I bought the house from an older man named Nick, who’d been born there. He and his wife had emigrated to Canada and remained there for...

When I closed on the house, I, like Frances in Under the Tuscan Sun, had only the dimmest idea what to do next. The similarity in our...

As it turned out, the GC wasn’t good enough. Expenses were piling up and work was moving glacially. When my father, a builder and land...

This is the little house as it stands now. There’s still a lot of work to be done, partly to reinforce it structurally because the roof...

Perhaps only in a second home in Italy can you have a shrine to yourself at the top of the stairs. Yep, that’s me, sort of — if I were 30...

The significant work I’d still like to do would be twofold: tame and landscape the outdoor area and extend the house into part of it....