The Big REVEAL

One of the funny things about watching home renovation TV shows is the splash, glamour and drama of how renovation/ home building occurs. Renovations that take up to 6 or 12 months are shown in 1/2 hour, 1 hour or 2 part episodes. Although there is pain/ drama in the show, it all seems very artificial and contrived. Real renovation is nothing like that. There is pain/ drama but it is real and has real consequences. For example, if we run out of money during the construction, we really run out of money. If we screw up on our construction, it is a real screw up and fixing it is a big deal. The same can be said about the BIG REVEAL. It’s a big part of the shows. The doors get opened, home owners walk around, fake cry, hug the builder et et. Everything is perfect from the paint/ furniture/ carpetting et et.

Real Reveals from our own experience is not like that. If this is the experience you want than you should buy a house already built and walk in the front door. Our reveal experience was fantastic and amazing for us but it came in sputters rather than a big splash. The reason for this (and I believe this is common) was because the builder was behind schedule!

We had planned on selling our old house to coincide with moving into the new house. We had planned to do this during the spring market of 2014 and in fact we did sell our house. Unfortunately, selling a house and closing are different and when we sold our house, we were told the builder would be done by May so we planned our closing date in June. Of course June rolls around after we sold the house and the house wasnt finished so rather than moving directly into a finished house, we moved instead to our inlaws for the summer. This lasted about one month. The builders still rushed to finish the house but by the end of July, they only had the interior finished and than they went on holidays. So on the day we received the house, the floor was varnished, the kitchen was in, the laundry was in, three bathrooms were complete but we were still missing one vanity for the mainfloor powder room and some tiles for our range hood. I spent the next week (actually three weeks) installing our closet organizers, we had window blinds installed maybe two days after we moved in and our security/ home automation/ video remainded incomplete. In addition, the outside soffits and siding were also incomplete.

Was it amazing? Yes. Was it everything we wanted? Yes. But it is not like the BIG REVEAL on TV. Instead, when the movers came, we had boxes and boxes of stuff lying around the house. The new house lacked basic furniture to fill up the rooms because we didnt have them from our previous house.  We spent days and weeks unpacking our boxes and throwing them away. This is where my wife really carried the load because on many days I was either working or fixing up our closet organizers.

Our BIG REVEAL didnt come in one splashy 5 minute finale to a 1 hour episode. Our REVEAL came in fits and spurts as we spent days and weeks cleaning and organizing rooms for our kids, buying things we needed and putting things were they needed to be.

We can now say our house is amazing! Way beyond anything we could imagine when we started this process out and we really need to thank our builders for this but it is definitely not a TV show and for anyone out there considering this, you should be prepared for the same experience.

floor just finished

stain glass transoms themed to children’s rooms

dining room

staircase with a rest

oil rubbed bronze fixtures

chandelier

his and hers

view of the lake from the turret

kitchen with hand drawn tile backsplash courtesy of Linda Paul Studios

basement bath

laundry

How did we find our contractor?

Once we had our property, we began to look for a contractor.

Largely this process was by word of mouth. We looked for builders who had signs in our neighbourhood, we asked friends who had their house built and who they used as contractors, we asked designers and architects if they had preferred builders… et et.

We developed a list of 5 contractors and we began interviewing and narrowing that list down.

The list included very large international builders to small boutique home builders.

All of the builders had to have Workers compensation, General liability and proof of incorporation to our satisfaction before we started. We want a contractor that built houses and not kitchens, baths et et small stuff.

From there, it was a matter of finding the right fit.

Larger builders offer more reliable results but with fewer custom choices. They also offer more of a ‘turn key’ no hassle no questions approach compared with the number of choices a custom home builder will offer. A smaller builder will allow more flexibility in your choices and may even allow you to participate in the building process.

We of course went through many lists of references for each of our contractors.

In the end, we settled on a contractor who had built several houses in our neighbourhood. We liked the designs and styles of these previous houses and we knew and talked to those home owners ourselves.

During this process, several things jumped out at us to make us choose our contractor:

1. the houses were built very quickly

2. the home owners did not always get along with the contractor during this process

3. despite #2, the owners still gave their recommendations

Probably the best praise we heard from one of the previous home owners was “we wished we had listened to him more because he was right about ‘x’ ”

There was of course still some hesitation with our contractor. For example, during the interview process, I was surprised to find that some of the construction methods which I believed were ‘best practice’ were not shared by the builder. For example, I believed tiles should be layed with ditra and modified thinset but he insisted on using the older method of a metal lathe and thickset. In addition, there was some discussion about writing a proper contract.