Remodeling Envy

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: Reds, I’ve got remodel envy. Now, I’m a woman who loves the so-called shelter magazines. I subscribe to HGTV Magazine and House Beautiful. I follow interior designers in Insta and bookmark pages for the Kips Bay Showhouse and the One Room Challenge. But, you know, in real life, everything in my house has been more or less the same for many, many years, and the same can be said for most of my friends.

 But two years ago, my sister redid her kitchen. 

It was the real thing - everything old went, including an oddly placed wall that squeezed everyone entering the space. She had the whole, newly opened living room-dining room area painted and new flooring laind throughout the first floor.

And her kitchen! Not fancy by the standards of those show houses and magazines, but to me, cooking all these years in my 1930-something layout, it’s spectacular. Pristine cabinets and drawers with soft-closing hinges. New stainless steel everything. A beautiful tile backsplash over cool marble countertops. A farmhouse sink deep enough to immerse a stock pot in and sweet touches like adjustable lighting and a beverage fridge right by the french doors to the deck. 

Now all I can think of is how I could maximize my work areas (Barb gained at least twice as much counter space) and make my storage so much more efficient. (It might help to get rid of two completely dead corner cupboards.)

How about you, Reds? Have you ever had remodel envy? What did you do about it?

RHYS BOWEN: I’ve just been reading about Debs’ upgrading of her pantry space. It looks brilliant. I have to say that I like my kitchen the way it is.  It has a walk in pantry, a nice breakfast area and a balcony with a view to the hills opposite. No complaints there although we do need a new stove but can’t make the effort to choose one. Instead we have to light one of the burners by turning the knob and blowing on it.  Our kids despair! 

However when we first saw our house in Arizona I drooled because everything had been remodeled, updated etc. A whole house all shiny and new. Lovely new kitchen with plenty of space. Gorgeous shower. White quartz counters everywhere–so easy to clean, and that hard faux wood floor that can be mopped in seconds. And the best thing about it–no forty year’s worth of clutter!

HALLIE EPHRON: I do, I do, alas I do have remodel envy. My daughter is an architect and she has endlessly pitched ideas for moving this wall and taking out that one and opening up the kitchen/dining room and I can see it all. We *did* redo our kitchen back in 1980 or so but the idea of “opening things up” and wasn’t yet on the horizon.

Now however, whenever I experience a bit of “remodel envy,” my next thought is: let the next owner do it.  Because how do you even live through a remodel??

LUCY BURDETTE: I do love my kitchen in Connecticut with all my heart. The pantry is a showstopper with lots of shelves and drawers and space on the floor for pots too big to fit in the main kitchen. My favorite part is the counter, made of old chestnut from someone’s barn and refinished with marine varnish. We were lucky to have built this house 25 years ago so it’s laid out exactly as I wanted it. We got a good chuckle out of my son-in-law remarking that it seemed “dated.” I will replace appliances that die (the fridge is hanging on by a thread), but no remodels for me!

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Oh, gosh, I love our house. It has its quirks, definitely, and I daydream about how I could rearrange the breakfast/sunroom by blowing out the outside walls and make a screened-in porch sort of amidst the garden, but I'm never gonna do it and it would cost fifty billion dollars anyway.

 

Our home is from 1894, and we did a little renovating 20 or so years ago, but I kept every bit of original molding and decoration and  woodwork. I DID make a sewing room (yes there was a sewing room!) into a pantry, and a SUPERsmall bedroom on the 2nd floor into a closet for me (!!) but it’s really pretty original otherwise. Although–do NOT talk about the basement. There are nooks and crannies  in there (like a coal chute)  that I would not even dare go near.

DEBORAH CROMBIE:  We did the whole gutting/remodel thing back in 2007. We bought our circa 1905 house from house flippers in 1995, and the job they had done on the kitchen was far from satisfactory (although probably an improvement over the original!) so we moved windows and doors and put in all new cabinets, an island, and appliances. But we had remodel horror stories, for sure! 

 

The contractors started in January, then once they’d torn everything out, announced that they couldn’t go any further until our foundation was leveled. Then it started to rain and didn’t stop for weeks and weeks, so no work progressed. (The foundation leveling has its own horror stories!) We lived with a toaster oven and an old microwave in our dining room, washing dishes in the downstairs bathtub, for about three months.

