Category Archives: Renovating

When The Going Gets Tough, The Tough Go Shopping…

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And so, it’s that time. The time to pick out what we want in terms of finishings for Boo Manor. Granite, flooring, plumbing, lighting… the works. This is where major dithering and debate can happen, not to mention untold arguments, disagreements, exhibitions of righteous indignation and walking-off-in-a-huff displays of orneriness. This is where a designer earns their keep, delicately negotiating between husband and wife, while trying to ward them off of decisions bordering on, in aesthetic terms, capital offences. Unless, of course, they are working with us. Then they just need to keep up.

The first order of business was finding granite. In that there are much fewer options for granite, and infinitely more in terms of tile, paint and colouring, the theory is that we start with an anchor and work up from there. So we picked up Gene and headed off to London to find some stone.

The granite showroom. How we are used to shopping for granite.

What we found at our destination was a showroom that looked a whole lot like the showroom that we picked our last granite from. There is a wall of samples, of a reasonable size, that show the types of stone available and the finishing options that can be applied. We hung around for a while, waiting for the granite consultant, considering our options. This, though, is not how Alberto helps you to pick granite. No wimpy samples for him. We’re going back into the warehouse to look at whole slabs.

Shopping for granite, Alberto style. Samples? Bah. We’re going to look at slabs.

Granite, when quarried, starts life as a 50,000 lb. block of stone. And no, I am not making that figure up. It’s a block that is about six-by-six-by-nine feet in size. From there, it is cut into a slab that is, depending upon the quality of the stone, either 3/4″ or 1 1/4″ in thickness, but still a good six feet by nine feet in size. And not light. To check out one stone, Alberto had one of the workers turn it around. This involved a ceiling mounted crane that can literally go anywhere in the warehouse, pluck up a stone in hydraulic pincers, and carry it wherever it needs to go.

Moving a slab of granite. Making it look this easy involves some impressive machinery.

When you look at a slab, you realize just how much variation there is in stone. Two slabs mere feet apart in the original block can show completely different colouring and pattern. Given that a kitchen the size of ours will use at least two (and probably three) slabs, you need to work with consecutive panels from the same block. And you get to pick your slabs. The actual one that will go into your kitchen. Or bathroom. Or wherever.

The CNC machine makes cutting giant pieces of stone look like child’s play.

Working with Alberto was hilarious. For the most part, he doesn’t think about price. Differences between grades one and five are rounding errors, and from there we progressively move from eek to boing. In his perfect world, every kitchen would be finished with Carrera marble. In fact, he showed us slabs that came from the same marble quarry that supplied stone for sculptures by Michelangelo. Impressive as that is, marble is really not optimal for a kitchen; it is porous, shows scratches and changes colour with time. For Alberto, this is ‘developing a beautiful patina’; and in a bathroom, I might go for it. But I cook with cast iron frying pans, and I’m not about to change, so granite it will be.

Having toured the warehouse in its entirety, we quickly settled on a short list of two slabs. As I said, keep up; we move fast. One was an amazing piece of granite that featured gorgeous, warm colouring – browns, beiges and blacks in a really intriguing, vibrant pattern. Very tempting, and for a while it was my first choice (although I think it never got higher than number two on Dianne’s short list). It would have made a major statement in the kitchen, and pretty much defined the look and feel of the rest of the room. Counters as show pieces. Two years ago, I would probably have gone there, as well. Today, we’re buying for us, not for what other people think of us.

A beautiful piece of stone. Vibrant and impressive.

And that led to what quickly became a unanimous choice – a mellow, green and brown granite slab dominated by gorgeous undulations of grey, black and brown; it almost looks sedimentary, but isn’t. That also led us to revisit our choices in terms of cabinet colour (we were going with an ivory cream colour, but have since recanted – we may be decisive, but we’ll still change our minds when necessary). Called ‘sea mist’ or ‘Bora Bora’, depending upon who you ask, it is a fabulous, relaxing, awesome-looking piece of stone. The two slabs in the warehouse, however, are already spoken for. Which will simply not do. Alberto needs to find us three slabs of Bora Bora, stat.

Bora Bora. Or Sea Mist. Your call. Alberto, we need three slabs.

Of Windows And Walls…

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Of all the rooms in Boo Manor (and there are many) the most questionable one was the kitchen. Kitchens are the heart and soul of a house. It is where every party winds up. Some parties start there and never leave. In Boo Manor, the kitchen is the main thoroughfare between old and new, and between living room and dining room. And, sadly, it was rather dark and not terribly functional.

