Fenestrated Refinishing

Fancy some Friday fenestration photography? Alliteration much? Too much?! Part poetry, part placeholder, today’s glimpses of fenestrated refinishing are seeds as of yet ungerminated, unflowered, and unfruited. And while seed saving is only a first step, it allows for optimism that soon, perhaps with your help, we will cultivate an heirloom and preserve an endangered legacy.

My favorite Rosslyn moments memorialize a marriage of poetry and design that pieces the puzzle together, that joins patches into a quilt, fragments into a whole, scraps into a book.

Sometimes it’s clear as sunrise. Others it’s not. An oblique and passing glimpse. A hint at how or what to revisit with a sharper wit tomorrow. Today I offer you a pair of poetry fragments — the first visual and the second verbal — as seeds to revisit soon the possibility of fenestrated refinishing.

Yes, it’s almost cocktail hour on Friday in the middle of August, so I’m mixing metaphors like garden-to-glass gibsons, shaken until slushy and so refreshing. As always, I’m Pollyanna-positive that combinatorial creativity (and the cross-pollination it so often engenders) will transform today’s tidbits into tomorrow’s template, outline, map, something that will show me the way forward.

In that first photograph above, I share with you a moment extemporaneous unexpected that I witnessed yesterday while walking toward the carriage barn to check on Tony’s progress. Next week I’ll take you inside to witness the wonderful refurbishment he’s bringing to life.

The time and life mottled interior is once again emerging, hinting at the importance of a carriage barn in the 1800s and early 1900s. (Source: Carriage Barn Restaining Begins)

I assure you it’s worth the wait. Let this cinematic preview whet your curiosity. Tony inside the carriage room of the carriage barn sanding or staining, spied through the wavy glass, emerging from the darkness, beyond a grid of rails and stiles and muntins. Yes, fenestrated refinishing…

A visual seed preserved for subsequent sprouting and maturing.

We can only preserve heirloom seeds through active stewardship. If we don’t use them, if we don’t allow them to grow again, they become lost. — Diane Ott Whealy (Seed Savers Exchange)

And with this visual seed, a verbal seed saved for another day.

Man or mirage
clearly, unclearly
refurbishing or
finishing refinishing,
daylit discernible 
through seedy glass,
through wavy glass,
through cobwebbed panes,
paint peeling
from muntins,
double hung
six-over-six,
sash over sash,
a glimpse gridded,
sectioned, simplified,
clarifying contours and 
coalescing the composition. 

Kaleidoscopic poetry and design and poetry and design, tumbling together like seeds in the palm of my hand.