13/2025: What that ceiling knows

Image © Jose 2025

Since we started this renovation, there has been an interesting tug of war between us and the general contractor we chose to do this journey with, and it’s one that is not entirely what I expected. This is a place near my Atlantic, perched on a stubborn peninsula that juts into the ocean with the same confidence (borderline aggressiveness…)  as the locals. A small town, but not the cute kind that tourists storm with Instagram and gelato. It’s quieter. A little weirder. Better.

The house used to be a carriage house. Yes, that kind of carriage house, originally for horses and buggies, later for weekend guests or staff, or whatever people with estates used to do with extra buildings when estates had extra buildings. You can still feel the utilitarian bones of the place. Ceilings high enough for haylofts, windows made for function not flair, doorways wide enough to imagine something grand rolling in. There is a lot of stone and cement, and we like that. The house wasn’t just shelter. It was a place where food was a love language, music brought people together, and visitors – family or not – were treated as warmly as kin.

The area itself has gone through phases. It was once seasonal, retreats for the sort of people who had both a city home and opinions about proper picnic etiquette. Over time, lots got carved smaller, neighbors grew closer, and the layered lives of year-round people replaced the breezy footprints of summer. You see the history in the angles of the fences, in where the ocean wind left paint weathered and wood bare. No one seems to care too much about perfect siding, which somehow makes it feel more real.

There’s a ceiling in this house, lofted, exposed, wood, and it’s not just a structural element. It’s a story. It’s a journal written in grain and shadow. You can see the changes it went through over time: the cuts made with purpose, the bruises that came from use, the nails left behind like punctuation from some past hanging lamp or pulley or who-knows-what.

This ceiling has held weight – literal and metaphorical. It has seen steam rise from soup pots, heard music bounce off its beams, and absorbed decades of warmth and noise and silence. And while I understand the temptation to cover it up, insulate it, make it “clean”, I can’t help but feel that doing so would strip away something too important to lose. There’s a kind of quiet nobility in letting these old ceilings breathe. Every imperfection is a fingerprint. Every irregularity reminds me that the house had other lives before mine. It feels honest and alive. And in a time when so much is polished and prefabricated, this wood is the exact opposite: imperfect, weathered, authentic.

Now, the contractor wants to cover it all up. Seal it. Insulate it. Make it “clean.” But I’d argue this is already clean, the kind of clean that comes from having nothing to hide. The kind of clean that holds history. The part I was not expecting is that I’m the one that wants to preserve this, our 78-year-old contractor wants to clean it up. And it’s not just because it might be easier that fixing and maintaining, it’s because the rest of the house is becoming more polished (reminds me of my post from last year https://zemanel.com/forty/).

I don’t want to bury this ceiling to meet some modern expectation of what’s “finished”, we already did some of that on the first-floor bedroom areas. I want to keep the raw clarity of it. I want guests to walk in, look up, and pause, not because it’s polished, but because it feels true. We’ll figure out how to warm the place without losing what makes it feel alive. Insulation can go elsewhere. Respectfully.