As has already been noted, the kitchen was last done sometime in the mid-to-late-eighties, a time when bangs, baggy sweatshirts, pencil jeans and questionable headwear were all to popular. Think Boy George, or the Thompson Twins, or Platinum Blonde, or just about any other musical act with too much hair and too little fashion sense. I think that this gives us all a pretty good sense of where this is going now, doesn’t it?

And so, the kitchen needed to go. As we’ve already discussed, though, the previous layout really didn’t work very well. It worked as well as it could given the space, mind you, but it was still less than optimal. So a merely upgraded version of the same layout meant this would have been just another kitchen renovation to be damned at a future date as someone else’s (ours, this time) fashion crime. Which would not do at all. There was nothing left for it but to change the layout. Changing the layout, however, requires a new window in the kitchen.

Putting windows in a house is not for the faint of heart at any time. This involves major structural changes; you are putting a hole in an exterior wall, where no hole existed before. Depending upon what your house is made of in the first place, this is going to be harder or easier. In our case, we are dealing with a wall that was built more than a hundred years ago, and is about 18 inches thick. So in other words, no small undertaking.

There was a reason that very old houses had very small windows, of course. And that is mostly that rock is heavy. So a wide window with really big, heavy stones above it isn’t going to work so well. Narrow is better. Not particularly expansive and certainly not letting a lot of light in, mind you, but for structural soundness a narrow window is definitely the way to go.

A narrow window is not part of the design, however. We are looking at a window that, when done, will be about nine feet wide and five feet tall. This is a window of significance. A window to be reckoned with. It will not be a wimpy window. Except it is still a window in an 18-inch-thick stone wall. This is going to require some serious engineering to make work.

Cue the stone masons. Who apparently are all too happy to take one narrow window, move it three feet to the left and add about seven feet to its length. First, though, we needed structural support. Given the width of the walls, this meant adding not one but two beams, each made of three two-by-eights laminated together; one supported the roof, while the other supported the ceiling beams. Both needed to be long enough to span the old window and the new, structurally tying into the walls that are already in place.

With beams in place, the masons could begin excavating a hole. Mostly this involves attacking the mortar between the rocks, one rock at a time, until you have attained a hole of appropriate size. This would have been easier, apparently, if the house hadn’t already been well insulated with spray foam polyurethane. Apparently that stuff is strong. Stronger, in fact, than the mortar. And therefore infinitely more frustrating to try to break apart and tear down.

It’s a hole. A very big hole. (Photo Credit: Gene Martin Design)

Eventually, though, we had a hole. And it was big. Very, very big, in fact. From there it was a matter of filling in the old window and finishing off the boundaries of the new window. To do this, the framers built a wooden ‘buck’ (a fake window made of plywood and two-by-fours that replicates the exact dimensions of the new window) and the stone masons filled in the blanks. A piece of Indiana limestone provided a new sill, and non-polyurethane-covered stones were reclaimed to finish off the wall edges.

One big hole, and one giant pile of rubble. (Photo Credit: Gene Martin Design)

Sadly, we weren’t able to get out to the house while the window was being built, because it would have been pretty awesome to watch. The end result, however, is also pretty spectacular. We have a new window where one did not exist before. And we have no window where the old one had been.

Taking the old rocks and making them fit, the old fashioned way. (Photo Credit: Gene Martin Design)

The weather was favourable enough throughout the process to allow the mortar to cure, without having to resort to tarpaulins and heaters. The result is a hole for a window that a nineteenth-century stone mason would have thought impractical, and probably bordering on the delusional. For the masons working on Boo Manor, though, it was just another day at the office. And for us, it’s the basis of a pretty awesome kitchen.

At the end, there was a window. Or at least, there was a hole for a window. (Photo Credit: Gene Martin Design)

And So It Begins…

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It would be easy to assume that nothing has been happening for the last little while. And nothing could be further from the truth. It’s just that most of it involves lots of follow-ups and discussions and preparing quotations and figuring out just what this little renovation is going to cost us. That was a lot of Gene working behind the scenes, developing specifications, producing drawings, conducting site visits and getting quotes, until he could put a number in front of us. And what a number it was.

But we are now beginning. The paperwork is signed and we are officially underway. We did a detailed walkthrough with Gene and Seren of the plans, the quotation and what that would mean in terms of work. Neither Dianne nor I passed out, which we are certainly taking as progress. We also did a detailed walkthrough of the house itself, to go over clarifications and be able to get a real sense of what would go where, when that would happen and the questions that would need answering. We have already made changes as well. Which took all of about an hour to start identifying. Add a new toilet, change the approach to heating water… it is mind bogglingly amazing how easy it is to add things on. And it is amazing how much discipline is required to keep a project on budget. Based upon our track record to date, our amount of discipline would appear to be highly questionable indeed.

