The Slow Renovation: Why I’m Finally Showing You the Whole House
People ask me all the time where to start with the slow renovation like mine. An old house carries a certain romance with it, and that romance is exactly what gets you into trouble. The scale of the place looms large in your imagination long before you understand what it will actually take to live inside it. Your dreams get ahead of you, and then the work of turning those dreams into something real, something tangible, starts to feel insurmountable.
My answer is always the same. You start somewhere. Any job, however small, is a step forward.
What I’m Calling The Slow Renovation
Starting at the end of this week, I’m taking you through this house room by room, project by project, at the pace I can actually manage — not the pace a renovation show would want. I’m 77. I work with a cane. I’m doing almost all of this alone, on a real budget, and I’ve decided the honest version of that story is more worth telling than a polished one–the slow renovation.
Three threads are running at once, and they’re moving at three different speeds. The bedroom fireplace needs a hearth and stone-and-lime repair on the side wall — heavy work, possibly more than I can finish without help. The sewing room needs its old clothes peg holes patched and its walls and ceiling painted — slower going, but mine to do alone. And the garden is the one most people ask about first, so let me tell you honestly where that stands.
Before I can plant anything, I have to clear the terrace
The plants are already bought. They’re sitting in pots in the shade right now because the terrible heat waves [canicules], waiting, protected from the worst of this heat. But I can’t put a single one of them in the ground yet, because the terrace where the beds are supposed to go is currently six feet of nettles, wall to wall.
There’s no shortcut through that. It has to be cut, raked, and cleared by hand before the garden can even begin, and that’s real physical work I’m doing in stages, not in an afternoon. So the first episodes of this series aren’t going to look like gardening at all. They’re going to look like me standing in front of a wall of nettles, working through it a little at a time, honestly, until there’s a path to the beds.
That’s where we’re starting. Not with a finished garden, and not with a finished house. With the actual work in front of me, shown at the actual pace it takes.
If you want the honest version, stay with me
This isn’t going to be the show where everything gets fixed in a weekend. It’s going to be the one where you watch what it really looks like to keep going anyway — past a certain age, past a cane, past a budget that isn’t where I’d like it to be yet. Slow, real, and mine.
If this work is useful to you, you can buy me a coffee — buymeacoffee.com/cskizer
