When I first moved into the other Bedlam Farm, flush with movie deal money and many delusions about life and responsibility, I poured more than $100,000 into farmhouse repairs, more on the barns outside. This was a lesson in hubris, in the two years Bedlam Farm was on the market, no one offered to buy it and mostly people squawked about taxes and wallpaper. People said they didn’t want a lot of barns. So we pulled it off the market and rented it out.  If the browsers noticed all of the improvements, they didn’t say. In our new farm, things proceed more slowly and deliberately.

Our 1840 farmhouse is solid as a rock, but there is a lot of work to be done inside, we are moving very slowly, one project at a time. Our friend Ben Osterhaudt moved on to bigger things, we have a wonderful new carpenter and restorer named Jonathan Bridge, he is a geologist by training, he quite (he does sing and whistle) and easy to work with. We discovered a few months ago that the tiles in the old shower were beginning to disintegrate and fall down into the tub. The wood behind the tiles was getting a lot of moisture, Jay came in this week and took the tiles off – we have chosen some pretty new ones. Our bathroom is operational, just shrouded in plastic.

Jay returns on Monday.

We are getting there.