Five years into renovating their retirement home in Gloucester, Denise Boyer and her husband Jim Stallings are finally close to the finish line.

When the Gazette-Journal first talked to them in 2021, their project was in the beginning stages, stalled by the pandemic and by renovations they were making to another house they had purchased near Stallings’ workplace in Dahlgren.

But commitment and diligence have paid off, and the couple can now enjoy the dream home they were looking for when they visited Gloucester in late 2020.

The house, located in Pinero on 10 rolling acres with a stream running through it, has a spacious open floor plan. When the couple bought it, the living space was dominated by a huge central kitchen with a large island, but they wanted something different. New kitchen cabinets were installed in one corner, with the space-hogging refrigerator and microwave placed in a large pantry adjacent to the dining area, and a central living area was created where the kitchen was before. The previous small living area at one end was turned into a library, with cabinets and shelves lining the walls.

“My husband built every single inch of the library cabinets,” said Boyer, explaining that Stallings couldn’t be there because he worked during the week in Dahlgren. She said the two of them together installed the oak floors, “hammer(ing) every single nail into every single board.”

The whole open living area of the Boyer/Stallings home has a wealth of natural light, with a central entry door in the living area flanked by wide sidelights standing opposite rear sliding glass doors, another set of sliding glass doors in the adjacent library, and additional windows in the dining and kitchen areas.

Everything about the light-filled room seems to welcome the outdoors. The entryway features a ceramic tile art piece embedded in the floor that Boyer created of wolves howling at the moon. It leads outside to a long porch with a line of red rocking chairs offering plenty of seating. The rear sliding glass doors open onto a deck Stallings built that’s shared with the master bedroom, which makes an L-turn off the main room, and the sliding glass doors in the library lead to yet another long porch, this one ending in an enclosed “catio” for the couple’s two feline friends. The cats access their outdoor space through a cat room in the home office that was created out of a former bedroom adjacent to the master bedroom.

Boyer accented several spaces in the house with her ceramic tile work, including a piece installed in the master bathroom and one installed at the foot of the stairs in the attached garage apartment. She also added such accents as a faux disintegrated castle wall to make her guest bathtub look like a Colonial-era folly, a vanity top painted as a bed of leaves that she coated with epoxy, and a leaf-shaped vanity bowl. She carried her wolf theme into the guest bath, as well, painting wolves on the vanity doors.

The garage apartment is perhaps Boyer’s proudest achievement. In 2021, it stood with exposed framing, every inch of it needing to be completed. With contractors scarce during the pandemic, Boyer and Stallings decided to take on the job themselves, contracting out only the drywall mud and wiring.

“We learned all we needed to know and did it ourselves,” said Boyer. “Hanging the drywall, installing the cabinets and plumbing. We worked in 15-degree weather and 92-degree weather, with no air conditioning or heating. My husband installed all the lighting and I did all the painting with seconds from Lowe’s. It was definitely a labor of love.”

Consisting of a living/kitchen area, a bedroom, and a bathroom, the apartment is used as a guest space for family. The furnishings were all “gifted, thrifted, or sifted,” she said, and her daughter Rachel Stallings, an artist, gave her a large painting she created of a pilot standing in front of his vintage aircraft, superimposed over the image of a map of Europe. This piece dominates the apartment’s stairwell.

The garage itself was converted into a spacious art studio for Boyer, with one corner housing a laundry room area with pantry shelves to store the canned goods she makes from her large, flourishing vegetable garden and fruit orchard. She also has herb and wildflower gardens and a chicken coop with a small, friendly flock. Her next project is building an octagonal gazebo in one corner of the yard.

“This is a hobby farm for us,” said Boyer. “We love having all these projects to do. We love figuring out solutions to small problems. About five years into our marriage, we decided we wanted a house in the country to have plants. When we found this, it was karma.”