Carolina Cottage
Affectionately called The Home Place, this charming cottage belonged to my family for seventy-eight years. The total restoration lasted almost two years. I preserved original heart pine floors, bead board walls and ceilings, plastered walls, period doors, windows, and hardware. Memories of extended family reunions, grass-stained knees, and homemade peach ice cream flooded my mind.
In the kitchen I designed a functioning island from an old cast iron sewing machine frame and butcher block countertop. If kitchens had islands when this home was built, I imagine that’s how they may have looked.
I found treasures like my grandma’s coffee percolator and saved heirloom plants including an antique Seven Sisters rosebush. As a child, this is where I fashioned rooms in my mother’s baking pans using moss, mirror fragments, stones, and found objects in the woods down that steep hill by the creek.
