Being an Architect is hell … I’ve said it before and a lot of you have agreed with me. While I think it’s one of the best jobs you can have, being an architect can complicate other aspects of your life, aspects that allow “regular” people to go about their lives completely, and at times, blissfully unaware. For those of you that are musically inclined, you should be playing Gymnopedie No.1 by Erik Satie while reading this post (you can click here to play it in another window – it sets the right sort of mood for today’s post … I’ll wait while you get that going).
I am in full-blown renovation at my house at the moment, and I am either a genius or a complete lunatic for choosing this time to tackle the work. I am working from home so the good(?) news is that I am home to keep an eye on the work being performed and I am only a few short strides away from being available to answer questions. I’m sure you can see why this could either be a good OR a bad thing. Another consideration is that I was already trapped in my house during this pandemic and with the work taking place, there is plastic up and workers running around all over the place so I have lost the use of my entire house during the day and stay only within my bedroom/office. That bit is total madness by the way – I also have my two dogs in here with me all day and I’m not pointing fingers, but one of us has terrible gas.
While the scope of my renovation is fairly extensive, my available time and budget are finite resources. Over the past few evenings, I thought I would build a SketchUp model of my house so as I tried to convince my family of what we should be doing, the graphics would be in place to facilitate that conversation. I consider myself an expert in hand-waving, but 3d models work a lot better.
It took me maybe 5 hours to build this model so there are all sorts of things in my house that aren’t currently in this model … If I’m not working on it I didn’t model it. The plan above is my house, a vintage production architect-designed house from 1977 which was poorly drawn and even more poorly built. I also have the “construction drawings” for this house – all two pages of them – and the plan is mirrored from how it was actually built, and to correct the elevations, they just ran the elevations blueprint with the sheet flipped over but all the notes are mirrored. If you needed further evidence that these are NOT top-quality documents, the contractor wrote a note on the top of the floor plan page that reads “DO NOT DRAW like this” (click here for proof)
I thought this renovation might be fun to document on this site and it would certainly give me plenty of opportunities to write informative, yet ridiculous, blog posts along the way. Of course, I made this decision around 11:00 pm the night before the contractor was going to show up so I quickly ran around my house and took some fairly poor quality iPhone photos.
The image above is my family room and it’s where we generally hang out. That big round table isn’t normally in this room, we were trying to move all sorts of things out of the way before construction began. The sort list of scope we are tackling in this room is:
- remove all the popcorn texture
- new casing, base, and crown molding
- new paint everywhere
- all new recessed lighting (boo hoo, those brass square light fixtures are more appropriate for a 1970’s community youth center)
The vast majority of this renovation is really about scrapping off the icky and the poorly executed … and of course, removing the brown urine color scheme.
This is the bar – which might be a bit of a throwback but I like that it exists and we try to put it to good use (proof from our last big party) but it’s just … gross. Yes, the countertops are a delightful tone of brownish-yellow. I should also point out that the lower countertop elevation is correctly set at 36″ with the slightly elevated serving countertop set at 42″ … except, the floor into the Den steps down 6″ so when you are in front of the bar, it is 48″ – which means standing room only at the bar (guess how many times I’ve made that joke?).
In this area we are doing the following work:
- rebuilding the front of the bar so that we can put bar chairs in place here
- new countertops
- new sink and faucet
- new molding
- new paint
- new lights
- remove popcorn texture
- new cabinet hardware (glides, hinges, pulls, sanded and painted)
Believe me when I say that I will be ready to party again once this area is completed.
Of course, the kitchen is also being renovated, because it would be too easy to live through this renovation if we had access to our kitchen. In fact, I’m not sure renovations even count if you don’t take your kitchen out of commission and you have to wash dishes in a bathtub and relocate your fridge to the living room.
- new countertops
- new backsplash
- new sink and faucet
- new molding
- completely skim-coat the walls
- new paint
- new lights
- remove popcorn texture
- new cabinet hardware (glides, hinges, pulls, sanded and painted)
- sanding and repainting all the cabinets
This one will be painful to go through but fixing this single room will probably allow us to re-coup all expenses associated with this total renovation.
The rooms I’m not showing that are getting work done, that I will probably focus on at one time or another, will be the Utility Room and all the bathrooms. The scope in the various bathrooms varies but typically includes everything that we are doing in the kitchen plus the additional scope of replacing the tub in my wife’s side of the master bathroom (it’s a deathtrap, but I’ll save more on that till I am focusing on that space).
Just so this post isn’t completely boring, I thought I’d throw a few nightmarish photos in at the end (stop now if you’re squeamish). We’ve lived in this house for 4 years so far and based on how terrible the trim is in my house, I’m not entirely sure that I’ve made it this far with all my faculties intact.
