The first thing we agreed upon, when we decided to renovate: We weren’t going to live in the house while the bulk of the work was going on.

Our first plan had been to keep our Toronto rental apartment and live there full time while we turned the house over to our contractor. But the brightness of this idea dimmed: while it’s possible to check in on a renovation using Facetime or Zoom, we realized we wanted to be able to pop in and discuss those inevitable twists, turns and fine-tuning needed when you impose a renovation plan on an old house that may well have other ideas.

So at the same time I was securing a contractor and a cabinet maker, I set about securing a short-term rental where we could live in Stratford.

The timing of our renovation was driven largely by the fact that there are seasonal rentals available in the winter months in this little city, places that are booked in spring, summer and early fall by theatregoers to the Stratford Festival and other visitors who want to tour the city’s gardens, shops and culinary destinations. Among my friends and friends-of-friends circle are innkeepers and B&B hosts. We needed to find a place where we could both live and work: someplace where we could set up two temporary work-from-home spaces in addition to places to cook, eat, visit and sleep.

The accommodation gods were with us: we were able to book Rosalind’s Retreat, just three blocks away from our little farmhouse / dollhouse, for the winter months.

Rosalind’s Retreat is one of two rental spaces within a handsome, red-bricked dwelling owned and managed by Kim and Kevin Gormley, the hosts and proprietors of The Old Rectory. Yes, it’s named after Shakespeare’s As You Like It heroine: the other unit is Orlando’s Hideaway. This duplex is, in many ways, the opposite of our home even though it was built only a few years later.

The ceilings are high — 11 feet, I think — and from the outside the house looks huge. The foyer is grand, with stately black, grey and white Italian tile and the kind of ornate staircase that makes you feel like you should be descending its 17 steps in a ballgown. The baseboards are a foot deep and there is similarly generous trim around doors and windows. However, while it feels much larger than our place, it does have less floor space: plenty for a few-months respite spot but long term I would tire of working in the dining room and we have a new appreciation of our two-piece main-floor washroom in our house.

Any home, even a temporary one, teaches you more about how you like to move in a space. The main bedroom here has a king-sized bed and even after a couple weeks we can’t get used to its vastness. The difference between a rental where you hang out for a week, versus months, is largely about storage: we brought over a few items from our house to give us more spots to squirrel away our bits.

The kitchen is set up in an efficient L layout with island, presaging our new kitchen, and I love its solution for under-sink storage: an IKEA piece of cleverness where the whole thing pulls out like a huge drawer, using a towel rack handle, with lidded containers inside for garbage, recycling and sink bits. Want!, as the kids would say. My cabinet makers were less enthusiastic: apparently the design is rickety and won’t stand up well over time but, bless them, they are adapting the design to something that will function the same way and not compromise their commitment to long-lasting craftsmanship. (Use the arrow to move back-and-forth to see the outside and inside the IKEA piece of cleverness).

We couldn’t stretch the budget to rent Rosalind’s Retreat and keep up our Toronto apartment so committing to be here set in motion our earlier-than-anticipated move out of the big city. That forced us to think hard about what we’d use from our apartment in our Stratford home, which we had furnished for rental by artists during the theatre season. We had two of almost everything. So we sold or donated a bunch of stuff in Toronto before we packed up the rest in October, most of which went to a Stratford storage locker. These past few months has been a slog of moves, packing, unpacking, repacking. We had to clear our house’s main floor entirely before renovation could begin, so right after Christmas we went through a blitz of more culling, donating and moving: some stuff up to the second floor and the rest out to our storage locker, or off to a local auction house.

We’re not out of the moving woods yet: but for the next few months, we can rest easy at our airy retreat before the final push down Renovation Road.