Close to the end of my home renovations, the light went on for me.
I’m the customer from hell.
Of course, now that the kitchen and bath renos are done, I’ve learned my lessons.
‘Oh, can you just add this, modify this, replace that?’ – that kind of stuff must drive professionals crazy. My bad.
I thought I was ready for renos, having most of the materials, or at least having settled on them, and the contractor would find all the fiddly bits (that’s a technical term for supplies such as pipes, nails, screws, etc.). Nope, there’s so much more that goes into home renos than I realized.
And I thought I was using a mixture of common sense and financial common sense. But every decision and ‘little request’ has consequences. When I couldn’t find prefab walls for the tub surround that fit a 72-inch tub, I went with glass tiles. That meant extra work and time.
Even during demolition, there’s discoveries and decisions that impact the overall project. We didn’t expect to find five layers of flooring and about eight times as many floor staples as required. I became quite proficient at removing staples over the course of a weekend.
Then there’s supply order delays and supplier errors to be factored in.
And you don’t always get what you pay for.
To get a vintage look, I used reproduction arborite, a design commonly known as cracked ice, but it’s also known as mother of pearl. Many of us have vintage pieces with the Formica brand surface that came in many cool colours. I have my parent’s green kitchen table.
Now this product is reproduced in grey, yellow, and red. It was one of my few pricey splurges, a special order. While I love my red countertops and backsplashes, the red ‘cracked ice’ does not come close to what the old product looked like.
For my reno, I incorporated some old hardware – bakelite door handles, vintage pulls, a chrome toilet paper holder from the 1940s, glass towel bars, vintage light fixtures…
Using these sorts of materials have their own challenges. I needed one more bakelite drawer pull than I had and you can’t just head to the nearest big box hardware store for another, so I will be assembling fiddly bits from various sources to fake one up.
I said in the first installment of my home reno saga that this wasn’t going to be one of those six or seven figure jobs that wins awards and gets glossy spreads. But, I love the results.
Okay, so the big question everyone asks – what’d it cost ya?
The tally for supplies, plus way too many restaurant meals (it turns out to be really tiresome trying to make interesting food with just a toaster oven) minus the fiddly bits left over from assembling the cabinets that I was able to return for a refund, etc., etc, and the damage was only about $36,000.
Here’s the first two installments of this adventure:
- March 22
- April 19