Ah, love. What potential homeowner can forget that first starry-eyed walk through the show suite, the fantasies of your life together, your all-too-easily-overlooked misgivings about bathroom dimensions or oddly sited electrical plugs? Expecting perfection is unrealistic, you tell yourself...isn't it? Well, no. Tackled the right way (which means putting your foot down), what rises from that former parking lot can be exactly the home you want. Most developers let you decide between green and grey granite in the kitchen, and whether the carpeting in the bedroom is oatmeal or beige. Period. What many buyers don't realize is that besides making minor cosmetic changes in the property you've just sprung for, you're also entitled to major nips and tucks right up to, and including, the way your new place is laid out.
People are always surprised at the size of her condo, says cookbook-store owner Barbara-jo McIntosh. Located on the edge of Yaletown, it measures 650 square feet but, thanks to intelligent redesign, looks considerably larger. Small spaces don't faze her (her store is 800 square feet): when first-time home buyer McIntosh signed the final papers, she'd been living in a 900-square-foot loft. The home she would move into 18 months later "wasn't even a hole in the ground", but a model suite in a similar development revealed what she'd be dealing with. "They gave me options of a counter, and that was about it," she recalls. "I said, 'Can I make more changes?' and they said, 'Of course.' I hired a designer right away to take a look and told her generally what I wanted to do."
Barbara Houston of Houston + Associates (604-806-0281) says she's often called in to organize space, and not just for first-time homeowners. Calling spaces, however tiny, a "dining area" and a "bedroom" (as was the case with McIntosh's condo) makes a suite sound impressively larger, but "it's the efficiency of how the space is used," says Houston, who, in a phone interview, cites her own loft (main floor, 530 square feet, viewable at www.houstonandassociates.ca/) as an example of making much of little. (Rather than a bulky conventional fridge, her kitchen, for instance, has fridge and freezer drawers under the counter.)
"Plan it properly from the start" is Houston's advice. "Put your own [scale model] furniture in before you buy. Request a floor plan to quarter-inch scale." If it doesn't exist, ask for a floor plan, remembering--an insider tip--that kitchen countertops, unless custom-made, are always 24 inches deep, and do the math yourself. "Doors can be moved, walls can come down to some extent....Don't be dictated to by what builders tell you rooms are used for," she says. Ask yourself if you need a pendant lamp anyway, let alone whether or not a dining table should go under it.
Just where to stash vacuum cleaner, linen, clothes, and generic stuff is a common problem. Space in McIntosh's bedroom was restricted to laughably small cupboards either side of, and above, the bed. Originally, architectural plans showed a big closet and storage area right inside the front door with, on the left wall, two smaller closets and a "surfing booth" for computer. One of the first decisions McIntosh made was to relocate the entrance to the bathroom's large closet and install shelves and racks (she credits California Closets for the design) and her granny's cedar chest to make it a genuine "walk-in" that didn't force her to go into the hall to root through her wardrobe. Also rapidly pencilled out were sliding glass doors between bathroom and living room, "so you could open them up and look at the fireplace. Not high on my list of priorities." The replacement wall has narrow bands of lathe applied in a grid pattern--an idea swiped from a magazine--for architectural interest without clutter.
Unsurprisingly, the kitchen got the most extreme makeover: its huge fridge, curio cabinet, double sinks, and pass-through into the dining area, all in the original plans, gobbled space that McIntosh, a former restaurateur, recognized could be better allocated to cabinets and counters. Her under-the-counter fridge, she says, fits her lifestyle. "I've never, ever cursed it, and I don't like microwaves," so that went too. She rejected both of the granites the developer offered in favour of Corian countertops, and living on her own, and with a dishwasher, why did she need a double sink? Instead she installed the apron sink she had always wanted.
When McIntosh has people over, she opens the flaps of the dining table and moves it from its normal parking spot in a corner of the living area to the centre; armchairs get pulled around it. What happens then happens at most get-togethers: everyone stays talking around the table until it's time to go home. Now deprived of its designated role, the former dining area morphed into a den with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and computer space filling the wall formerly housing the pass-through. Erasing the wall and sliding doors between this and the bedroom created a good-sized relaxing, working, and sleeping area: "private space" almost invisible from the "public" living and eating areas, but all pulled together by a palate of soft yellow, grey-green, and burgundy. Unifying floor treatments helped, too. Rather than the standard tile-carpet-and-wood combo, McIntosh asked for wood everywhere but the bathroom. The almost square-shaped condo now has a visual and logical flow to it. And a psychological one: "You bathe, put on makeup, and get dressed all in the same room," she says, convinced that running from place to place only ups early-morning stress.
Meanwhile, back in the hallway, one small closet and the "surfing booth" got lost on the cutting-room floor, replaced by custom-made dark wood shelves and cupboards to hold books, linen, candles, wine, sound system, and CDs: there's room for everything, and the dentil trim on the top that extends their entire width not only echoes that on the 200-year-old Scottish grandfather clock snugged into an alcove beside the fireplace but is--deliberately--the right height for leaning on, says McIntosh.
So it's all done now, and she's happy. The builders did a good job, she says, apart from installing carpet instead of wood in the walk-in closet. By project's end, she figures the changes and upgrades she made added somewhere between an extra five and eight percent to the cost. Thinking back, she says: "You really do need to get a designer. I could tell they [builders] wouldn't listen to you if you said, 'I want to do this and that.'...If you want to make substantial changes, you really need to make it plain at the start." Even equipped with professionally drawn-up plans, she says there were still a few arguments. "They said, 'We can't get that fridge.' I said, 'Yes you can.' "
And, as with the stove and sink, she had the model number to prove it.