An Architect’s Own Remodel and Lessons Learned

Architects are our own worst clients. Here is Jeff's story of remodeling his own house and the lessons learned.

Here at Board and Vellum, we have been very busy this spring! We moved into an office down in Pioneer Square, took on several great new retail projects, are deep in design on several single-family residential projects, and our team has grown. Ryan Adanalian is now part of the team and he'll soon be introducing himself on here and discussing his architectural passions. What's been keeping ME busy in my personal time, though, has been the remodel of my own house (less personal time = less blogging time, sadly, if you've been wondering).

This remodel has been a fun journey and is generating plenty of material to write about (if I just had more time!). Case in point is how the whole project started. Perhaps this will sound similar to many of you?

Our house. (Before the remodel.)

My partner Chris and I love our location. We like our house. It never really compared in charm to our last house but we just KNEW that with the right remodel it would be the house we'd want to live in forever. So, year after year, we continued to fall in love with our great neighbors, being able to walk to pretty much everything under the sun (or clouds, this is Seattle after all), and the fact that we could sit on our front porch (which we did love) and say hello to the people walking by. What we didn't continue to fall in love with, though, were the insides. The oddly angled peninsula in the kitchen filled my dreams with visions of hacking it away with a sledgehammer. The place where the fireplace USED to be since it fell down in the 2001 earthquake ate at me. Most irritating, the lack of a master bathroom in a house which is often filled with out of town house guests made sharing a bathroom a royal pain. I knew that if we had kids down the road it would drive me even crazier.

So, adding a master bathroom was in order. Easy enough. I began with the task, though, of master planning the whole remodel. I wanted to make sure that nothing I was going to do now would have to be undone to do any future work. This is probably the best advice for anyone starting a remodel. Figure out EVERYTHING and then work backwards. The problem came up not with my approach, but with my profession. See, being an architect is a strange thing. While I don’t wear all black or stand coldly at a cocktail party looking largely bored, I DO constantly redesign the space I’m in. The coffee shop I’m in right now writing this, for instance, really needs a better mantle on the fireplace. Gosh, that is ugly. If they just raised the top by a few inches and then tweaked the trim. Dammit! See, it never goes off!! So when it came time to plan out my whole house I really dived in. I designed EVERYTHING.

And then, as things go, I fell in love with EVERYTHING! Suddenly the peninsula that I never liked in the kitchen became something that was practically violently assaulting me on a day to day basis. That thing stalked me. The salt and pepper pattern solid surface countertop that hid sticky stains from drinks would then make my mail stick to it and rip half my mail apart when I pulled it up became unbearable. Chris had to stop me on a weekly basis from just ripping the cabinets out from the wall. So, without real intent, a plan came into place to dive into the whole damn remodel. Want, it seems, became NEED.

Clearly, we’re deep into first world problems here.

Whatever you call it – scope creep, the “while you’re at it” syndrome, or “just one more thing”, these are all valid and dangerous things as part of a remodel. I knew this, so I figured I might as well tackle it all before construction started. I just hadn’t fully wrapped my head around the fact that scope creep can happen during the planning phase as well. Ironic, of course, since I talk to my clients about this all the time.

Architects, without any doubt, are the worst architectural clients. It became this endless feedback loop of dream, design, dream, design. I often longed for the day when I didn’t just live and breathe this profession. Normal people have other hobbies and passions, right?

So where did we end up? We forged ahead with a full set of plans for the house. A plan to turn our garage into my studio / guest house got shelved for the future for a variety of reasons, but otherwise, we jumped on in. We’re only a few months in with a target September move-in date, but so far my planning has really removed any changes in the scope. We did have to end up removing our existing brick foundation and put a new concrete one in place (the plan was originally to leave the brick and put a new concrete foundation inboard of the existing brick and dig it deeper), however, that was caused more by our sandy soil causing enough instability during the excavation that it just made sense. When this is all over, we’ll have given new life to a 110-year-old house with a great new finished basement (that will be DRY), a new kitchen and some restored moldings, and that fabled master bathroom.

And for those who know me well, don’t you worry, there will be an epic Lego room down in the basement. That’ll deserve a separate post.

If you’re thinking about a remodel know that the planning and dreaming ahead of time really does pay off. Keep collecting those dream images. Bookmark every image you like on Houzz.com and keep thinking about how to make your house more efficient. And now, you really will be a better client than an architect.