In exchange for white kitchen cabinets, ten years old but not “modern enough” for a wealthy woman on the island, I checked on her six cats twice a day for two weeks while she went to Paris. After Artie ripped out the carriage house’s battered old brown cabinets, he and I hung up the white ones in my kitchen.

I painted all the walls and ceiling white with one of those paint sprayers, except one wall in my family room, where I glued white wallpaper with elegant pink roses because I love my roses.

I paid for new windows and two sets of sliding glass doors, one on either side of the house, so I can watch the sunset and the sunrise as the house is up on a slight hill. I ordered breezy white curtains with tiny light yellow roses.

I ripped out the brown trim around the windows and used a miter saw to make wide white trim. From the wood of an old barn on a friend’s property, I made a full wall of shelves, floor to ceiling, for my slight obsession with books.

I found a front door with a half-moon cutout in an antique shop on the island and painted it red. I found three hanging lights made with dripping crystals at Marv Leopold’s estate sale, the fashion mogul who had a vacation home here and died in his bedroom in a frilly pink dress and one of my mother’s purple flowered hats with blue jays.

I painted the new stairs to the loft/my bedroom white and the floorboards upstairs white. I went for a jean material to block out the light at night through the two windows. I bought a white comforter with embroidered red and purple roses and a bunch of pillows by Ellie Kozlovsky with roses painted in all colors.

My mother and aunts hunted around in their attic and gave me an antique library card cabinet that I put next to the front door. I piled more books on top, and below it. It had been used in the town’s library at one time, and the cards to locate books were still in it, so it was my kind of furniture piece.

They also gave me a blue weathered antique wardrobe their mother owned. She liked to curl up in it, shut the door, and sing. I added shelves to it and used it in the kitchen as a pantry. They also gave me a pew from a church that collapsed from age outside of town. They remembered their mother sitting at that church and humming rock songs while the minister spoke. Their father had to take her outside if she refused to quit.

I placed the pew against one wall in my kitchen nook and piled more books under it for storage. I painted sawhorses dark blue and put a butcher block counter over the top for a table. I bought two leather couches from an estate sale when ninety-four-year-old Colonel Ralph Kalama died. They had that cool used look to them. From the rafters over the leather couches I hung three model airplanes that my father had made as a kid, and nailed up two of his fishing poles on either side of the shelves for my books. I hung one large crystal from Aunt Camellia above each window and the sliding glass doors. I could not miss out on possibly receiving a hot sex life from those crystals.