Twenty Years Of Love And Labor Make A

‘Home Sweet Home’

By Nancy K. Crevier

When Chuck and Jeanetta Miller of Newtown retire this summer to return to a home they built nearly 30 years ago on the Pacific coast, they will be leaving behind another home that has been more than 20 years in the making.

“It will be hard,” admitted Ms Miller. “This has been a construction zone for 20 years. Now Chuck has finished it up, and we are leaving.”

“I am most proud that this has been a really great house to be in,” said Mr Miller, who designed and built the additions, as well as crafting the detail work, himself. “It is functional, it has been a good place to be as a family, and we each have our own realms,” he said.

Jeanetta Miller has served as the head of the English Department at Newtown High School for the past 10 years. “My craft is words,” said Ms Miller. The crafting of their home has been the kingdom of her husband’s, she said, trusting to his ability to envision an entire room. It has helped immensely that he has the credentials and skills to take ordinary materials and apply them to an ordinary house purchased in 1991, turning it into the extraordinary living space it has become.

Mr Miller has been with Taunton Press Fine Homebuilding Magazine for 31 years, beginning as the Western editor while living in the Berkeley section of California. He started in the Newtown office in 1991 as a senior editor, then managing editor, and will retire as the editor of special issues. A highly skilled trim carpenter, Mr Miller has also produced several videos for Fine Homebuilding, and writes the Tips and Techniques column.

He readily admits that in addition to his own know-how, having access to some of the country’s best designers and architects, as well as being a part of a willing and able Taunton Press Fine Homebuilding “family,” has given him an edge that not all home renovators have.

“I’ve always been interested in the design, rather than construction techniques,” Mr Miller said. While many home builders focus on the “how to” of creating, his focus has always been on the “why to,” he said. “I’ve been fortunate to meet a lot of designers who talk to me about practical, down-to-earth designs,” Mr Miller said.

Even in the dark of that 1991 winter’s evening, with no lighting available, the Millers could sense that the house in foreclosure on Taunton Hill had a good body, they said. What it lacked was soul, and that was something they knew they could inject into the center hall Colonial with the half-gambrel roof.

“We could see the roofline against the starry sky, and got a feel for the house walking through, in the dark,” said Ms Miller. It felt so right, that her husband was nearly ready to seal the deal when he saw the walk out basement — ideal for a woodworker — without even going any further.

They knew it would take work, but they envisioned a home that would become the welcoming property it has been, and offer a wonderful space in which they and their sons, now grown and gone, could live.

Within days of closing that February, the Millers started their first project: pulling out all of the carpeting and drying out the entire house. Water in the pipes of the uninhabited house had frozen. A February thaw turned the house into a waterfall.

“We were renting a house nearby and I drove by one night just to check on this place, and in the truck lights I could see a ring of icicles around the house at ground level. Even though I was from California, I sensed this was not a good thing,” Mr Miller recalled. By the time his wife coincidentally drove past, the driveway was lit up by the swirling lights of the fire department, pumping out a river of water from over 14 leaks.

It is a virtue of his wife’s that has served them over the years of building, said Mr Miller, that her only comment as she gazed at the mess was, “Boy, it’s got a good well.”

Since that wet beginning, Chuck Miller has worked on what he perceived as a “high quality, blank canvas,” infusing it, day by day, with the soul that it lacked.

The garage, with his studio overhead, was the next project, providing shelter for the recycled materials he collected through Bargain News and later, through CraigsList.

“I do have the advantage that I just know if it’s good material, that I’ll use it somewhere. CraigsList is an incredible resource,” Mr Miller said. The garage studio is a place to relish his other passion: guitars and music.

“It’s a place where I can be as noisy as I like,” said Mr Miller, who has participated in many garage bands, over the years, including The Grateful Dads. The ceiling is made of hemlock boards bought in a lumberyard as part of a distressed sale.

“They fell off of a lift, so they weren’t perfect enough anymore to sell there,” Mr Miller said. He knew, though, that there would be plenty of boards in the lot still in very usable condition. Underlighting above a concrete mantel cast by Mr Miller adds soft lighting, and is enhanced by the large skylight set into the board ceiling.

The Taunton “family” assisted the Millers in erecting the deck that stretches from the garage to the kitchen and dining area of the house. The deck, like much of the rest of the lower level of the house, was designed to invite the outdoors inside, and to increase the feeling of depth and space within.

Local Finds, Repurposed

The kitchen alone is a testament to Mr Miller’s craft, creativity, and penchant for using recovered or local materials. Overhead, horizontally placed two-by-six wooden boards span the 32-inches between the exposed beams. “I painted the beams white, and trimmed their tops with crown molding to give the ceiling a coffered look,” explained Mr Miller.

An alcove, one of several designs repeated throughout the home, shelters the Viking stovetop and cook area. The alcove walls are lined with vintage looking, rectangular glass tiles, and thick glass shelves disappear into tiles to give a seamless appearance. All of the finishes, said the Millers, were selected to give a timeless quality, and for ease of cleaning.

The stainless steel countertop was crafted from a deli table advertised for sale in the Bargain News.

