Between the house and the pool, several trees were removed sometime before we arrived at Grandview. Whoever did the work cut the stumps close to the ground, which was probably good enough at the time. But portions of the stumps remained, along with a network of large roots running just above the surface of the lawn.

Not the end of the world; just a thorn in my side.

Once you’ve been around renovations for a while, you start to get a feel for projects and expectations.

Replacing a furnace, for example, is obviously going to be difficult. It is large, heavy, connected to several different systems, and capable of either heating your home or filling it with carbon monoxide. Nobody looks at a furnace replacement and thinks, I’ll knock that out before lunch.

A thermostat is different.

Acre upon acre of earthwork. Each slope, field, and grove designed and constructed with intention. None of it feels accidental. The lawn rolls away from the house in broad, deliberate gestures. The garden beds sit where they sit because someone wanted them there. The old paths, the stone edges, the transitions from open grass to pine shade to tucked-away outbuildings all have the feeling of decisions made long ago by people who were thinking in decades.

What a shame to have to rip it apart.

There’s really no other way to put it: the heating system at Grandview is insane.

Stick Season marks the transition from fall’s color to winter’s gray. With outdoor work wrapped up, the focus moves inside — wiring cleanups, air sealing, and small projects to make Grandview a little warmer, safer, and more comfortable for the months ahead.

This past weekend, Lily and I hiked up to the AMC Hut at Lonesome Lake for her first overnight backpacking trip — and my first with either of my kids. It happened to be the hut’s final night of the staffed season, that fleeting moment when autumn exhales and everything feels both alive and winding down. What started as a simple overnight became something deeper: a quiet reckoning with how noisy life has become, and how rare it is to truly unplug. Between Lily losing a tooth at dinner, the crew’s impromptu skits, and a sunrise wake-up call echoing through the cold mountain air, it turned into a weekend I’ll remember for a long time.

While raking a mountain of pine needles from the upper yard, we stumbled onto what looked like a swarm of giant wasps emerging from a tree trunk. A little digging revealed they weren’t wasps at all, but Pigeon Tremex Horntails—nature’s recyclers, turning a dying tree into the next layer of forest life. What started as a weekend cleanup became a reminder that even decay has its purpose.

Fall has arrived hard at Grandview, and with it comes the scramble to button things up before snow arrives. What started as a little peeling paint on the sunroom turned into an excavation of rot—scraping, cutting, and patching until solid wood showed itself again. Inside, a slow drip on the water heater line reminded me that copper, too, has its limits.

Both projects tell the same story: wood wants to return to earth, metal wants to corrode, and water wants in. The only thing standing in the way is steady attention; scraping, sealing, soldering, repeating.

As fall arrives all at once, the rhythm of life at Grandview changes too. The frantic speed-run that was our summer is slowing, our progress is compounding, and we are shifting to preparation for the cold ahead.

One-third of Grandview is freshly painted; trim, muntins, and a small city’s worth of patched plaster. I sealed up old-house smells, made peace with window grids, and - shocking no one more than myself - fell for ECOS paint.

This project has been perhaps the biggest victim of our summer’s “alternative plans”. Not only is it non-mission-critical, we also don’t play tennis and can’t see the court from the house, so when we needed to tighten our summer scope this was the first and fastest to get the axe.

I can’t tell you how many times in my life I’ve been standing in that aisle feeling like an idiot, or digging around in a basement looking for a shutoff, and though “man I wish this was written down.'“

I showed up at Grandview this summer with big dreams, and a big ego. Grandview was ready for me though. And boy did she put me in my place.