Some of the changes are quite reasonable, on the face of it. Rather than a new and larger hot water heater, we are taking the plunge (as it were) and going with a tankless, on-demand system. We had done some research earlier that raised a few cautions about proceeding with an on-demand system rather than a traditional hot water heater. In particular, early systems (and by early, we are talking only a few years ago) could run alternatingly hot and cold, and took some time to deliver heated water. Depending upon the draw, a trickle of water might meant that the hot water doesn’t engage. And when the final verdict of Consumer Reports is that many homeowners are better off with a newer model, high-efficiency traditional water heater, it’s enough to make you think twice.

Certainly there are pros and cons to both: the tankless system is a more expensive up-front cost, but saves on fuel costs over time. The hot water heater means you have hot water right there when you want it, but uses a great deal more energy and has a finite amount of hot water; a couple of showers later, you are waiting for more hot water. But the prices on tankless, on-demand solutions have come down, the reliability is going up, and given that we will be back and forth to the house, we won’t be paying to keep a really big tank of water really hot around the clock. So while we had originally veered in the direction of going with a traditional hot water heater, we are now going the on-demand route. We shall see how that plays out going forward.

In the next couple of weeks, we will be getting to do some of the fun and exciting things about renovating: choosing stone, flooring, paint colours and lights. For now, we get to face the fun and exciting challenge of paying for it all.

Of Renovations New And Old

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This is not the first time that the kitchen of Boo Manor has been renovated. It is not even, in fact, the first time that the kitchen of Boo Manor has been renovated by Gene, our designer/contractor/awesome-wood-working guy. The current kitchen was actually his first project on the house. It was also not his last.

Boo Manor, pre-addition. Or renovation. Or any attempt at beautification whatsoever. (Photo Credit: Gene Martin Design)

The owners that built the current addition approached the project in phases. First was the kitchen, back in somewhere in the mid-to-late 1980s. Then came the garage and coach house, which was built in about 1992. The final addition, which added the great room and master bedroom, was constructed in 1996.

The kitchen, however, was an interesting case. The overall structure was itself an addition, although one that goes back to the 1880s. The walls, built in the style of the original house, are substantial. Because it is an addition, however, there was no basement – its foundation is at ground level.

I have already discussed the problems in the current kitchen: it lacks natural light, it has less storage than we would like and doesn’t make full and effective use of the room. Dianne is also not particularly taken with the colour of the cabinets or the countertops. All that makes a pretty strong case for renovating.

That said, there are also some definite positives to the kitchen. For starters, it was built by Gene. And by that, I mean that he physically built the whole thing. By hand. Himself. Gene is a woodworker, and in a previous incarnation of his business also did custom cabinet-making. Every box, every door, every drawer was hand-framed and built by him. And the result, 25 years on, is pretty damned impressive. The doors are all inset into the cabinet frames, and every single door and drawer still closes with precision.

That said, it is a beautifully built set of cabinets for a less-than-optimal room layout. Which means, sadly, replacing them with something else. Although we have been able to make use of a separate free-standing cabinet that Gene also built, which will now be refinished and take pride of place in the dining room as a china cabinet. The island will make its way to the office, where it will be an awesome working space. And the rest of the kitchen has found a new lease on life courtesy of Kijiji.

One of the most interesting thing about how the kitchen was renovated last, however, was its timing. As I have already noted, the kitchen was completed before the new addition was constructed. During the later renovation, the current owners wanted to (very reasonably) keep their new kitchen intact. This was easier said then done, however. Because the kitchen was a later bolt-on to the original structure, and because the addition was designed to integrate fully into the old house, the renovation needed to be done around the old kitchen. And by around, I mean around: beside, above, and below. It was a box that needed to be kept, without being obvious that it was a different box.

Excavations for the new basement. Love the drainspout on the old house; functional AND stylish. (Photo Credit: Gene Martin Design)

That meant a number of logistical challenges had to be addressed. The addition was being built with a new basement, which was excavated around the kitchen, leaving it floating in space above the new foundation. Until the addition was completed, it was wrapped in steel sheets that had previously been the roof of a lean-to garage, in an effort to keep the water out. And throughout the entire renovation, the tenants lived in the house, happily making breakfast mere feet from an open pit.

Watch that last step. It’s a doozy. (Photo Credit: Gene Martin Design)

Gene recently found some pictures from the time of the original excavation for the addition that illustrates exactly what they are dealing with. And impressively, the kitchen didn’t shift an inch through the entire process. It has good bones, this house. Really good bones.