“It turned out the guy was just down the street from my Taunton Press office. I bought it for $50, and had a guy in New Milford cut holes for the sink and range top — also a buy from Bargain News,” Mr Miller said. The piece of steel cut out for the sink became the bottom piece of the knife drawer located under the range top, and beneath that drawer, a recycled restaurant bread warmer serves as more storage space. Because they prefer baking with electric, two ovens are set into the wall adjacent to the cooking alcove.

Fine wines over the years have provided fine corks that have reappeared as a cork wallboard on one kitchen wall.

On the opposite side of the galley-like kitchen, another recycled steel counter top with built in draining channels houses the main sink. Open shelving showcases dishes and glassware. A closer look discloses the carpenter’s sense of humor. Like a tidy butler, different types of wood have been worked into the cupboard doors beneath the sink, to give the appearance of a tuxedo. Nearby, a cupboard door is opened via a carved rhinoceros handle.

Dividing the kitchen in two is a long butcher block counter top, again, a recycled restaurant find, with open shelving beneath. At one end, small wire baskets from a local bath and home supply store are nestled in a wooden holder that straddles the counter top. “I like to find things that are well-made and find some other use for them. It personalizes our space,” Mr Miller said.

A somewhat higher table, bolted to the floor, extends the butcher block, and provides a place for guests to sit and visit comfortably, without actually being in the midst of the work area.

What is unseen is one of the things that makes one home project stand out from another, the use of heavy duty hardware, everywhere.

“It works smoothly, and it lasts. One of the most important things in drawer and cupboard quality is the hinges,” said Mr Miller. While a more expensive initial outlay, he goes by the adage, “Buy quality, cry once.”

Underfoot is oak flooring that runs from the kitchen, into the open dining area (where Mr Miller has drawn out a window sill into a delicately curved top surface of a built in bookcase), and down into the 2006 living room addition. The hardwood floors were progressively installed everywhere downstairs, to replace popping slate tiles and unfinished floors that had once been covered by carpeting, they said. By adding herringbone corners, the Millers have personalized and given detail even to the floor.

“I like oak, because it is a local material,” Mr Miller said. “There is no denying that using locally sourced materials is a good idea.”

The living room addition “completes the house,” Ms Miller said. “It needed a living room. There is a front room that was supposed to be the living room, but it never felt like one. We tended to just congregate and hang out in the kitchen area. We wanted something with a higher ceiling, and a lot of windows that would allow us to appreciate the scenery,” she said.

Two steps lead down into the living room, an intentional design that gives the room a different feel than if it were on the same level as the dining and kitchen spaces, said Mr Miller, yet remains cohesive. “It creates its own space,” he said. Again, alcoves in the living room add the feeling of additional space, as do diagonal open space. The addition is just 400 square feet, but feels larger because of the openness and location of the windows, Mr Miller said. “Good design is about creating space you want to be in,” he pointed out. Crown molding and trim pull together the spaces, even repeated in the cast concrete frame and mantel of the fireplace there, another work by Mr Miller. Another example of utilizing the same material in a new way is seen in the use of trim material as a built in shade for corner lighting.

The former living room has been used as a bedroom, and is currently serving as a study. Floor to ceiling shelves on one wall provide plenty of space for a book lover like Ms Miller.

A New Personality

In 2005, the Millers had completed another project, that of the addition of a dormer across the front. A “dog house” dormer with a peaked roof is centered over the front door, with shed dormers on either side. Although the entire project added just 70 square feet, it changed the entire personality of the upstairs.

“There were no windows in my study until we added the dormers,” said Ms Miller, or anywhere on the east side upstairs. Now, light and views flood the space. “I love my study,” she said, where yet another alcove now allows her to curl up on a sofa, with lots of “cubby” cupboards for books and small items built into the alcove, and into the closet.

Still another alcove in the master bedroom cradles the bed, built from aged old-growth Douglas pine, by Mr Miller. Handcarved pine eels weave in and out of the head and foot boards of the bed, echoing other ocean-inspired pieces found in the house. The décor in the home, like the design, is simple, yet reflects the owners’ styles. Neutral colors work together, and related shapes pull everything together.

The downstairs of the house is heated mainly by wood from the living room fireplace, specially designed to draw air from only the outside.

The exterior design of the home was not ignored, of course, through the years of renovation. “Chuck actually moved the front door just a couple of feet, because it didn’t line up with the hallway, and that made him crazy,” Ms Miller said. “There is an attention to detail for him that becomes almost obsessive,” she laughed. “It has to be just right.”

Leading up to the front door is a fieldstone path bordered by stonewalls. The stone all came from a nearby excavation that made way for a development.

There is no sense of projects cobbled togther, inside or out, and always the Millers have strived to give the house what Ms Miller called “a human scale. The additions are not huge. It has remained inviting and cozy,” she said.

“It has been a slow process,” confessed the Millers, with both of them working demanding jobs, and the home projects needing to fit in after hours and on weekends. The projects evolved over time, and that can be a good thing, Ms Miller added. “But the projects have been self-contained, so life can go on.”

Life does go on. The time has come to close the door on their Newtown life, and this Newtown home, and return to their California roots.

“We felt how wonderful this house could be when we first came upon it, in the dark,” Ms Miller said. They have achieved their goal of putting the soul back into an empty shell.

“It is,” said Ms Miller, “a beautiful space.”

Please visit www.NewtownBee.com for a collection of color photos showing details of the Miller home.