Linda Facci and Gene Gironda love working on home DIY projects together, which is what

Linda Facci and Gene Gironda love working on home DIY projects together, which is what they do after spending working weeks apart. Linda, the Creative Director of famed New York City establishment Magnolia Bakery, enjoys days off upstate in Woodstock, NY with her husband Gene, a carpenter and the chief renovator of their 1940s stone storybook house. When they first found the property a year and a half ago, they thought it would just need a good cleaning. But as often happens when old walls are opened up, more work quickly presented itself. The couple decided to overhaul the main living space, creating an open floor plan in which to entertain groups of friends. Gene took time off from work and concentrated on the house for almost a year, with Linda pitching in her skills on weekends. She and Gene spent an entire vacation mocking up several designs for the living room fireplace wall clad in over 100 painstakingly hand-stained pine boards. Many other projects contributed to the final product, including the unearthing of a charming Dutch door that the couple had admired from outside, but that had been buried in sheetrock inside the kitchen. In the downstairs bedroom, they exposed a stone wall ? once marking the home’s exterior before a 1970s renovation ? that had been covered up when that room was added on. A stone mason built the house and laid paths and steps around the grounds, incl...