The Seymour Project

Post 25: Before and After: The Big Reveal

We purchased Seymour in November of 2005 and this is what it looked like. Orange and old.

Then in October of 2006, under construction...

Then another 12 months later, in October of 2007, 23 months after we took ownership, here is the new Seymour...

posted by Mortal @ 11:49 AM 3 comments

Post 24: Before and After: The Second Bedroom (2nd floor)

November 2005

February 2006

May 2006

July 2007

posted by Mortal @ 11:44 AM 0 comments

Post 23: Before and After: The Main Bathroom (2nd floor)

November 2005

May 2006

July 2007

posted by Mortal @ 11:23 AM 0 comments

Post 22: Before and After: The Kitchen

The changes are starting to look pretty dramatic, and the pictures really speak louder than words. So I’ll leave you with the pictures…

November 2005

February 2006

May 2006

May 2007

posted by Mortal @ 11:09 AM 1 comments

Post 21: When the Walls, Come Tumbling Down

The exterior walls that is. After a year working on the interior, and getting it almost up to snuff, we had to turn now to curb appeal. Our bright orange brick exterior, the 1 meter step up to our front door, the leaking eavestroughing, the rotting porches… they all had to go.

Seymour has a brick façade on its front, and cheap vinyl siding coving up decades-old insul-brick on the other three sides. While we liked the brick, it had been painted and repainted too often, such that removing the paint would require a sand-blasting, but this operation would also likely damage the brick and worsen the look. We’d already damaged much of the brick already when we installed the new casement window and front door with sidelight. So what do we do? We’d gone completely new on the inside; why not do the same on the outside?

I hired a couple of university students to help me take down the front verandah, then I bought a tall ladder and started taking off the vinyl siding at the back of the house. While we were again engaged in demo, we were talking to stucco and siding companies getting quotes. We talked to 5 companies and decided to go with a small immigrant family (natch!), a father and son team, to stucco Seymour.

The biggest surprise about stucco, the way it is performed in Toronto, is the mess it creates. Not just for the homeowner, but for the whole neighbourhood. To prepare the surface, sheets of Styrofoam are attached to the exterior walls, then smoothed with a tool that was a combination trowel and rasp.

The workers sand the walls with the tool, which has sharp points (screw points) sticking out of its face. They are levelling the surface, and in the process creating this snowstorm of Styrofoam dust that blows everywhere, drifts into neighbor’s homes, and clogs storm drains and gutters. If you aren’t initially on good terms with your neighbors when you start a reno, you’re going to be mortal enemies with them when you finish stucco’ing!

posted by Mortal @ 9:58 AM 0 comments

Post 20: Stairways to Heaven

During the demo phase, HOT and I dragged bag after bin after bag of debris down the original 93-year old stairs between the 1st and 2nd floors, damaging them beyond repair (the basement stairs were a crippled, creaky and worthless to begin with). We decided to replace rather than go through a painful, lengthy restoration. Mr. Flora introduced us to Tony, an Italian stairmaker who had worked the Riverdale-East York area for decades. Tony came out twice to measure, worked with Mr. Flora on the rough opening dimensions he would need, and timed the shipment to coincide with Mr. Flora’s schedule on flooring and finish.

From Tony I learned the differences between open and closed tread, straight and winder stairs, and paint grade vs finish grain wood. I also learned that railings are not quoted with stairs, and depending on your choice, can be as expensive, or even more expensive, than the stairs themselves. While the wooden stairs, with proper measurements, can be constructed in a factory with machines and a workforce, iron railings like we chose have to be installed by hand, with a drill and a hammer.

Tony was an accommodating man, even when faced with newcomers like us who, mistakenly, ordered the wrong type of stair for the basement (we ordered open tread on one side, when we required closed tread on both sides). I learned of our mistake over the phone while at the office, with Tony and Mr. Flora and the delivery truck at my house trying do unload two staircases. “We’ll take it back,” Tony reassured me. “We’ll fix it.” He did, and they did, at only a few dollars extra cost.

posted by Mortal @ 9:40 AM 0 comments

Post 19: “Finish Work” Doesn’t Mean You’re Finished

There are stages to a gut and reno job like we were doing: planning, demo, foundation work, water supply and drainage, HVAC, electrical, insulation, drywall and taping, priming and painting, and finally finish. Finish, though, as a noun, is such an all-encompassing stage, it typically requires its own team of designer, contractor and subs. If you’re doing it yourself, as we chose to do, it is an endless stream of piddly little things, from light switch covers to door knobs to painting trim to any other thing that wasn’t done by the pros.

We’d signed Mr. Flora for all the work past demo and up to but not including finish. And he’d done an admirable job. We were now successfully moved into to a home that had all but one of its windows, doors with locks, a fully-functioning 3-piece bath (in the basement), and heating and air-conditioning. We had a kitchen with cupboards and a sink; we had all our appliances hooked up, even the washer/dryer in the basement. We had primer on all the walls to keep the dust down. We even had sparkling new hardwood floors throughout.

The first thing we tackled on our own was tiling. We had the front entrance to do and all three bathrooms. Though the work was hard, I really enjoyed these jobs because we could splurge. We bought expensive and exotic marble – different styles for the different rooms – because each job was small unto itself. A 50 square foot entryway done in travertine marble only cost about $300! And it looked great. Once we got the hang of spreading thinset and which colour grout to use, we really motored through these jobs.

With the 2nd floor bathroom taking shap, the second thing I tackled was the vanity. This was really fun because it started off with a flea market find – the old curved-front dresser – for $65. The concept was something we’d seen on the home reno shows: take an old dresser, drop a sink in it, cut some holes for pipes, and call it a vanity. Cutting out the holes and opening up the drawers for pipes… that wasn’t too difficult. The head scratcher was after I’d put it all together, and the faucet leaked!

