Like many young adults in the early 1970s, Jimmy Warnock arrived in Vermont enamored with the back-to-the-land movement and its simple lifestyle. His future wife, Carol, soon joined him. They were hippies. “Most definitely,” said Jimmy, a product of suburban Boston who graduated from Brown University, then moved to Bridport to work as a carpenter. Carol, who grew up near Rochester, N.Y., would become a midwife.
They bought 20 acres of woods in Lincoln, cleared trees, and Jimmy, with “hippie carpenter” friends, built the couple’s home with salvaged beams, boards, bricks and slate. And indoor plumbing.
As much as they respected the simple life playing out in the communes clustered around them, the Warnocks would go only so far back to the land. Friends they’d shared a home with in Bridport moved to West Virginia, where they farmed with horses, had a pitcher pump in their kitchen sink and used an outhouse. “We went down to visit them a few times,” Jimmy said, “admiring — but kind of glad to come home to an indoor toilet.”
Forty-five years after moving in, Jimmy still lives in the house he built. Forced-air heat now supplements the home’s woodstove. The couple added a porch that offers views of Mount Abraham and Mount Ellen and a second sleeping porch one story up. A later addition gave them a spacious fireplace room and a walk-out basement with a sauna just outside the glass door.
The home now boasts two full bathrooms.
Carol, who lived with dementia during the last years of her life, died in January. It was she who designed the home’s interior. She selected its furnishings, abundant pops of color and much of its eclectic art collection. Jimmy, who traveled a lot in his last job as an education consultant, recalled how he often came home to new treasures — including a large painting of unknown provenance that Carol found at the Brimfield Antique Flea Markets in Massachusetts, arguably the country’s largest such show.
“Carol was a big fan of Brimfield, to say the least,” said Jimmy, 76. The painting, a gold-framed triptych, depicts seven women — six wearing flowing white dresses — walking through the trees, coming upon a man enrobed in fabric and seated on a stone bench, eyes downcast. “He looks like he’s in an asylum,” Jimmy observed. “My first thought was, Where are we going to put that?”
It fit perfectly above the fireplace and has become a conversation piece.
Carol appreciated art, though she hadn’t studied it. She worked as a midwife her entire career and assisted with an estimated 2,000 births before retiring in 2015. Jimmy moved from construction into education. He taught building technology in Essex Junction, then became an administrator. He helped run two vocational technical centers and served as principal at Harwood Union Middle & High School and, from 1993 to 2000, as assistant superintendent in Burlington.
Jimmy was teaching, and the couple had two young children, while he built the family’s house over 16 months, starting in 1980. His goal: Get it built, move in and continue to improve it over time. In August 1981, the Warnocks moved in.
The house evolved with them. Many of the couple’s early choices, dictated by lack of money, remain, adding to the home’s aesthetic and charm. Those include several interior doors with intricate panels salvaged from a Burlington hotel. Jimmy cut them down to fit. Many other building supplies came from a barn in Huntington whose owner wanted it demolished. Jimmy tore it down and paid $400 to salvage its materials. The barn’s mammoth beams, some of them hand-hewn, support the first-floor ceiling in his home. Barn boards became sheathing, a bathroom wall and wainscoting that lines the dining room and stairwell. The wainscoting’s grain, a rich mix of warm brown and black, makes the wood appear stained, though it’s not. “I ran it through a drum sander at a local shop, and then I belt-sanded it and urethaned it,” Jimmy said. “It finished really nicely.”
Barn boards became sheathing, a bathroom wall and wainscoting.
Bricks that a former owner had stored in the barn became a wall in the downstairs bathroom. Its cast-iron tub was also found in the barn. “He was watering cows with it,” Jimmy said. Carol painted the tub’s exterior with lavender flowers. Its fixtures are original. “All I did was blow them out with an air compressor to get the dirt and dust out,” Jimmy explained.
The footprint of the original house is 24 by 32 feet with an 8-by-12-foot bump to accommodate the pantry and mudroom. Jimmy and a few friends installed its slate roof. They even incorporated a decorative pattern about halfway down. “I would never do it again,” he said. “It was youthful ambition.” He hired professionals to roof the additions.
The couple purchased native spruce for the upstairs floor, but “again,” Jimmy said, “in the interest of saving money, the underside of [the floor] is the ceiling downstairs.” A knot fell out in daughter Erin’s bedroom, allowing her to overhear midwifery conversations in the dining room below. Her unusually advanced obstetrics vocabulary surprised her teachers and informed Chris Bohjalian’s 1997 best-selling novel, Midwives. Bohjalian, who lived in Lincoln when he wrote the book, interviewed Carol and Erin as part of his research.
