Rejuvenation Projects Blog

To start, a refresher on the exterior of my home on the date of purchase:

The first official picture of our house

Check out the hot awnings, the trim around the garage (yes, that’s pressure treated wood), the stairs going up to the front door.  What’s hard to truly appreciate from the picture is just how ugly the front stairs/door combo really were.  That said, we had decided to let it slide for a while – that is until I noticed that the boards used to build the stairs were “loose”.  So in the middle of our office project, I was standing outside getting some air and I decided to lift one up and see what was underneath.

A closer look at the stairs in question

My dad had always been a fan of this plastic wood/composit stuff.  I don’t know, for some reason it made me uneasy.  Upon pulling up the stair, I realized that there were concrete stairs underneath and that they were falling apart.  Surprise, surprise – and of course, this was the exact moment that I discovered one of my neighbors was a contractor (convenient, I know!).  He had just pulled up from a day of work and I could hear him having a good chuckle at my dilemma from his driveway.  At this point, my hub had arrived and wanted to “know more” about the cracking concrete stairs, stating that he thought it could be the reason our cold storage had sprung a leak during spring.  Long story short (seriously, it was way longer), we quickly realized that we had to rip the stairs out, seal and repair our cold room, and put something back in to gain entrance to our house.

Our "fixed" concrete stairs

Once we got all of the plastic stuff off, we quickly discovered that the broken concrete stairs were actually the second set.  Notice the missing awning, new glass insert in the front door, the missing bushes – ah, gotta love the million little projects along the way.

One set on top of the other

We demoed it.

No more stairs! Or ceiling in our cold storage!

It made such a mess, wow.  Thankfully, our neighbor Dan (of Kehler Renos, Ottawa) was helping us out… well, really – he directed and we obliged.

Cold room repaired, framed in and ready...

Ready for what?  Well, since we had to rebuild the front steps – I decided to incorporate a front deck into the design.

My new front deck!

Is it a porch?  In my head, a porch is covered.  I had a million pictures of the during now I have no idea where they are.  Ah!  That’s what happens when you do a project in six days (my hub and the neighbor did it after work over two weekends, madness!).  We’re going to paint it out next year and move the path – but for now, it looks like this:

Our updated curb appeal

Soon we will be painting out the trim and getting new eaves, the rest of the awnings will be down and we will need to pick new lights.  So far, it’s very popular in the neighborhood – front sitting areas (large ones at least) aren’t very common in our area.  Any suggestions on lighting??

The wall, ready for built-ins

We started with a blank wall and a need for storage – from here, we hired an excellent local woodworker who came in and carefully measured everything. The overall goal was to maximize the storage space and align the office with the kitchen by ensuring that the cabinets matched.

Kitchen assembly

As the unit was huge, it was necessary to assemble it on-site. Our cabinet-maker used the floor of the kitchen to put it all together.

The first section is up!

Here is a shot of the first section in place.  You can see our cabinet-maker in the kitchen assembling the next section.

The bookshelves installed

The base is to be completed with doors and drawers – we’re also going to add crown molding and prep it for paint.  I know painting over wood isn’t a popular choice but we’ve decided to do that to maintain the feel of the house (and be consistent with the kitchen).  My hub and I are doing the finishing ourselves, hopefully the final product will be beautiful!

We got the keys to our house in November of 2009. It was a bit of a mad dash to prep it for our December move-in. We had to get it all releveled, rewired, and painted top-to-bottom. On top of that, we ambitiously bit off a kitchen renovation and had eyes on our home office.

The room we selected for a home office is on the ground floor of the house – in front of our kitchen, beside the living room area. With this in mind, we really wanted it to be a working room (as my husband works from home) that could be used by anyone and everyone.

Here is what it looked like in its original state – the previous owners ripped out the old carpet and left it soft blue (with rose pink closet interiors). This had originally been the master bedroom – but all doors had been removed…standing directly in front of the window to the front lawn (the right window in my first post), this is a view of the closet wall. You can see the (renovated in the 60s) kitchen through the door.  Click on any photo to see a larger picture.

This is the room from the opposite perspective. The window is nice and large – and notice the ceiling fan/light fixture combo that came with the house. There were ceiling fans everywhere (and where there wasn’t ceiling fans, there was tacky fluorescents).

As we had decided to renovate both the office and the kitchen, we decided to demo the wall with the closets to gain some valuable floor space in the kitchen. It’s amazing just how much debris can come out of a single wall demo – we did all the demo ourselves with the help of some friends – demoing is very therapeutic, I have to admit. Rebuilding, on the other hand…

With the wall gone, we considered for a brief moment going open concept – but an office/kitchen area wasn’t really ideal for our needs.

It made it look so much bigger though!  You can also see that the fan is gone, replaced with a temporary solution.  What lighting fixture do you think would work in this kind of space?  I’m partial to the Pembrook but am open to suggestions!  With the wall gone, my hub started to frame out the space and come up with a way to repair the holes left in the ceiling.  This was much harder than in looks – our walls are all double gyprocked and have a layer of plaster on them (horse hair?).  Every wall has its own depth – hence the interesting ceiling framing that you can see in this picture.

This is the wall my hub built – his first wall in a very long time, it was a little crooked. This is where we started to learn in the reno process that we aren’t as handy as we thought we were…that said, it turned out well enough. The door opens and shuts, we managed to hide any great differences with selective use of molding. And with that – I offer the final wall, finished and painted.  The only thing that gives it away is the ceiling plaster job.

We managed to salvage enough original molding from the closets to frame out the new door. I stripped all of the moldings and repainted them (this was harder than doing furniture, it surprised me).  The door offers a view into our evolving kitchen reno – you can also see things like the ceiling patch job, some remaining wall repairs (from having the house rewired), and the original closet footprint on the floor.  Our plan is to have a built-in that will hide all of this, bringing it all together and hopefully maximizing the space we have for books.  Recently, we managed to finally hire a woodworker to do up a set of built-ins for this wall. I can’t wait to show you the work-in-progress!

Hello everyone!

This is my first post to the project blog – I thought I would take a moment to introduce myself.  Hailing from the Great North, I live in the capital of Canada – Ottawa, Ontario.  I recently (November!) bought my first home with my husband (and our dog and cat).  Here’s a picture from the summer, before our close:

Oh and did I mention that we want to do a lot of the work ourselves?  And that we are two busy professionals?  Thankfully we have some good friends, a handyman that lives close (and finds our projects amusing), and a contractor (just in case!).  We are obviously in reno-love with our home – hopefully our budget can survive.  So welcome to the ride, if you have any questions please let me know.