To Ikea or Not to Ikea? That Really Is A Question

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So we’re building a kitchen. A very big kitchen. A very big kitchen with lots of cabinets.

Having already built a house once, Dianne and I both know full well that one of the largest expenses in a kitchen is cabinetry. Our previous kitchen was built from custom cabinetry, and the price tag was impressive. So we already had some idea of what we were getting into as we considered taking on a brand new kitchen project, especially one that will now require as much cabinetry as is now being planned.

Many people swear by custom cabinetry, of course. Partly that’s practical: when you are dealing with a design that needs to fit within pre-existing walls, especially walls that are not necessarily completely square, fitting perfectly uniform boxes can be extremely awkward. Custom means that the cabinet will be tailored to fit regardless of the realities of the room. At the same time, some people insist on custom cabinets for the simple reason that they can.

Others will tell you that going the custom cabinetry route is a waste, and that you can get perfectly viable options much more cost effectively. What is considered one of the highest quality options, at a much more affordable price, is Ikea. Yes, that Ikea. The home of flat pack, Swedish meatballs and do-it-yourself hernias.

Ikea – Home of flat-pack, meatballs and do-it-yourself hernias (Photo Credit: North America Retail Architects Inc.)

While frequently snubbed as down-market, many renovators and designers have positive things to say about the quality of Ikea kitchen materials. Extremely positive things. One designer and renovator provides a detailed deconstruction of their kitchen materials, and why he has used them in more than 20 renovations to date. Another designer extols her love of Ikea kitchens, and explains why they are her preferred go to option.

The points they make are significant. The quality of their boxes are good, and often as good as you will get from a semi-custom kitchen manufacturer. Go to an Ikea showroom and open one of their cabinets, and you are faced with extremely solid 5/8″ thick MDF. Their hardware is also (mostly) excellent, and on par with custom installs, right down to soft-close drawers and doors. Their options in terms of drawer and door designs aren’t stellar, but are certainly competent. And if you do it right, and particularly if you install it yourself, you can get the same quality kitchen for as much as half the price. All of which are compelling arguments in favour of Ikea.

Ikea kitchens can indeed be funky, well designed and appealing spaces (Photo Credit: Carol Reed Designs)

So, to Ikea or not to Ikea? That is the question. For us, there are some drawbacks, and they are worth taking into consideration. For starters, the door styles tend towards the more modern. Based upon their catalogue, we thought they had a more traditional bead-board styling, which is what we are looking for, but it turns out to be a high gloss door with two inch strips of laminate positioned closely together to suggest bead-board. In the catalogue, it looked promising; in real life, sadly, it looks cheap. Their drawers have also changed since the two articles above; they are now exclusively plastic frames inside. I have no idea what their wear will be, but I’m enough of a snob to want real wood in my drawers, thank you very much.

We thought Ikea did bead-board. Less bead, more board, and not liking the final result (Photo Credit: Ikea)

The largest argument against, however, has to do with the size of the boxes. They are only sold in standard widths, meaning that if you are running the full length between two walls, there is a very good likelihood of leaving gaps at the end. More importantly, however, the height of all their cabinet boxes are standard, and designed to result in a uniform 36″ cabinet height once a counter is added. For my height, a counter of at least 39″ is a minimum; any shorter, and I can’t work for more than a half-an-hour in the kitchen without massive lower back pain. Meaning that our out-of-the-box Ikea kitchen would need about 35 linear feet of custom footings to raise the standard boxes to an appropriate height. The possible savings quickly start to disappear.

If you are trying to save money on your renovation, and in particular if you are going for a more modern look and feel to your kitchen, Ikea is certainly going to save you some money without sacrificing too much on quality. When it comes time to renovate the kitchen in the condo (and that day is certainly out there somewhere in the future) we full expect that Ikea will be our source of supply. For Boo Manor, however, we’re going the custom route. It will cost us more, certainly, but we get exactly the cabinets we need, at exactly the height we need them at. That is an investment that will quickly pay off.

Let The Renovations Commence!

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We have finally taken possession of the house. Which means that the renovation plans can now proceed in earnest. And an hour after picking up the keys to the house, we were well into discussions on what to do and how to do it.

The plotting begins. Meeting at the house with Gene & Seren.

Since our initial meeting with Gene, he had been working on some conceptual options for how we could approach the renovation. In particular, a big question was what to do with the kitchen. Kitchens play a major role in any house. They are its centre, its gathering point, and the place every party migrates to. It is important, then, for the kitchen to be a place that you want to hang out in.

