For an active Boise couple, retirement meant re-examining their lifestyle and priorities. It also meant rethinking their home’s suitability for the next chapter in their life story.
Vision
For our clients, retirement didn’t mean slowing down — it simply meant having more time to pursue other interests beyond their professions. Given their active role in the non-profit sector, these interests included entertaining, and they wanted to make sure their home was up to the task. This meant improving the functionality of their kitchen and expanding their outdoor living spaces to take advantage of a beautiful vista. The While addressing the issue of public space, they also decided it was time to give their private space a much needed facelift.
Challenge
Situated on four acres of mature trees and stunning views, our clients’ two-story home, built in the early 1900s, had plenty of entertainment potential. The kitchen, however, had not been updated since the couple bought the home thirty years earlier. With worn out formica and linoleum, and appliances that barely worked, it needed a serious update — and during the demolition phase we discovered that it also needed new floor joists. Turning our attention to outside entertaining, we needed to address both the creation of a gathering space as well as improving the esthetics of the home’s east-facing facade. Meanwhile, on the private side of their home, we focused our engineering on a master bedroom untouched, save for the addition of a six dollar light fixture, since its owners acquired it, and that suffered from a sense of claustrophobia imposed by attic-like angularities.
Accomplishment
Other than rebuilding the floor joists, the main work in the kitchen had to do with updating rather than reconfiguring. To make the room a more pleasing gathering space, granite replaced formica, and slate replaced linoleum. Our clients liked their existing cabinets, and elected to add to rather than replace them. We worked with a local cabinet maker to customize cabinet facades that blended the new with the old. To enhance our clients’ culinary interests, we added a prep sink and an under-the-counter refrigerator, along with something they had long wanted: a gas range — then installed a window above it to bring in another necessary component to great cooking: light. To provide more room for outside gatherings, and to take greater advantage of the view from the east side of their home, we worked closely with our clients to design a patio roof that doubled as a rooftop patio, and connected that space to their ground floor patio via a custom spiral staircase that they helped design. We also connected it to an existing rooftop space on the other side of the master bedroom. In this room, we reengineered the ceiling joist system to remove constraining angles and open the room up to become a place of space and light that invited one to do more in it than go to bed.
Highlights
Over the course of a five-month remodel project, the changes to our clients’ home transformed it from a place whose drawbacks they had learned to live with for some 30 years into a home that elegantly and efficiently supported their evolving lifestyle needs. Getting to that point was made possible by a very close collaboration between our clients, who were very detail oriented and clear about their remodel intentions, and a STRITE designer, project manager, and construction lead. The result of this collaboration for our clients was not just a home they wanted to live in for the rest of their lives, but the satisfaction of having played a major role in its creation. For STRITE, the satisfaction was not only in a job well executed, but in knowing that we had the people and processes in place to accommodate the level of involvement our clients desired.
Like so many homebuyers, Janet and Russ had to carefully weigh the allure of their ideal home against its affordability — and like so many homebuyers, their decision was to stretch their budget to accommodate a house they knew they could live in and love for many years.
There was indeed plenty to love about their north Eagle home. Built in the early 1900s, the two-story house was situated on four acres with mature trees and a beautiful view, and it was close to Hewlett-Packard, where both Russ and Janet were employed. But after 30 years, they were ready to rekindle the love affair with their home, and that meant addressing its imperfections — some of which dated back to when they first moved in, and some that simply reflected the toll of passing years.
It wasn’t as if Janet and Russ hadn’t made home improvements along the way. Twenty years earlier they had put in an office/closet/bathroom addition, and in 2005 they added a full basement, bringing their house up to 2,600 square feet of living space that better accommodated guests and hobbies. A few years ago they created a large patio with pavers, leaving additional footers for an eventual roof.
Unfortunately, their initial remodel project created an exterior appearance that didn’t match the rest of the home. As Russ describes it, “It left an ugly wall on the east side of the house that clearly looked like an addition.” For Janet, one of the biggest drawbacks to her aging home was its kitchen. “We had redone the kitchen when we first bought our home, but hadn’t touched it since. We had formica and linoleum that was worn through, and the appliances were getting very old.” The couple was ready as well for some changes to their bedroom, which Janet described somewhat charitably as “old and dark.”
“It was faded and dingy,” she states more bluntly, “and the only source of light was a fixture we bought for $5.99 when we moved in. It was just not a place you wanted to be.” Clearly, it was time to make some improvements — and time was an additional concern of the now retired couple, who wanted to spend the rest of their lives loving their home as much as they had three decades earlier.
Russ and Janet had first talked to STRITE when they considered doing their patio addition — but this was prior to the economic downturn that caused many would-be home renovations to be put on the back burner.
“We ran into STRITE every year at the Tour of Remodeled Homes,” Janet remembers, “and we thought they were very nice people, and we admired the quality and creativity of their work. They clearly know how to remodel challenging spaces.” By the end of 2013, however, Janet and Russ were ready to do more than just talk to the nice people. They were ready to make some major changes of their own.
Russ and Janet’s remodel project, which began just before Christmas 2013, started with the master bedroom. Constrained by odd angles that made the room feel more like a cave (Russ’s description) than a living space, STRITE set about solving some structural challenges — challenges that the couple could especially appreciate given their engineering backgrounds. As Janet recalls, “In every spot STRITE had to do some pretty miraculous figuring — and figuring out how to make all those angles come together in a nice cohesive look was a lot of hard work.” To bring additional light into the room, STRITE replaced an attic vent with a window.
Moving into the kitchen, the project hit a delay when it was discovered during the demolition phase that the floor joist system would have to be replaced. “It was a mess,” says Janet. “We were putting in a slate floor, and you want that to be well supported. The more layers of old house we got down to, the worse it was.” Ah, the charms of an older home.
Other than rebuilding the floor joists, the main work in the kitchen had to do with updating rather than reconfiguring. Russ and Janet liked the existing cabinets made with quarter-sawn white oak, and elected to add to rather than replace them. “The biggest changes to the kitchen were going from formica to granite and from linoleum to slate,” says Janet. Perhaps the most challenging aspect of the kitchen remodel was choosing the appliances. “We wanted to avoid the stainless look,” Russ says. “Big surfaces of cold stainless steel don’t go very well with the warmth of natural wood cabinets.”