The House

When my family first moved to New England in 1987, we bought a typical suburban house as a temporary residence, while we checked out the area and looked for a house more appropriate for our needs and taste. Part of the wish list for the right house was space for my studio.

My plan was to find a house with extra space suitable for such development, hopefully space that was "extra" and that didn't run up the price of the house too much. I figured an old house with an attached barn would be really cool. Also, things like zoning, proximity of neighbors, traffic patterns and the like figured prominently in our planning. New England is rich in houses with barns, except for one wrinkle: as you get close to Boston the price for such houses becomes astronomical. So, right off the bat, I took on a fairly tough commute in order to get into real estate that was both affordable and potentially viable for my home studio.

Over a three-year period, I guess we looked at twenty-five or thirty houses. Most were so-called "antique colonials" that had barns, often attached to the main house. Unfortunately, the barns were usually pretty antique too, so that the rehab costs looked daunting. Sometimes, the barns were too large - we found one in New Hampshire that was 85 wide by 210 long by 50 feet high! Almost a million cubic feet! It had two apartments built in, plus facilities for milking forty cows at a time. A major redecorating project, as they say.

What I finally found and acquired, through sheer dumb good fortune, was an antique colonial house (ca. 1725! - New England does go back a ways) to which a previous owner had added a modern wing which included a big family room, complete w. cathedral ceiling, fireplace, and a gigantic copper-topped wet bar that took up nearly a quarter of the room (ca. 150 square feet!). Even better, the house is on 18 acres, with another 9 acres of protected wetlands on the other side of the little road we're on. Although where we live is definitely suburban, the ambience and acoustical noise floor is really pretty rural. What this means is that I've finally got my room, and, praise be, it is already heated, finished and quiet, so that my renovation costs (compared to rehabbing a barn) are going to be fairly modest, while yielding excellent results. Below is a floor plan and side view, plus a table [next page] showing the noise floor of the room.

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	Floor plan of studio

	Side view of studio

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