First, some housekeeping. Thank you to everyone who’s entered in the Love Your Body giveaway so far. I am really enjoying your entries! Also, as you may have seen here yesterday, I was part of a social media show on ‘A Morning’ yesterday, along with Stephanie, Melissa, and Lisa. It was really fun. You can watch my segment here. (I’m not going to watch it. I can’t watch or listen or read myself after the fact. What’s done is done!)
Everyone at ‘A’ was fantastic to work with and it was a memorable day. As always, after the tiny segment was all done (I think it was five minutes) I thought of a zillion things I wanted to say about BLOGGING. Egads. Someone needs to have me on an hour long phone-in show. With a panel. Who wants to join me? :)
This morning I woke up thinking about the reno. I first talked about it here. It’s something Mark and I have been talking about a lot, although it hasn’t bee reflected in the blog very much.
Oh my god, it’s all so overwhelming.
My first issue is this: why hire an architect, and not just a builder who offers design services?
If you ask an architect they’ll tell you that an architect is eminently qualified. Years of experience in design and traffic flow etc etc. They’ll say that builders (who may have “designers” on staff) don’t have the same qualifications.
If you ask a builder, they’ll say that an architect overcharges and is just a superfluous member of the team.
Mark and I went to the Home Renovation show at Lansdowne last weekend. First of all, can I say this, I hate paying for trade shows. It’s like a mall charging you admission so you can have the privilege of shopping. We could have saved two bucks per entry by buying our tickets online ahead of time, but apparently we had to give a whole bunch of personal information in exchange. Is four bucks worth a years of junk mail and telemarketers? No.
We wandered the aisles looking at countertops and picking up brochures for everything under the sun. At one point we stopped to chat with a well-known company that does renos and additions. Mr. Negative freaked us out about several unforeseen issues, like the possibility of there being asbestos in the stucco. Maybe he was doing us a favour by opening our eyes to some things we hadn’t considered, sure, but he went on to trash-talk architects. “We have a design team! You don’t need an architect!” We walked away from him feeling worse than when we started out. I still think it wasn’t very professional of him to badmouth people who work in his industry, no matter what he really thought.
Another person (not at the trade show) told us about kickbacks between architects and builders. And what if the architect comes in with an estimate that’s really low, and then we hire a builder who ends up blowing our budget?
All of this freaks me out to no end. Who do we trust?
It’s times like this I wish that I had been raised to be a contractor. Or we had a more solid connection to someone in the building industry.
We met with Architect D last week. (I’m not sure if I’m going to be using names at this point in our process, so this will have to suffice for now.) It was pretty exciting and nerve-wracking.
We liked him very much. He was very professional, a total straight-shooter, and understood that we weren’t made out of money. (I wish we were!) The first thing he said to us that we COULD consider selling our home and moving out to Stittsville. We’d get more house for our buck out in the sticks. For example, look at THIS house. On first view I liked so much that I fleetingly considered country living.
I know that our dollar would go much farther out there but it would break my heart to leave Westboro. I love it here so much that I’m doomed to stay.
Once that was out of the way we gave him a quickie tour (it WAS quick, because our place is so small) and gave him a general idea of What We Need To Do. Our emphasis was (hopefully) on smarter use of living space and storage, while maintaining true to the character of our home. We don’t want a huge home, we want an efficient and livable and lovely home. And closets.
It is obvious to me that we have a wish list that’s as long as my arm and a budget that does not match. The question is, can we end up with a renovation that will make us happy that does not require us to work until we’re 75? (I would be 75, Mark would be 85 for the record.)
We asked Architect D the builder question and he said that we wouldn’t need an architect if we were planning on building a simple one-storey addition right off the back. Our needs are more complex, he said, traffic flow and all of that. I have to give him that. He’s been doing this for almost 30 years. I have a rough idea of what we want but need a lot of help planning it out. But still, it’s hard to know what to do. He doesn’t come cheap.
He’s coming back to us with papers in the coming weeks and we’ll have a clear idea of a breakdown of costs. As much as we like him we need to set up a couple of others to talk to so we can compare.
Anyway, whatever route we decided to take, the reno will be crowdsourced here on the blog. :)
My first question to you is about bathrooms. Our plan is to build a 3-piece bathroom in the basement. There’s already a powder room on the main floor and there’ll be no change there. The second floor bathroom needs to be updated in the reno. Would you opt for an ensuite bathroom off the master bedroom (toilet, sink, walk-in shower) AND a separate bathroom for the girls (toilet, sink, tub/shower) … or one very large bathroom, very possibly with separate commode – Euro-style – which appeals to me GREATLY.)
Here’s my question: I realize the girls will be teens some day, but do four people really need four bathrooms? Do I really want to be cleaning four bathrooms until the end of my days?
