We’ve been waiting for this moment for several years now. It’s a long story, one that we decided we’d no longer talk about anymore, involving a very badly done renovation and a contractor who talked big but didn’t have a clue what he was doing. Since neither did we, it didn’t make for good results. Then, a baby (Dylan) came into being, and our lives changed: both in pace and in spirit.
(By the way, if you want to get a sense of what some of our house still looks like, just check out the “before” pictures below - I could take shots like that in a bunch of places. I am way too familiar with bare, unmudded drywall …)
So fast forward seven years (my goodness, it’s been THAT long that we’ve lived in this half-finished house!) and we both feel we’ve discovered the right contractor for our place. Out of all the contractors we’ve talked to, all the ones who’ve deigned to come see the place and give us a price, he’s been the only one who (1) didn’t suggest we tear down the whole place and build a ranch house instead, (2) gasp in horror at the idea of doing a renovation instead of a tear-down (are you sensing a pattern here?) or (3) marvel at how “different” a house this is, and how a tear-down would be the thing to do.
We have no plans to tear-down our house. We do live in the suburbs, just outside of Toronto, but unlike the rest of the community, the area we live in is not made up of new or practically new houses (as in, built within the last 20 years). We have a very distinctive house, the kind of house that a realtor would say, ah, yes, not everyone would like it, but certain people would just adore this property.
We are that type of person. The first time the house was listed, we were all ready to go see it - but the sellers, who were in the midst of a break-up, decided they would give their relationship another go, and took the house off the market. A little while later (the go at repairing the relationship apparently didn’t work) the house was back on the market, and this time the timing was perfect. We were in the market, and went to see it on the day it was listed. We made an offer for the house that very day.
I remember saying to Ward, if the inside is only half as beautiful as the outside, I want this house. And the inside turned out to be about three-quarters as beautiful as the outside. It was small - too small for us, really - and it was old. The roof leaked, the windows needed replacing, and it has a very odd design. The front door opened directly into the sleeping area, and the gathering areas (kitchen, living room, dining room) are all downstairs, in what would be a basement in any other house. We don’t actually HAVE a basement. But this downstairs walks out to the backyard, so when you’re down there, you don’t actually really feel like you’re in a basement area - because you’re not.
So no, this house is not a tear down (although after the botched renos, I have to say it’s probably far more of a tear down now than it ever was!). Our outdoors is just so beautiful. We’ve fooled with it quite a lot in the years we’ve been here, so it looks nothing like what we fell in love with, but since we had a hand in the transformation, it’s safe to say we’re more in love with our property than even that very first look.
This is a part of our side garden:
This is a part of our back deck:
This is our kitchen deck. This picture was taken just after Ward finished building it. We have two long wooden tables there now plus wooden chairs, but I can’t find the pictures, so this will have to do for now!
We put in a new IKEA kitchen about three years ago that we like very much. These pictures are from just after that renovation - it’s too messy right now to take new pictures. Just replace the appliances with stainless ones, move the microwave to a different corner and replace the small bookcase with a large one with glass doors, and that’s about the way it looks now (when it’s not messy).
So you see why we’ve shied away from all the contractors who hinted it would be the perfect thing to tear down our house and put up some sprawling ranch house? Sure, it’s not perfect. It gets very cold, especially in the addition, during the winter. We have exterior holes which mice apparently have marked as the entrance to their winter abode (ie inside our floors).
But this contractor (the one who STARTS TOMORROW), who is a good friend of our bookkeepers, took a look at the house and said, “wow, look at those lines.” “What an interesting job this will be.” And, part of what sold us, “I like the actual renovation-type jobs the best.”
He also got bonus points for not laughing at the drywall mudding job in the master bedroom, which yours truly worked her behind off to accomplish, huge bumps and all.
Plus, he’s only ever been at the most an hour late for appointments with us (unlike other people who’ve worked on the house and seemed to consider arriving the next day as being “fashionably late”). Not only that, so far he has always CALLED us if he’s going to be late. We find this to be very amazing.
So this is the area he’s going to transform first:
As to why there’s an exterior door hanging in the middle of nowhere, I’ll just say that I’ve been known to say things like that scene in Sleepless in Seattle. You know: “why don’t we just pick up the house, rotate it, so that the living room is the dining room and the dining room is now the kitchen and …” Once, about an hour before company was due to arrive for dinner, I actually persuaded Ward to MOVE the train room into the dining room, and the dining room into the train room, transforming it into, uh, the dining room (again - because a month previously I had persuaded him to do the first switcheroo).
Anyway, I had the bright idea of increasing the valuation for our house (which kept being appraised as a bungalow, so that none of the living space downstairs, in the not-basement, was counted) by cutting away the floor and putting in an entrance right in the middle. It transformed our house into a “backsplit”. But it just never really worked structurally. (It did help with the appraisal value though. See, there is usually a method to my madness, if you look hard enough …)
So the door’s going to go. We’ll get a nice window, the ceiling put back in, a laundry room that leads into the bathroom (right now you get into the downstairs bathroom by going through the furnace room, which means walking by the cat litter, which our daughter Hayley is in charge of cleaning. Enough said about that cat litter - I’ll leave it to your imagination.) And upstairs we’ll have a nice little alcove where we’ll be putting a sofa bed. My mom will be able to have a nice little place to herself when she sleeps over.
It will be perfect. Just keep your fingers crossed for us, please!
Tags: Life, renovations
