annex is an ambitious vision of creatively reusing and repurposing a decade and a half of leftover building materials, architectural salvage, and lumber grown, felled, milled, and cured on site. (Source: Clearing Out Historic Icehouse)
Decades of artifact and leftovers, heirlooms of often dubious distinction, bikes and small boats, lawn furniture and gardening accessories, bundles of dried flowers, building supplies, and looots of architectural salvage are being winnowed. Most is bound for repurposing by others. Not all. Some still serves us and need only be inventoried and relocated.
Organizing, editing, curating, and emptying lots of *everything* that has collected over the last eighteen years. Intentional, methodical reorganization and elimination of nonessentials. As we distill the keepers from the let-it-go’s, I’m reminded of my January 7, 2024 post which drifted from what I might do differently into the riptide of overdue, challenging, but critical filtering. Essential? Or not? … [Little by little we’ve] been catalyzing the slow-and-steady purge of unnecessaries, and I’m beginning to see the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel. (Source: Essential Or Not)
Things to downsize. Bits and bobs to organize. Debris to purge. Busyness to abbreviate. Distractions to alleviate…
[…]
Eliminating, systematizing, harmonizing. Levity returning. Essentialism. (Source: Declutter)
So much will go away. But a few treasures, like the old, rotted canoe has a new destiny unfolding as we speak. Reimagine and reuse, I so often extol. I mostly manage to practice what I preach, and that means that you can begin anticipating a second act for this vessel. Update soon!
What do you think?