Before _ After_ A Family Home Gets A Breezy Facelift

This house tour is brought to you by the new House & Home Designer Collection for Scotty's. Eight great patterns to mix and match. Find your style with Scotty's. This is a 1950s side split home in Guelph. Being a side split, there's just the four stairs coming up. So you didn't see anything to the kitchen, you just saw a long, thin, narrow room. You were able to see the beautiful big window, which was really lovely, but the back also had the same potential with larger windows and doors to be able to see out there. So that's why I wanted to get the wall down. My husband is a cook and an entertainer, so he and I came up with a plan. He really wanted the cooktop in the middle of the room. So I built the island around his request to be able to be where everyone was. The island's a little oversized for the space, but that was done by design because he wanted to be able to lay out all of his appetizers and whatever he had and have people sit with him and eat while he cooked. It was really important to me that when the cabinets were open, they're just as beautiful as they are on the inside as they are on the outside. So there's all maple veneer inside. All the drawer boxes are dovetailed maple. The countertop I sourced from Sea Otter. They are porcelain. I also put it up on the wall. I opted to do the porcelain backsplash. My husband likes to cook, and I didn't want to have to be scrubbing grout after he was done cooking. I expanded the size of the window over the sink because we back onto a golf course, so I wanted to be able to see as much of the backyard as I did from the front. Taking the wall down allowed us to have a much bigger table as well. The dining area was important to me because when we get together as a family, there's quite a few of us. We were able to put in an eight-foot dining table. I chose to do a built-in bench with storage, A, because we need the storage, and B, I was able to take the table out of the way so that I still had a nice flow from the living area to the outside without blocking it with chairs and the table in the way. I put the little built-in niche at the end of the banquette for the dog to keep her out of the way when she's eating because she's a little messy. The floors are always the first thing I choose. I always work backwards from floors. This is a wirebrushed white oak floor, engineered, and that was important to me because we have a Doberman and the smaller guy, she's a little chihuahua, but she's probably messier than the Doberman is, and I needed a wood product that could stand up to both. I love libraries, so I was trying to get a little bit of that flavor in this room. When we peeled all the angel stone off of the fireplace, the plan originally was to move the fireplace over so that when you came up, it was the first thing you saw. When we peeled all of the angel stone off the fireplace, we realized that there was cinder block in behind that goes down to the basement and then is part of the roof structure, so we had to leave it. We just put limestone over top and then used the existing fireplace, and I had to find an insert that fit. Everybody seems to be switching wood to gas now, and I didn't want to do that. This particular unit is really neat. It has its own combustion, and when the fire is in there, it turns and dances. It's not just like a regular flame. It makes little circles as it goes up. It's really beautiful. My big thing is texture, so I really wanted the texture of the wood. I like the black against the wood, against the white, and then I put the closed door on the bottom that's got the components in it for the TV, so everything's hidden in there. We used to have the gym down where the TV room is now, and I wasn't sure, are we just adding another TV room, or is it going to be a place that the kids will use, and they're down there all the time. The double doors from that room open up onto the pool, so they just go back and forth all day long between video games, TV, and pool, and so it's made a huge difference in how their kids are here more often, which is nice. The main bathroom, otherwise known as my daughter's bathroom, I wanted, when you walked in, for it to feel a lot bigger, brighter, more open. I want one tub in the house, so I decided to keep it separate so she could use the shower. She just has a small area to maintain. She also wanted a curbless shower. The house was already built, so it was a little trickier, so we had to use a shower base, and then we sloped out from the base. Hannah chose the floor in her bathroom. She wanted a pattern. She wanted something fun. What she wanted was the concrete tile, which I would have loved to put in there for her because they're stunning, but I was able to find a pattern that is on a porcelain tile because I was afraid of her dropping makeup or hairspray or any of those sorts of things, and as soon as we do that, you stain the concrete, and then we would have trouble. So this is a lot easier to maintain but got her the pattern. The exterior was original. It had wood board and batten siding and the original clay builder brick. The brick, unfortunately, was brought too close to the ground, so the snow and the salt over the years started to deteriorate the brick. So the first thing I did was pull all the brick off, pull all of the board and batten siding off, and then new windows, and we put stone on the exterior. I went with stucco because there was so much texture in the stone that I decided to go a little smoother on the second level to showcase the wood windows a little more. I work with a lot of Mennonites. I do all their drawings for their kitchens, so they're fully custom. He hand-built the windows, the doors, all of those from outside. I don't know what they're actually called, but the little corbel-looking guys, you can see them outside. I had him add all these. Yeah, it is amazing. Our goal when we first moved in was to have it renovated in two to three years, and it was ten because the project kept growing, and I had to keep adjusting the budget, so I had to keep waiting a little bit longer. And then the one thing I learned with doing my own space was the longer I was here, the more I knew how we used the home. A lot of times people say, you know, I think you're right. I wish I had waited because now I see that we use the space like this. I wish we had done that differently. So it's all about seeing how you use the space.