Another knothole story became family lore. Jimmy and Carol sent Erin to her room for misbehaving at mealtime, Jimmy recalled. “Carol and I were finishing dinner with our son, and, all of a sudden, a little note came flying down, saying, ‘I’m so sorry. I won’t do it again.’”
Jimmy drew the layout for the original house, and Montpelier architect Ward Joyce designed the fireplace room addition. Joyce advised putting it on the north side to provide a view of the pond that Jimmy had hired a contractor to dig. Large windows on each wall and translucent panels in the vaulted ceiling flood the room with light.
Two salvaged windows, installed high on the wall where the addition joins the original house, allow light to pass through and echo a design element that appears elsewhere. “Carol was always interested in making sure there was plenty of light,” Jimmy said. In addition to serving a function — two transom windows in the upstairs bathroom allow steam to escape — the interior windows are visually interesting.
Function, as well, led the couple to install an iron spiral staircase to access their new basement. They chose it to avoid cutting into the fireplace room, but it, too, adds a sense of whimsy.
For Carol, the house was a blank slate for inventive decorating. She countered Vermont’s long, white winters with vibrant color. She frequently redecorated, said son Todd Warnock, 56. He lived abroad for several years. “Every time I came home for a visit, there was a new color on the wall,” he said. Currently, mustard yellow, red and mint green appear on window trim, a mixed palette on walls and furniture. Standing near the woodstove, one can see the kitchen’s cantaloupe-hued walls accented with a lilac door frame, the foyer’s tomato-bisque walls and eggplant floor tile. Just beyond, yellow window trim in the fireplace room pops against the white walls. The red couches and large red rug there echo the foyer walls and exude warmth.
Bird nests that Carol avidly collected are displayed throughout the home — tucked on a beam, lining shelves and incorporated into little works of art. The horned skull of a kob — an African antelope — which she spirited through customs at John F. Kennedy International Airport, hangs next to the woodstove in the kitchen.
Original artwork fills the home. Much was created by Vermonters, some of them neighbors and friends, including Judi Danforth, Anne Cady, Kit Donnelly, Pamela Smith, Jake Geer, David Bumbeck, Kathleen Kolb, Rory Jackson and Woody Jackson.
Many of the couple’s early choices, dictated by lack of money, add to the home’s aesthetic and charm.
Even more personal is a section of the fireplace room devoted to small works by the couple’s four grandchildren. Large, candid photos of the kids in the entryway capture both the serenity and the exuberance of childhood.
A photo in the stairwell to the second floor documents a moment at which the family still marvels. Acclaimed Life magazine photographer John Dominis shot the image at the Woodstock Music & Art Fair in 1969. When his photos were put up for sale, Erin spotted her mother in a crowd scene. A few months after her parents bought the photo, Jimmy got a call from Carol, he recalled. “And she said, ‘Oh, my God, you won’t believe it. That Woodstock photo? You’re in it.’” He pointed to a head, covered in curly hair and a headband, in the top left corner. He and Carol had not yet met.
“Magical” is the word that comes to Erin Warnock’s mind when she recalls her childhood, she said. Now 51, she grew up without screens — including television. She hosted sleepovers on the sleeping porch, where she and her friends drifted off to the lullabies of peepers. She and Todd made up games and played outside. Their father had installed small doors between rooms in the house so family members could crawl to safety in the event of a fire. “We used to spend a lot of time making forts and going through those little doors and just living in this version of a Hobbit world,” Erin said.
A path through the woods connects the Warnocks’ home to that of the family’s best friends. In a clearing along the path, Todd used leftover building materials to construct a little cabin and sweat lodge. Those are gone now, but the path and the friendship have lasted into a third generation.
When she was young and her parents didn’t have a lot of money, Erin said, her family’s home was “scrappy.” But it was cozy, she said, “and perfect for us.”
And, as he anticipated nearly 50 years ago, her father is still making improvements. He’s clearing trees to open up the view and to create a pollinating meadow. However, he might not ever finish the trim around the shower in the upstairs bathroom.
“I think the idea of having something unfinished is good,” Jimmy said. “It’s just a reminder that life is not perfect.”
The original print version of this article was headlined “Home Made | Jimmy and Carol Warnock cleared trees and built their own house in Lincoln”
This article appears in Nest • Fall 2026.
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