I can’t resist ruins.  I love the detritus of an earlier built life. For me it is the leftover quality that makes ruins so enticing.  I can’t explain my lifelong affair with crumbling structures, the more forlorn, the better. Is it the possibility of repair, or the lure of starting over again? Give me a rubble foundation and a tumbled framework and I will cheerfully spend years on their restoration.

“You are besotted with rust,” my brother Deo says, but he doesn’t understand the beauty of decay, the mottled richness of wrinkled walls and crusted plaster.

“Ruins are enchanting,” I protest.

I ought to have figured out by now why I am obsessed with these piles.  Am I trying to make a connection to the way we lived in the past and the methods and materials of bygone days?  Who can quarrel with a nostalgia for less complicated times? A psychologist might say that I am trying to discover a sense of belonging and a place to put down roots. But only in fairy tales does the wind rise suddenly and set us down where everything is safe, where we have perfect pitch. Each time a project is finished, and I am comfortably ensconced in a resurrected abode, I can’t wait to move on.

“You always feel you will come over the brow of the next hill,” my brother has diagnosed, “and there it will be, a vista you have never seen before.”

It all started when I was a student in Europe. Between courses, I spent all my time buried in the real estate ads of the Times. In my years at the London School of Economics, I rented two homes and improved them as much as my graduate finances would support. The first was a single-storey retreat built by an eccentric teacher of literature at the Cheltenham Ladies College. Perched on a cliff high above the Welsh town of Tenby, “The Clovers” overlooked  a magnificent panorama over Carmarthen Bay and the Bristol Channel. Ms. Allen had carved out a natural amphitheatre at the edge of the precipice and erected a Temple to the Winds to stage her Greek tragedies. ‘The Clovers’ was an astonishing piece of modernist architecture that had been empty since her death years earlier.

The second was South End House, a crumbling Victorian red brick estate just outside the village of Bungay in Norfolk. It too had been mothballed for years and was in desperate need of attention. Though I was just a tenant, I devoted  far more time rehabilitating these wrecks than on my studies.

ORD, or Obsessive Ruins Disorder, a neurosis not yet classified in the Diagnostic Manual of Mental Disorders. By the time I returned to Canada to begin a career in trade negotiations in Ottawa, the sickness had taken hold. For the next twenty years, when I wasn’t working on tariff reductions, my life revolved around restoration.

Some of my homes were quarters in Lower Town for labourers working on the Parliament buildings, a few were enlarged cottages in New Edinburgh and Sandy Hill,  and at least one, the Francis Sullivan House, represented an important piece of architectural  history. I completely rehabilitated each one; each was the place I intended to stay and make my home, filled with the patina of age and the artefacts of my life and career. I didn’t leave easily or without regret. But each time, I left. I had found another lover.

In Lunenburg, Nova Scotia I began a cycle of new affairs. I refurbished the Miller House to its 1790 footprint, adding plumbing, heating and a kitchen. Then I moved to the Kaulbach House, a much grander Georgian home. It, too, was returned to its 1810 elegance, including eight third-floor dormers and four fireplaces.

When I first crossed the Skyway Bridge to Prince Edward County in 1998, I discovered the Loyalist style, its English sense of balance and harmony. The Loyalists fled the American War of Independence, pledged allegiance to King George III — and settled in Canada. So many of their homes are still standing, the place is nirvana for a lover of the past. The farm was at the water’s edge, and featured an assortment of collapsing barns and sheds, its foundations already surrendered to the forest. How could I resist?

Let’s face it, everything and everyone is in some stage of deterioration. The trick is to learn how to manage it. Take old door and window frames and convert them to outsize mirrors. Highlight peeling plaster in pentimento frescos, and lacquer generations of flooring. Instead of the Japanese cult of “tidying up,” try their craft of “Kintsugi” – finding beauty in broken things.

“Very few share your ardour for ruins,” Deo points out. “Most want new and shiny.”

All I suggest is, before you plow in, or pull down, or throw away, consider the beauty and the integrity of what might be reinvented. A garden enclosure in the foundation of the driveshed? An art gallery in the abandoned dairy barn? A yoga studio in the smokehouse?