The end result was fabulous, however, fit for a House and Garden spread, and we have never regretted it for a minute. 

JENN McKINLAY: I remodeled my kitchen myself so no envy here. It’s a 1959 ranch and I redid all the cupboards–scraping, sanding, refinishing inside and out, and new hardware. I did have to buy some new cupboards (bare wood and pre-made) to replace cupboards that weren’t able to be refinished. The fit was so tight, I had to wax the bottom of the cupboard and the slab floor and use my feet to shove it in place under my new granite counter. 

 

I did hire someone to put in granite counters and rewire the kitchen for the new steel appliances. But I put in my over the sink light and ripped out the vent and cupboards over the stove by myself. The plan is to put a skylight there (yes, I will hire someone) but I haven’t gotten to it yet because, alas, I am a seventy percenter and only get things about that far done and another project distracts me. LOL.

 

JULIA: How about you, dear readers? Have you tackled remodeling? And what, in your house, are you dreaming of changing? 

If It's my Hotel, This Must be HGTV

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: With apologies to the marvelous 60s comedy, IF IT'S TUESDAY, THIS MUST BE BELGIUM; I stole their title because if I'm in a hotel room, there is one thing on the increasingly wide screens in the room: HGTV. 

 

Readers, I looooove HGTV. I get the HGTV magazine (or as my son calls it, middle-aged mom p*rn.) But I don't have cable, except for the internet - we cut the cord some twenty years ago. So for me, watching the channel is a pleasure reserved for hotels and Carter's Automotive waiting room, where I will sit for three hours waiting for my Honda to be fixed rather than arranging for a ride because Doug Carter has HGTV on. (Know your customers.)

 

What do I like? Love It or List It, where Realtor David hunts for a dream house for a couple while decorator Hillary races to renovate the place they already own to make it a dream come true. It's particularly amusing since my sister became a Realtor a few years ago - I always thought deciding based on seeing three houses was a bit premature, but now I know just how fictional it really is. There's always a BIG conflict between the couple; he MUST HAVE a man cave and she will DIE without a walk-in closet. They tour houses that look, no lie, 800% better than mine and turn up their noses.

 

The day my mother died (I promise this isn't a sad story) my girls and I were headed back from the New Jersey that had admitted her. (She had been transiting through Newark Airport when she had her stroke.) We're in shock, sleep-lagged, because we had driven from 1am to 7am to be there, and it we were crawling along the Merritt Parkway on the HOTTEST day of the year when our AC died. Rolling down the windows made it hotter inside the car. We struggled along for another three quaters of an hour when I said, "Not going to do this." 

 

I navigated off the Parkway as Youngest searched her phone for a hotel, and we too refuge in a deliciously cool Marriott. We all took lukewarm showers and, wrapped in hotel waffle robes, spent the rest of the day watching Beachfront Bargain Hunt and eating take out pizza. Out of a terrible twenty-four hours, its become a memory I cherish (and we still joke about the couple who passed on a gorgeous lakehouse because they were afraid their three-year-old would climb on the built in bookcases.

Househunters International is another fave for all of us, mostly because it features couples who have jobs like "yoga instructor" and "doggie portrait painter" looking for million dollar properties in exotic locales. Are they laundering Russian money? Drug mules? We'll never know. One couple was looking to buy an apartment in one of Brazil's smaller, beautifully colonial cities, and they had just graduated from college, like two years before. FROM COLLEGE. The girls and I stalked their social media to try to figure it out. (Turns out her family had $$$$$.)

My new must-see if Farmhouse Fixer, mostly because the adorably photogenic Jon Knight is as passionate about creaky old New England farmhouses as I am. He had be from the first kitchen demo, where instead of swinging mallets through the existing cabinets - also known as the HGTV money shot - he and his worked carefully removed them so they could be, you know, recycled and reused by someone. I love you, Jon! Please come up to Maine and do a show on my house. I'll start a GoFundMe to raise the necessary $140,000 - $180,000. You guys will all pitch in, right?

How about you, dear readers? Do you HGTV? And do you have a special show you save for those hotel stays?