(seriously, stop now or send all children from the room) …
The main piece of information you need to know about the picture above is that these two conditions are in the same room. IN THE SAME ROOM!! Every time I look at it I just say over and over to myself – like a lunatic – is “how does this happen?”
This is in the kitchen but the cased opening molding is the same as the previous image, just on the other side of the cased opening. Once you get past the ridiculous cake-batter wall texture, please make a mental note of the base molding. First off, it’s literally the cheapest and nastiest cove base there is, so that’s a bummer. The second and far more egregious observation is the amount of glue that was slopped on these baseboards when the wood flooring was installed. There is so much Witches Brew permanently stuck on these pieces that there is no triage here … amputation our only course of action.
Oh yeah … they painted latex paint over the original oil-based paint so the most recent latex is constantly sluffing off. If you try to clean these, and boy did we try, you end up just taking the paint off, and yet the glue stays behind, mocking you and your feeble cleaning efforts.
Did you happen to notice that the trim doesn’t line up in the corner? Jeez … F*%k you, base!
What?
Wait … what?!? Is that … I mean. What?
I bet you weren’t prepared for this high-quality base installation photo [heavy sarcasm], were you? Even with upper-level college math under my belt, I don’t think I can count high enough to list all the things wrong with this installation on the image above.
Are you kidding me?!? Did they really change base sizes on opposite sides of the same door – ON THE SAME WALL????
Yes, my friend. They did. Even the blanket in that closet is trying to escape under the door in an effort to get away from this base installation.
I know what you’re thinking:
Borson, you are faking all these terrible examples, there is no way these are real.
No, I’m really not. I’ve seen base in a Turkish prison that has been installed better than this. In fact, not only are these photos real, all these examples are in the same area of the house – like in the same 6 square feet! Before I built the SketchUp model of my house, you can see on the right-hand side of the above photo the techniques I was going to use to explain to my family who I was going to fix certain conditions.
Is this a Fendi store or is it the crown that ONLY exists in my master bedroom. If I have to answer that question, I will politely ask you to turn in your membership card at the front desk on your way out.
Which brings us to our last “Pre-construction” photograph … what is now becoming my quite famous fireplace (but I’ll get to that in a minute). A lot of the same stuff I am doing everywhere is showing up in this image:
- Remove the popcorn texture
- tear out the fake wood beams at the ceiling
- new tape, bed, and float with new paint
- new light fixtures (which will also include moving them so they are so obviously out of whack with the items they are supposedly intended to illuminate)
… and this one is a biggie
- remove all the stone from the fireplace, enlarge it, and clad it in new brick (which will be painted).
We need some additional bookcases in this room and I intend to build them into the ends of this new fireplace – which will put them close at hand in the space where I like to read. For all those people out there that think “don’t tear out that stone, it looks great!” … No, it doesn’t, I just have good iPhone photography skills. It’s so rough that it will rip your clothes (or skin for that matter) if you happen to get too close, and you can forget about cleaning it unless you take a shop-vac to it every week, and ain’t nobody got time for that.
To help people visualize what this room could look like, I took this opportunity to work on my rendering skills in Enscape and I whipped these images out this afternoon –
For the record, I actually do have that Eames chair and ottoman, along with the Eileen Gray e 1027 side table sitting in that exact spot (that’s my “book reading” spot – I feel smarter just sitting there).
Yes, I am aware that there are not world-class renderings, but these are the first interiors I’ve ever tried to work on, which included adding interior light settings, and for my purposes, they worked out well enough for me to convince others that this was the right thing to do.
But there is one problem … and it’s kind of a major one. My chimney does NOT want to play nicely. The guys came in and spent an incredibly noisy day laboriously chiseling the stone free from the brick structure and it quickly became apparent that there was a problem.
Around 54″ off the floor, the masons who originally laid this brickwork apparently took LSD and left me with the Quasimodo of fireplaces. I shared this image on my Instagram account (where I am providing regular – but not every day – status updates on the work taking place. If you want to follow things along, check out my Instagram Account) and I probably received around 100 direct messages from other designers telling me that they loved it in this state and that I should keep it.
That’s not going to happen – this is a suburban neighborhood and the overwhelming majority of people who would come in contact with this would think I was a complete moron. While I don’t normally let other people’s opinions about me dictate my course of actions, this is yet another instance where my amazing iPhone skills are not helping me out. This thing looks cool for a second, and then you think “Is this thing going to fall on me?”
Quite possibly, but Instagram thought it was cool so …..
This is what my life will include for the next 3 months – I am both happy and terrified at the prospect. Did I mention that we have an International Exchange Student coming to live with us in a month? Did I mention that I routinely have 5+ teleconferencing calls every day and that I am quite literally sitting in a construction site?!?
I might be crazy by the time this is all done but I can guarantee you that it won’t be boring. Hopefully, you’ll enjoy coming on the journey with me.
Cheers,
