The renovations on our third floor are finally complete. I won’t say it’s exactly as I envisioned it, because I really wasn’t able to envision anything during the design phase, a state of affairs that caused me no little anxiety. But I am very pleased with the way it turned out. I now have a comfortable, open work area with a space large enough for a big desk and–best of all–a bathroom with a shower large enough to turn around in. Husband has his recliner work space, and the kids have a small playroom for which I am unable to find reasonably-priced furnishings. The other mothers in my playgroup have daycare-quality play areas, but my kids have a few toys sitting on the floor of an empty room.

The new space is tucked just under the roofline, or rooflines to be more precise. The ceiling/walls zoom around at all kinds of crazy angles, which is one reason I had such a hard time envisioning the finished space. It’s like the home office for the House of Seven Gables. The walls are always rising up to meet you unexpectedly. You rise from plugging something into an outlet–BAM! You climb out of the shower–BOP! You turn from opening a window–POW!

We are not the first inhabitants of this space. The previous owners had slapped up some drywall, installed a toilet, and put in a single radiator to accommodate one of their sons who wished, like Greg Brady, to retreat to the attic. I don’t know if it was their biological son or their son adopted from Korea who lived up here, but for their sake I hope it was the former, because I can imagine the gossip if it were the adopted kid. Whichever one it was, he must have had warm blood, because there was no insulation in the attic until this renovation.

The previous owners had this place for 25 years. Before that, it was a nursing home, run by a family who lived on the property. A year ago, the now-grown-up daughters from that family stopped by the house and asked to see it. (One of them was in the process of adopting from China. Port City is lousy with infertiles, isn’t it? It must be something in the water.) They told us that both sets of grandparents lived with them, one in the basement, and the other in the attic. (They didn’t live on the main floors so they could save the space for the nursing home clients.) That absolutely boggles the mind. I’ve seen Anne Frank’s hiding space in Amsterdam, and that place was a palace compared to what our attic must have been before the previous owner put up that drywall.

Those poor grandparents. They were probably the only senior citizens in history to be envious of their peers who were lucky enough to be admitted into the nursing home.