"São as águas de março fechando o verão. É a promessa de vida no teu coração." —Tom Jobin
Built more than a century ago at a time when Alameda Hill had only a handful of houses.
I had begun searching for a house that could truly be a forever home, but what I found left me disheartened: an endless market of overpriced properties, none with the architecture or design that spoke to me. I longed to remain in Northeast Portland, where I’d spent the past decade nestled in an old Irvington house, and I couldn’t fathom retreating to the suburbs—to the polished sterility of Lake Oswego, with its manicured golf-course lawns and miles-long drives just to reach a coffee shop.
That was not for me.
Finding a home that fit both my taste and my budget quickly became its own test. I refused to drain my savings on a turnkey property only to spend years undoing its choices. It made more sense to take on a fixer-upper and shape it slowly into what I envisioned. I’d tackled remodels before—enough to have a kind-of-sort-of sense of what it might entail.
And then I saw the house that would become Grace.
She was in ruin: crumbling foundation walls, an unfinished basement drowned in water, ancient wiring and wrecked plumbing, no insulation to speak of. The roof leaked steadily into the dining room. A poorly built kitchen addition blocked the driveway, making the old horse carriage house unusable. Every wall bore seven layers of wallpaper, and the carpet—thick, matted, and blazing orange—looked straight out of a 1970s TV show.
And yet, there she stood: seven bedrooms, one bathroom, 4,700 square feet of possibility, ready to be stripped to her bones.
An excellent adventure for a tiny Brazilian girl, I thought.
Let’s do it.
3+ years in the making
Renovations began in the heart of the pandemic. The engineering and architectural plans alone stretched across nearly a year. Then came nine more months of permitting, followed by almost two full years of construction—dust, noise, and steady transformation.
And yet, I ask myself: is it ever truly finished?
Rebuilding Grace was no simple task. In truth, it may be one of the hardest things I’ve ever done—made even more so because I did it quietly, almost entirely on my own. Even Will only learned of the project when it was nearly complete. A few close friends knew what I was undertaking, but unless you’ve been in the trenches yourself, there’s no real way to explain how grueling it is.
The house came to me at a time when I, too, was rebuilding. With every obstacle—complex hardscaping, wrangling contractors and crews, watching the steady stream of cash disappear—I felt as though I was restoring not just these walls, but parts of myself. Through the labor and the dust, I found Grace. And so, the house was named.
