Dormers

The roof dormers, perched high like watchful eyes, have weathered the years and their changes, reshaped by time’s restless touch. A photograph, faded from the late 1800s, holds them in their early days—front dormers graced with shuttered or louvered vents, their tin roofs catching the sun’s gleam. Whispers of 1915 linger in the saw marks and nails, stubborn in the wood, telling of a renovation when those vents gave way to windows, framed and set to welcome the light of a new century. Over time, the old wood clapboards, worn and honest, were replaced with Masonite siding, then draped again in vinyl, each layer a mask laid over the house’s true face.

Now, in a quiet call to the past, the dormers are being beckoned back to their origins. The vinyl and Masonite will be stripped away, like lifting a heavy curtain, and new clapboards, shaped to echo the old, will take their place. The windows of 1915, still cradling their quiet stories, will be lifted out, reglazed, and settled back with care, their panes catching the light as they did long ago. The modern trim encasing the rafters will be undone, the roof opened once more to the spare, honest lines of its 1915 rafter style, as if the dormers themselves might breathe freer, gazing out into the Houston County dusk with eyes unclouded.