This creates a particular challenge in Boo Manor. The kitchen is truly the centre of the house – it is the dividing line, in fact, between the old house and the new house. Not just a place to wind up, it is in fact a thoroughfare, and one that is quite well travelled. On one side is the formal dining room, a gorgeous wood-panelled room in the original farmhouse. On the other side is the great room, the central living room with open windows, warm hearth and welcoming light. In between these two entertainment spaces, and central to both, is the kitchen.

The current kitchen has a number of problems. For starters, it is dark. It is an addition to the original house, but likely a very early one, and the walls are the same 18-inch-thick masonry featured in the rest of the farmhouse. Two narrow windows are the only source of light, and two doorways carve a path from old to new. The layout of the kitchen does what it can within this space; the cupboards and counter line one corner, and an island is an anchor in the middle of the room. Around the perimeter, however, is dead space. The previous owners had a table in the far corner, and a cabinet on one wall, but the result is a dark room that productively uses only a fraction of the space that is truly available.

Faced with this challenge, Gene came up with some options. The first was simply a refresh of what was there now; the same layout, just more modern and with new appliances. The challenge is that it solves none of the current problems, it merely gives them a new veneer.

Thinking inside the box only gets you so far…

His second option, though, revisited the room from the outside in. To be functional, kitchens need a workable triangle between fridge, stove and sink. The sink is in many ways the anchor, and ideally is below a window, to give you something to look at while otherwise up to your arms in soapsuds. Given that the windows that exist are both narrow and in opposite corners of the kitchen, immediately adjacent to each doorway, they didn’t afford much in the way of an option. Gene’s solution? Let’s move the window.

And so began a design that envisioned a good 10 feet of window, lightening up the room considerably and providing a suitable anchor for the rest of the room. A counter could now line the outside wall, along with fridge, dishwasher and cupboard space. Across the room, more space for pantry, ovens, microwave and appliance storage. An island with cooktop becomes a central focal point for a completely revitalized kitchen that becomes somewhere you want to stop and spend time in, rather than something you want to pass through as quickly as possible on the way to somewhere else.

On the other hand, we could just completely rebuild the box…

The new design solves a number of problems with an otherwise difficult room. It becomes much lighter, makes far better use of space and provides considerably more storage. And all we need to do is carve a brand new window out of a hundred-year-old wall. That seems reasonable, doesn’t it?

Engaging A Designer

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In order to satisfy ourselves on the financing requirements for the house, Dianne and I want to get a sense of what we are looking at in terms of renovations on the new property.

For the sake of convenience (and budget), we’re staging the modifications that we make. The first plan is to get the house itself in order, which largely involves renovating the kitchen and two bathrooms, and making some minor changes to the basement to accommodate a media room and wine cellar. Later, we’ll worry about the office and coach house, and still later we’ll tackle storage for the motorcycles and a workshop. Somewhere along the way, we will also build a wall.

A designer and contractor that we referred to quite early on in the process was a woodworker and designer who lives, quite literally, down the road. Even better, he had done all of the previous major renovations on the house, including building the coach house, construction of the addition and renovation of the kitchen. A fairly obvious place to start, then, in terms of talking about what we planned on doing.

Dianne and I scheduled an appointment for yesterday in order to meet with him, find out more about his work and approach, and walk through the house with him to discuss our planned changes. We met him at his workshop, which is also his house, to review some of his previous portfolio, get a sense of how he works, and have a general conversation before walking through the house.

Simply based upon what we had seen in the past, we were impressed with his work. The great room in the new addition is post-and-beam construction, and not just beautiful but breathtakingly well built. The joints and seams are, well, seam-less, even after 17 years. Seeing his own house provided similar reassurance of his craftsmanship. He is in the process of building an additional sunroom and deck on his house, and currently has the posts and beams up and the framing for the overhead roofing in place. Looking at the construction, he is clearly someone that is painstaking in the details.

Even better, he also has the original drawings from the construction of the addition and the coach house to work from. He knows the house well, likes working there, and is really pleased with the changes that we want to make (which basically address previous shortcomings, or finally tackle challenges that were ignored in earlier renovations – simply because you have to draw the line somewhere).

Both Dianne and I were extremely comfortable talking with Gene from the outset. His process is solid, he wants to work collaboratively, he appears entirely fair and objective in his pricing and and his work is both quality and in keeping with our own tastes. So, despite saying that for any professional you should call around, review qualifications and check experience, our process of finding a designer and general contractor pretty much came down to one meeting, a handshake and a glass of wine. Or two.

In fact, we left five hours after we had arrived. An hour meeting had stretched considerably, and had evolved from a discussion with a potential supplier to a conversation over wine with our future neighbours, telling stories and relaxing in the quiet of a country evening. I suspect we’ll have a few more evenings like that.