Designing our Dream

Don and I have looked at many homes and have been renovating and I like to think perfecting what we do. Having said that there is always ways to improve! Paul is an architectural designer at the remodelers and it was him who came up with our kitchen design dilemma. I’m sure he’s done tons of plans, and his expertise has paid off... We had thought of keeping the kitchen where it was, but the area was really too small and with the basement stairs not moving there was not much we could do about that. Another option would have been to put our kitchen where the old living room was. The space was great, but having a kitchen in the front of the house just isn’t that great of an idea... Here’s what we were originally thinking:

Well we are closer to our dream a big thanks to Paul and the Remodelers for their experience and help!

In the beginning ...

We... Don and I (Karen) purchased our Brentwood bungalow in 1998. Renovations since then have included a new kitchen (1998), new hardwood in the entrance, halls and kitchen (1999), new hardwood in the family room (2005) raising the sunken family room floor (2010). This I will refer to as Phase I although in reality it was probably Phase X, but I do get dates and renovations confused as there have been way more than I'm willing to admit to! Why raise the family room floor you ask? Well we have been thinking (OMG) that we will get to that age...in the distant future.. where we don't want to go up and down stairs. OK there were only two stairs, but yes I can be a klutz and have done the occasional misstep! So Don raised the floor which created a interesting man cave where our family room used to be. This interesting man cave had our beautiful fireplace removed, and the patio doors which happened to be the only light source for that section of the house. Argh... I would have to live with this for the next unknown number of years as we planned our dream home.

Phase II

The roof... Well the hail damage took it's toll on our roof in 2009 and although we got an insurance claim to repair it, we knew we wanted to make changes to our house so we let it wait. Probably a bad decision that we didn't get to planning our renovation sooner, but I suppose life has a way of working out.... More about that later....OK - the roof...  First we bought a house design package to figure out the new floor plan we wanted. Next we bought a better house design package, because the first one really didn't do the trick and wouldn't design a new roof for us. Then in the spring rains we got this year our poor roof started to shed the remaining asphalt that existed on the curled up remnants of it's shingles. Our planing started in earnest! Hmm these do it yourself packages are great, but you really need some training to do it properly and no we didn't have any training! I started to look for a company in that would take the beautiful floor plan we created and turn it into something more substantial like a building permit. Well I started to google in earnest and came across a wonderful company The Remodelers. Well we did quite a bit of homework and decided that we would go with them to remodel our house! Time in our case is one of the biggest reasons for this decision. Don... who is a very handy and talented man, can and in some cases has done it all in the home renovation world. He could and would do it himself, but it would literally take us years to do. With the Remodelers our renovation will be about 6 months. Oh to have a home in one piece with no more renovations required, yes it was tempting. I guess what really tipped the scales for us and made us sign on the dotted line is the quality we saw and were assured would go into our home. So... this is where our adventure begins...