Cottage for Sale, Must Be Moved: A Woman Moves a House to Make a Home

My husband and I never read the same books, until now, and I think we were both surprised. I enjoyed the trips to the hardware store bargain box as much as heart-swelling descriptions of a single woman living her life her way. And my guess is that most of the men who read this book, including my husband, have a crush on Kate. She has her own business,gardens,cooks, belly dances AND reads blue prints. Kate may be looking for a man, but it would be very hard to find one who is good enough for her. On top of all that, she writes like an angel. I loved this book.

In these days of building the bigger better home from scratch and everything supposedly having to be brand new, along comes Kate Whouley and her story of the little cottage that lovingly becomes a part of her already established home. It was wonderful to read the process she had to traverse to make this dream a reality. Being a dyed-in-the-wool recycler myself, I found the entire process admirable that even a small cottage could be "recycled" into becoming a part of a home. In this day of so much discard, I find it very heartening that Ms. Whouley found a way to recycle a cottage. I love the idea of introducing the "cast of characters" as one would for a play in the beginning of the book. Upon reading this list, I was hooked. Also, being a cat person, I understand Ms. Whouley's cat's role in supervising every process of the joining of structures. They really need to do that, you know. thanks to Ms. Whouley's experience, I now have a bit more courage to forge ahead with my own dreamt-of projects.

I didn't expect that the best book I'd read in 2004 would turn out to be a tale about moving a cottage across Cape Cod, but Kate Whouley's memoir is almost impossible to put down. This is a surprisingly suspenseful story of one person's effort to make a dream come true -- despite obstacles ranging from small-town bureaucracy to good old-fashioned mud. Whouley has the rare gift of being able to say a lot with a few well-chosen words. By the end of the book, you feel like you've hung out with the diverse crew of workers who helped move and renovate the cottage and you feel like you know her house well enough that you could walk around it while blindfolded. Along the way, Whouley mentions that she's working on a novel. I can't wait to read it.

When I was a single woman, I got it in my head to move from Boston to Nantucket, not knowing a soul or really knowing much more than how the island was during the 2 weeks in July I would go there every year. Like the author, I found a little cottage that had been loved long ago, built in the 50's and abandoned. I bought it on the spot when I saw it and proceeded to make Nantucket my home for many years until meeting my husband and being swept off to Europe and marriage at age 45. I felt like I was reading a ot of my own story as Kate swept me up in her adventures of builders and plumbers and the hazards of trying to do a project of this scope as a single woman. This would make a great movie I think! And the next time I come home for a visit I am going to try and find this wonderful little cottage with the cottage attached.

If you think the only thing more tedious than initiating a building project is to read about someone else undertaking one, then you need to pick up this book to change your mind. Kate Whouley shares with us an experience full of excitement, possibility, drama, finance, frustration, spirituality, and above all, friendship and humor.The first task is to figure out how to move a cottage from one town to another. The second is to take care of the extensive interior work that will unite an existing house to its cottage addition. Woven in and around it all are the plans and official paperwork that must be filed with the proper authorities. Though the originally simple thought of attaching the two structures becomes more complicated as the weeks go by, the author has a support staff of friends and local artisans who keep her spirits high and keep making construction progress. And of course the whole operation is supervised by Egypt, the resident cat-in-charge. The eight pages of b & w photos barely cover all the stages of the project, but Whouley's descriptive prose more than makes up for the lack of additional visuals. By the last page, you know her home almost as well as she does.A fun and fast book to read, even if you don't know your flathead from a Phillips, and especially if you're thinking of enlarging your own home. An "Under the Tuscan Sun" (the book, not the movie) set on an American shore.