Four Years
We moved in on Wednesday, May 25, 2022. Joseph and I arrived with one car packed to the gills and a small box truck. Our twelve U-Haul Pods and grand piano would arrive later. The truck was unloaded while the house’s former owner prepared to hold a garage sale in the driveway. We found ourselves disoriented in a space we didn’t yet know how to navigate, uncertain even where to reach for light switches or how to move between rooms without knocking about in the dark. The house was bigger than we had perceived when we were only visiting, and that day its size became real.
We didn’t yet have our own furnishings in the house, but we had brought a brand new mattress that we set up in what would become the Victoria guest suite, and that’s where we slept for close to a month. It would be days before our things arrived and before we would learn — even with two days of help from a moving crew — that the process of physically moving into a three-story Victorian home is not for the faint of heart. Most of our belongings would eventually make their way to the third floor, which would become our private family quarters. Downstairs, the future guest spaces still stood mostly empty, and we had no idea yet what they would become.
It would be a year before we could open The Adams Pragge House Bed & Breakfast to guests. We’ve learned that running this inn, like inhabiting this house, is above all an act of stewardship — of the building, of its Uptown Port Townsend neighborhood, and of the long continuity between them.
Four years is not a long time by the measure of a house built in 1889. We are still figuring this house out — its 130-year-old puzzle of other people’s choices about wood and plaster, space and light, heat and water circulation. But four years is long enough to know that the work is larger than we imagined, the rewards are deeper and more specific than we hoped, and the surprises are still coming.
We are just the most recent of the long line of people before us who had to learn where the light switches were.
Zhenya Lavy writes The Turret Journal from within the Adams Pragge House, an 1889 Victorian in Port Townsend, Washington, where she and her husband serve as its stewards.
The Adams Pragge House is a three-suite bed and breakfast in Port Townsend, Washington.
→ https://adamspraggehouse.com
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