Well, now that we are about 8 months into the COVID 19 pandemic, what has that taught us about being resilient with home remodeling? I’ll share my experience…
We continued our remodeling this year on our 1867 Lake Champlain house located in the “North Country” in northern New York just outside of the town of Plattsburgh on the Cumberland Head. This is a beautiful piece of property that sits on a 3 acre parklike setting that has phenomenal views of Lake Champlain. It is a wonderful historic house that we purchased 3 years ago, but was in desperate need of some major renovations.
We had been watching for homes to come onto the market in this location, because Chris and I are both of French Canadian decent, and he grew up in this area, which is just about 50 miles south of the Quebec, Canada border. You can drive from our house across the border to Montreal in about 45 minutes. We love it, and the ability to not only get quickly into Canada, with all the exciting things to see and do up there, but this is also a perfect location to travel to the eastern coastal regions of the United States. We love taking summer excursions to Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, and Massachusetts, which are all within easy drives from our home on Lake Champlain.
So, what happened this year when COVID-19 unfortunately spread all over the United States? From a remodeling perspective, it presented some opportunities, but also many challenges. Because of massive layoffs in non-essential industries, construction products became in short supply, especially lumber. So, anyone looking to put up a nice privacy fence while they were stuck at home with nothing better to do than tackle those long overdue home projects, were likely shocked by the limited availability and long wait times to get your products ordered, as well as a significant increase in the price of lumber. Some fencing companies even stopped installing wood fences all together and concentrated on the vinyl and composite supplies. We took the same approach. We had wanted to do a big outdoor landscape project around the 1867 house, but realized quickly that we needed to adapt to the current situation so that we wouldn’t run into limited and over-priced supplies. So, we instead switched to an exterior hardscape project.
For this house, we really want to stay true to the late 1800’s design and European styles that were popular during that period. We decided to create a large cobblestone patio and outdoor entertainment area which combined creating an elegant and grand entrance to the house as well as an area for everyone to sit outside and enjoy the spectacular views of Lake Champlain. To bring this project to life, we brought in our trusted hardscaping expert Chris owner of EverGreen Landscaping and Excavation. Chris had previously installed some beautiful Vermont granite steps and natural stone retaining walls up to our guest cottage, so we were confident that he would be the best collaborator for this project. Oh how I love the smell of excavation equipment in the morning…
To get that vintage European cobblestone look, we chose a Unilock product called Courtstone, which is cast from real European cobblestones. We used a really nice mix of Belgian Blue with Pebble Taupe and tan sand, which really made the richness of the stones stand out:
Also, with this project, we were actually able to seize the opportunity to see what kinds of treasures were hidden around the property, which we uncovered while we had the excavation equipment onsite. And WOW, we struck gold! Not really, but we did strike (but didn’t damage) two water pipes that were running underground to the boathouse. This was almost like finding gold, because now we can cancel the “costly” engineering plans that we were trying get approved through the city to run water lines under the road to the boathouse for next summer’s project…YIPEEE!!
Okay, what else? We found a couple of live electrical lines that were cut and just buried in the ground, so we turned those into new exterior electrical outlets for the new patio:
And, oh yeah, we came across a mummified opossum! Just in time for Halloween!!
Overall, the experience with the shortage of lumber and other products, simply gave us the idea to try something new with the exterior hardscaping. We learned how to be versatile, so we can keep moving with the renovation of this historic property to recreate the timeless elegance of the old world architecture and design. We are also continuing to focus on the interior with some really nice master bath products that are not breaking the budget during the pandemic:
The pandemic has also made us that much more appreciative of the surrounding beauty of this area of northern New York, and we took advantage of just being outdoors and the luxury of having so many activities to do at Lake Champlain and around the Adirondack Mountains:
Melissa Courval 