Reno with a due date
Years of planning and house-hunting come down to wire for Toronto couple
There are certain things in life you just can’t plan; like when you get pregnant or when you get a house in Toronto.
Despite their best efforts to plan ahead, Andrea Diakun, 35, and her husband Mark, 31, ended up moving into their new semi-detached home in Roncesvalles just a week before her due date with baby Adrian last June.
“It was relief that we got here in time,” says Diakun, a Kindergarten teacher.
“It was down to the wire,” adds Mark, who works in commercial real estate. He said there was even a worker sanding the banister outside Adrian’s bedroom the day they brought him home from the hospital.
The couple had been trying for three years to find a bigger home to replace their Queen and Dufferin townhouse, knowing they wanted more space in which to raise a family.
They were intensely frustrated, constantly getting outbid as home prices continued to escalate.
At one point, they offered $5,000 over the highest bid on a house in the Mimico neighbourhood — with no conditions — and still lost out.
“Wow, we can’t even get a house when we’re the highest bidder,” Mark remembers saying at the time.
But things have a way of working out and the Diakuns have fallen in love their new family-friendly street, just a block from the bustling shops and lively restaurants of Roncesvalles Ave.
“We’re much happier here now, anyway,” Mark says.
Looking back he says they were in “shock” when their $956,000 bid was accepted and immediately went into panic mode because Diakun was five months pregnant at the time. They still needed to do major renovations on the home before moving in.
“We were cutting it pretty close,” Mark says. “If it was a month later, we probably wouldn’t have done it.”
The couple hired True Contractors to take on the project and ended up being very satisfied with their diligence and speed.
“We were just trying to find someone who was reliable and reasonable in terms of costs and who would actually do it in that short time frame,” Diakun says.
They needed to do a full kitchen renovation, gut the upstairs bathroom, create an entryway vestibule, remove all the knob-and-tube wiring upstairs, rebuild the staircase banister and repaint the whole house.
Adding window shutters on the main floor, a custom closet for the master bedroom, converting to LED fixtures and wireless lighting, and adding speakers in the ceiling were also priorities.
“Having a smaller space, we didn’t want to have speakers in the wall or on furniture,” Mark says, adding that since they’re in a semi, he wanted to have some constant background sound to cancel out any noise from their neighbours.
The couple spent $20,000 gutting the upstairs bathroom to reconfig- ure the space in a more user-friendly way. They also replaced dated tiles, fixtures and flooring with a more modern look and feel. Some exposed brick over the vanity was highlighted and they added bright pops of colour with yellow shelving against the clean white background.
Designer Renée Gammon, co-owner of Two Birds Design, was enlisted to help make the most of the home’s limited space, with extra focus on the kitchen since Diakun is an avid chef.
“The way the kitchen was laid origi- nally out, it was very choppy. Even looking at the before photos, the fridge just juts out into the space,” Gammon says.
“We created that tall appliance wall on the left hand side just to make everything really, really compact so we could maximize the counter space on the right side. By really making it as tight as possible and giving every area a function, we were able to maximize everything.”
Gammon says since the kitchen ceilings were a little bit higher than the standard, they went with high upper cabinets and gained an extra eight inches of storage space.
Two of Diakun’s favourite features in the kitchen are the coffee nook on the counter atop the wine bar and the built-in bookshelf in the kitchen island to house all of her cookbooks.
“It was really exciting to be able to have a kitchen that is super functional and big, considering,” Diakun says.
“It takes up a whole third of the house. You can have multiple people here at the same time and not be crawling on top of each other.”
And since she and Mark share a deep love of orange, they accessorized the house in the hue; from orange chairs, pillows, art and kitchen appliances, right down to the orange water bottle on their bedside table.
“We stay true to orange,” jokes Mark. “It’s our favourite colour.”
Gammon says the design process was extra fun because of the Diakun’s adventurous tastes.
“They’re not afraid to use bold colours,” she says. “Because we knew we were working with all of those colourful accents, that’s why we did go a little bit more neutral and bright along the walls. We wanted to go with a clean backdrop for all of their art and really cool accessories to pop off of.”