Diary of a Calgary House Renovation–The Highs And Lows of Renos
We are pleased to announce we will now be featuring guest posts! This month, we feature Calgary homeowner Brittany Kolba, and here she shares with us her experiences of her own home renovations here in Calgary. Stay tuned for more feature posts in the future!
Finding the perfect home (spoiler alert – it doesn’t exist!)
Three years ago we spur of the moment decided to put up our family home in McKenzie Town up for sale. I felt sick about it. Not only buying and selling stressful, this home had more sentimental value than I could have ever imagined. We lived life hard in that home. It was our first home purchased together. It’s where we brought home our second daughter from the hospital, where we got married, where our son took his first breath. We welcomed a dozen different dogs into that home to foster, some who found new homes, and some who didn’t spend near enough time on this earth. The front steps where our girls got their back to school photos taken every year. It was the house that made us, and we were about to say goodbye. It sold after four days on the market, on our second wedding anniversary.
The hunt for a new home was one that was beyond stressful. We had no desire to move communities, we just needed a bit more space. After awhile we realized that there were no homes in the area that fit the bill. We searched high and low, all in deep south communities and landed on a home in Lake Chaparral. I hated so many aspects of this ultra-nineties home but knew it had good bones. The kicker
was, we finally closed on a home big enough for each of our kids, only to find out a week later, we were expecting a fourth baby. Ha!
The home is at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac, with easy access to Stoney Trail and a five-minute walk to the lake where we skate in the winter and swim in the summer. There are a lot of quirks with this home, and not the charming kind. First off – the day we moved in, things looked…different. The seller had switched outdoors, lighting fixtures, both exterior and interior. They’d basically staged the home with
beautiful permanent fixtures and then we are assuming returned them to the store and reinstalled the old fixtures.
Within minutes of getting the keys to our new home, my mom and I were smashing out backsplash in the kitchen. It took us a few hours, a lot of noise, and some muscle. Keep in mind, I was about 12 weeks pregnant and felt like garbage, but we had 15 days exactly to completely gut this home and remodel before losing possession of our McKenzie Towne home – we took possession here on December 1st , and turned keys over on the 15th . Oh, I didn’t mention it was also Christmas? Okay…it was also Christmas, and you bet I was determined to get a tree up, haha!
The front closet is TINY for a home of this size, and a family of six fills that thing to the point of it constantly spilling out into the hallway. When we moved in, the floors were a honey coloured oak, and the backsplash in the kitchen were a thick, salmon coloured subway tile. All the countertops were mismatched.
The master bathroom was a poster-girl for a nineties master bath, with a corner jacuzzi tub, again, with that salmon colour. We were planning another home birth and knew that the bathroom needed to be overhauled. Because I love local and small businesses, it was important to me that the contractor overseeing everything was just that, and we chose West Oak Renovations, run by Ben and Amy, a couple from Okotoks to oversee our whole home renovation. They turned into great friends, which is always a bonus!
Those honey oak floors stayed, we ripped up the other half of the homes carpet, and the flooring company matched the plank size and style as well as the wood type. Then the entire main floor was sanded and re-stained in a light grey.
The counters in the kitchen were all removed and we installed a beautiful white with grey fleck quartz. The kitchen island was dark brown and we eventually stained that with grey chalk paint as a temporary solution until we have money to redo the cabinets.
We installed all new light fixtures to the front of the home, the living room, my office and the kitchen. The salmon coloured tile was now gone, as well as the charcoal 1 foot by 1 foot hideous tile off the free-standing fireplace, and all replaced with a white arabesque tile with dark grey grout. We initially wanted a herringbone pattern, but once the tiler came and saw the space – he suggested a smaller pattern as we were going to end up wasting a ton of tile – so I made a split-second decision on that tile. The plus side to a 15 day turnaround time for a renovation, is there is no time for second-guessing!
The upstairs to the home needed some major work as well! Josh repainted the entire home, top to bottom, in a dove grey, and then we painted our bedroom the same colour as we had in the last home to make me feel better about everything. The two kids rooms upstairs both got overhauls – with one room done in monochrome and hand-painted mountains and the other with a huge vinyl flower decal install from Urban Walls.
Our master bathroom was done a few months later. My dream homes all are Farmhouse style, so I designed this room to fit that. West Oak was creative with the countertop situation, we hauled out that hideous jet tub and replaced it with a beautiful free standing soaker. This almost didn’t happen as the floors were very shallow to install the tap, but I basically threatened our (good friend) plumber with his life if he didn’t make this tub work, haha! Don’t mess with a pregnant lady and her soaker tub! We installed shiplap, which I painted white, installed mirrors and lights ourselves, and purchased all the décor from Homesense.
Renovations are not for the faint of heart, and it seems once you start, you may never stop. We still want to do our kitchen cabinets, our basement, replace all window coverings and doors, and do a laundry room makeover. Oh, and convert my front office into a mudroom with lockers. Or, we could just move, haha!
It is so important to find a contractor that respects you, your time and your money. I have heard a ton of nightmare stories, and while we had our fair share (our flooring guy borrowing money to even get to our home, just to sit and eat a bucket of chicken while on the job. The counter guys throwing away our $400 kitchen faucet. Our tile not working. Our bath almost not working…), it was never our contractors fault. What is the worst renovation story you have heard or experienced?
Oh, and in case you are wondering – I got the tree up, and we had a magical first Christmas in our new home, starting new memories.
By Brittany Kolba,
Calgary homeowner