Since the dresser only cost $65, I splurged on the faucets and bought almost the best our reno center had to offer. That they leaked could only mean (I thought) that I’d put something together wrong. For 2 weeks I fretted over it, taking it apart again and putting everything back together again (not the dresser, but the pipes and connections). Finally I took the valve out of one of the brand new taps and, with it in the closed position, blew into it. Lo and behold, air whistled through it. I called the manufacturer, downloaded the parts sheet and they mailed me out two new valves the next day. Voila, a new vanity!

posted by Mortal @ 2:18 PM 1 comments

Post 18: Getting Green, Getting Brown

Everyone who’s done a reno of any size knows, while you’re putting in the sweat equity, there are few pleasant surprises. At the end of the job, yes, the sweet smell of success, but while you’re mired in it and shovelling sh*t all day, it’s mostly briar and bramble and too few roses.

We had one of those rare bluebirds though, and from an unlikely source. Mr. Flora’s HVAC man was a head-down, get-the-job-done Chinese engineer named George. He came in with his tin-cutting helpers, and after a fly-through introduction to our requirements in the basement, took his copy of the blueprints and went to work. Alarms went off initially when I came to the house that first evening and found ductwork running through the center of the basement bedroom, effectively eliminating all the headroom I’d gained by raising the entire house! But Mr. Flora calmed me, redirected George, and told me he’d watch closer.

Look closely at the picture to the right. Taking the photo one day after the ductwork fiasco, I was standing on my main floor, looking down into the stairwell to the basement. At this point, our new staircases hadn’t arrived yet, thus the ladder to the right which we used for access. But you also notice something else crowding the opening. It’s, um, the furnace. You see, George had originally placed the furnace further to the left, under the floor and out of the stairwell, but we realized we needed room to add a turn to the ductwork he was rerouting into the bedroom. So he had to move the furnace. Where does one put a furnace? A rational question, but one that didn’t occur to George. He just moved it into the freakin’ stairwell, not for a moment thinking, um, the stairs have to go here!

Anyways, that’s a long story to introduce the rather incompetent George, who nonetheless installed to my satisfaction our new HVAC system. While he was working, though, he dropped a pearl of unexpected wisdom into my hand. “You can get rebate,” he said. “I know lady who examine your house.” He gave me the card to Ms. Lin, of Greensaver.

Greensaver and the government program that spawned it are both, unfortunately, defunct. Ms. Lin went around examining homes for energy efficiency, writing and submitting reports to the appropriate government office, and prying dollars out of government hands. For $210, Ms Lin tested our home for “heating, building shell, and hot water systems.” The more efficient the home, the higher the score. The trick with a reno was, the lower the initial score and the greater the spread to the higher score, the more money the homeowner gets.

Our initial rating (see image on left) is telling: Ms. Lin had to write our -4 rating by hand … her computer model didn’t go that low! But look at the new score to the right, taken after installing new windows and new doors, insulating the whole house, drywalling, installing a new furnace, putting in an energy-efficient hot water heater and faucets and toilets, and finally showing proof of purchase of scads of new energy-efficient appliances. We went from -4 to 57. That brought us a refund of over $2,000, enough to pay for a much needed break in Cuba. Thanks George.

posted by Mortal @ 8:40 PM 0 comments

Post 17: Drywall to Cabinets to Floors
We were really happy to learn we’re coming to the drywall stage. It was a necessary milestone, made all the more urgent since we inked the sale document for Palmer, our first Toronto home. After 3 short years in the East York neighbourhood, we had sold 13 Palmer, and had a closing date in hand. That meant finishing Seymour, at least to a stage that we could live in it. There were still a ton of jobs: hanging drywall, priming everything, putting in the new hardwood floors, installing new kitchen cabinets we’d ordered 6 weeks earlier, hooking up new appliances. It also meant getting at least one bath and shower in full working condition, not to mention the kitchen so we could cook and refrigerate food.

When drywall goes up, if you’re dealing with professionals, it goes up fast! The boom truck delivered the sheets of drywall through our 2nd floor master bedroom window a couple days in advance of installation, to allow them to acclimatize, during which time Mr. Flora was completing all the framing preparation and window/door surrounds. Then, one morning, he brought in a team of three young Mexican boys sub-contracted from a local drywall company, and let them go to it. Within 4 hours, they had finished hanging half the house! Four hours! (I visited at 8:00 am before going to the office, then snuck back for a peek at lunch.)

I can’t say they did a perfect job; they covered up a couple heating vents in the basement and I’m sure there’s still one return air duct hidden in the new ceilings, but with our move-in date threatening to overtake our reno schedule, speed was the name of the game.

We had ordered the cabinets from Home Depot. I shopped the design around, from off-the-shelf to second-hand to high-end, full design and installation shops. Prices ranged from $6k to $25K. We chose a mid-to-high end beechwood for the doors, and didn’t go for granite on the countertops. Where would I find a place to spend an extra $4,000, I don’t know!

The flooring, for instance. This was a complex decision, not the styles, but how much to put down. We initially thought only on the main floor, and for the longest time entertained the idea that we could salvage whatever was on the 3rd floor to save a few bucks. But just like they say on the home reno shows, Mr. Flora repeated earnestly: “When you have everything else new, you’ll regret it if you leave something old in place!” He was right, of course, and luckily we listened to him. We did hardwood throughout the main and second floor. I spent an entire Sunday afternoon with him, the week before our move-in date of July 01, sweating and banging the planks into place with a nailer and mallet. It felt good doing some of this work myself.

posted by Mortal @ 10:54 PM 1 comments