Dawn Brocco's Life & Design Blog

Hello all,
Welcome to my new weblog!

I have put off doing a blog for a long time, as having enough time to devote to its upkeep and entries is no easy thing to do. As a self-publishing designer, I work much more than the ordinary 40-hour work week, then have a 13-room home and garden to maintain, as well as making time for my husband.

Up until a few years ago, I also had 2 children to rear and a bed & breakfast to run. The B&B was closed down 4 or so years ago, and the kids are finally both out of college and on their own.

Life is all about transition and change though, and now is no different. And that's why I thought maybe it's time to start a log - to talk about my design work, but also to talk about life, what is going on. I used to keep a diary as a little girt (who didn't!), and then I wrote poetry for many years after that. My creative life went onto a back burner, though, when I had my children, got divorced, had to support them on a legal proofreader's salary, then got remarried to my high school sweetheart, and finally moved out of Staten Island (one of NYC's boroughs) to a town in orange County, NY, called Warwick.

We stayed there 7 years and while there I began my journey into textiles, then we moved to Saugerties, in the Mid-Hudson Valley of NY State. We've been in Saugerties 10 years, slowly restoring a 3,200 sq. ft, 13-room circa 1800-1850 Greek Revival farmhouse on 6 acres.

We've made a good dent in the restoration, but as anyone who has ever owned an old house knows, you better have tons of money to pay workmen or tons of time to do the work yourself. The kids are gone though and this house is way too large for us and it has long ago decided to *own* us. We gladly let it, as we saw, and still see great virtue in restoring historic structures. It's not something, though, that we want to spend the rest of our lives spending every spare moment doing, particulary as the reason we bought this place was for the running of a B&B.

It was a brave idea, but we soon discovered it was not to be a financially viable idea in this particular town. Tourism here is quite seasonal, and without fireplaces and jacuzzis in the suites, we weren't going to have enough business to support ourselves. So, along with the B&B, I returned to freelance designing, while rearing teenagers and continuing the restoration, with hubby, who also worked fulltime elsewhere. Talk about a surefire way to be permanently exhausted!

So, as much as we love this old house and the peace and quiet we've *finally* found after growing up in noisy Brooklyn and Staten Island and then living in a noisy part of Warwick, I think it's time to let it go.

And hence, this blog. I'm not likely to start a longhand diary, not with all (ALL) the work ahead of me, but if I don't keep some kind of record of the transition, it will be gone in a flash, and my thoughts and feelings gone as well, into the past.

I'll try and cover bits of my past, my youth, my journey into textiles, as well as new designs, new dreams, new hopes and the day to day of cleaning out and prepping of this house for sale. We can't go forward until we close some doors behind us, or else we'll forever be looking back through those doors, through time, to all we've been, we've done and we've loved. The hard part is letting go of what we love, in hopes of finding something new to love.

I've already begun to clear out the closets, throwing out stuff. I also sent many boxes of magazines to recycling. Today I'm cleaning up where I've been, reorganizing the book shelves in the library, and continuing the reparing of the seams in the wallpaper in bedroom 1. It was inexpensive walllpaper (meaning *aged*) and the edges just began curling last winter, after being up a few years already. So, with some vinyl to vinyl paste, a brush, rags and that blue painter's tape, I'm getting the seams to lie flat again.

We have 4 bedrooms upstairs and several downstairs. One of the downstairs bedrooms is off the dining room (an odd place for it I know), and has been our bedroom, when we had guests, as well as being a temporary kitchen for several years, whilst the real kitchen was gutted and being slowly put back together. The other 2 downstaiirs bedrooms are adaptations of what used to be a large room, in the older (circa 1800) section of the house. This room had a life as a kitchen once, then the previous owners divied it up into 2, 7' x 11' bedrooms for their sons and a family room, 10' x 16'.

These 2 rooms became my childrens' rooms and the family room was where we all hung out, as the guests had the *good* end of the house (restored and decorated) to use. Now, these rooms are my office and wool/shipping rooms. The family room is still where hubby and I hang in the evenings and where I sit and knit up my designs.

The square footage of the house doesn't sound like it would allow for so many rooms, but in olden days, square footage wasn't wasted on hallways - there really is only 1 main hallway, by the front door. Rooms were directly off other rooms. So, when you walk in there's the parlor and library to the left, dining room, back bedroom and its bath to the right. Walk through one door to family room, 2 work' rooms, then around to the bath, kitchen, and then the pantry, which exits into the dining room. Upstairs are 4 bedrooms and 2 baths. Off the dining room and family room are doors that lead to the second stairwell up into the smaller attic, which then has stairs to the larger attic. There's also 2 basements, as the house was added onto in 1850, and 2 front doors.

The house's layout can suit any number of uses, from home business to in-law apartment, to B&B, though, if I was just starting the B&B today, I'd use a different section of the house for it, then I did then.

Today, I don't have to water the veggie garden as I did that yesterday and tomorrow, it is supposed to rain, so that saves some work.

I have some designs I'm *finally* getting back to that I started last October. Doing each Heels and Toes Gazette issue breaks up my other designing - many things languish, as there's just not enough time.... These designs are in a great Plymouth yarn, called Alpaca Boucle. It's light, it's quick-knititng, though the ballband gauge is horribly loose for it (but I never heed ballband gauges - only swatching will tell me, or YOU, what gauge the yarn *should* be to create an optimal fabric.)

I DO need to have lunch now, as it's an hour past my usual lunch time already, return to washing the library floor, and work on a few more wallpaper seams up in bedroom 1, and maybe get to do the 2nd oil paint coat on some of the steam radiators I began a week or so ago. The *smell* though of oil paint - ugh - even with the doors closed and the fans pulling the air out - still ugh. I also need to get a 2nd coat (not oil based, thank goodness) on the parlor mantel. Now *that's another story! What the previous owner did to that mantel! Actually what he did to much of this house in the 40 odd years he lived here is enough for a book unto itself!

This week, hubby has 7 sections of scaffolding up on the front porch roof, so he can take down the original, but not well-cared for, built-in gutter on the front of the large section of the house. He's been making joists to extend the roofline, in simulation of the orignal roofline with wood gutter, and will box it in, rooroof what he's riupped and hang a one-pice new gutter underneath. Idea is to keep the original line of the house but get it functional again.

Can't tell you how many layers of metal and roofing tar fills these old wood gutters, making them nearly useless! 2 years ago, he did the back of the main section of house, and last autumn, he did the front and back of the small section of the house and reroofed the entire small end. It takes forever to tackle these large projects. that's why our kitchen is about 8 years in the redoing. It's just about done - just painting, a little trim left to put up and some details added - just in time to sell. Maybe I can take my finally done kitchen with me?! 8 years with a semi-kitchen, and 2 years with a stove, sink and 1 small cupboard in a back room. I finally have a nice, country kitchen with a 1950's double-oven stove with refreshed nickel trim, that DH spent 5+ years rebuilding, and someone else will get to use it! Ah well.

So, until tomorrow...