But once again we were forced to be practical, and the need to enclose the house took precedence over our desire for a new door. We had removed all of the original clapboards from the house, scraped them of two centuries of paint, and stockpiled them to use on the center-chimney structure. Although the doorway would need to wait another year, before we reattached the clapboards to the facade, we defined the edges of the doorway with strips of wood, against which we finished the clapboards. We created a plywood cover for the opening, attached a vertical strip to it to suggest the future double door, and painted the surrounding Tyvek (against manufacturer's instructions) with our trim paint. Once again, we were prepared for Winter.
The following Spring we turned our attention to the doorway and the creation of the garden. We had made the twin doors in our workshop through the winter months. We found an eighteenth-century stone step at a salvage yard in Brookfield and had it moved to our front entrance. As soon as the stone was in place, we hung the doors and began work on the surround.
The garden, designed by Jan and Susan McGlew of the Smith College Botanic Gardens, consists of raised beds surrounded by a simple fence. Next came the nine raised beds, arranged in a symmetrical pattern around a central diamond. We built the raised beds and laid them out in the front yard on top of what passed for a lawn.
