A childhood home makeover
After buying the Cobourg house where she lived as a teen, Ashley McFarland and husband Adam rolled up their sleeves to overhaul the 1990s decor.
Who says you can’t go home again? Not Ashley McFarland. Last year, McFarland and her husband Adam bought the two-storey brick house in Cobourg where she had lived as a teen.
“My family had it built during 1995 and we moved into it in January 1996, when I was 13,” says McFarland, a design consultant for a Cobourg homebuilder.
“We moved out in 2002. My dad always liked a home reno project, so we moved around a lot. Being in this house for six years was the longest we stayed in the same place.”
The house held special memories for McFarland, including time spent there with her teen friends and her grandmother, who lived with the family during those years.
“Ashley and I have been together for 15 years and ever since I met her, she’s talked about this house and how it was her favourite house to live in growing up,” says Adam, who works in corporate communications.
“One day, we drove around town and she pointed out the different houses she had lived in as a kid. When we got to this one, she kept going on about how special it was and how she wished she still lived there. When the house came on the market last year, she was so excited that we just had to put an offer in.”
McFarland was surprised to find the house virtually unchanged since her parents sold it 14 years before. The forest green carpet, the gold colour scheme, the parquet family room floor and all the light fixtures were the same. But with an open layout, large rooms, quiet cul-de-sac location and large pie-shaped lot, the 2,800-square-foot home was the perfect place for the McFarlands to raise their two young children.
They bought the four-bedroom house for $500,000 and launched full on into a one-month reno blitz after taking possession in October 2016. To save money on their $75,000 renovation budget, they did the demolition with help from family and friends, including their parents. “We were coming from a new house and there was no way I was going to move in and live in a house that looked like it was stuck in the ’90s,” McFarland says.
Their priorities were the kitchen and master bathroom; the kitchen was completely gutted.
“It (the demolished kitchen) looked like one of those cities in rubble you see in a disaster movie,” Adam says.
Custom cabinetry in white, a new black pantry and white quartz countertops remade the kitchen. McFarland hired YouNique Kitchens & Bath — the same supplier she deals with in her job at New Amherst Homes — to design and supply the materials for the kitchen and bathrooms, and used the same tradespeople her employer contracts to do the work.
Wide-plank laminate flooring was laid throughout most of the house and large-format porcelain tiles were used in the foyer, kitchen, laundry room and bathrooms. Given the size of the home, flooring was the biggest expenditure. Despite initial plans to install the new floors themselves, the couple hired professionals to do it — that, plus trim work and potlights throughout, plus extra attic insulation added $15,000 to their budget.
Both the kids’ bathroom and the master ensuite got double sinks. The kitchen ceilings were smoothed but to save money, the McFarlands opted for a California ceiling treatment — or knockdown texture — to flatten the old popcorn ceilings in the rest of the house.
Draperies were removed from windows and California shutters installed. The honey-oak railing and pickets, and forest-green carpet, were replaced on the large, curving stairway.
Hiring painters would have cost $10,000 to do the whole house, so the McFarlands, their family and friends took on that task.
“The painting took longer than if we hired painters, but it saved a lot of money.”
Except for the children’s rooms, the home’s interior was painted in a white, grey and black palette. Daughter Addison, 3, has her uncle’s old room that now features colourblocked walls in grey, pink and white.
“I painted the whole room pink at first, but it was too much,” McFarland says.
Son Declan, 6, loves super heroes and his room — the one that was McFarland’s room when she was a teen — is decorated in an Avengers theme and features an orange wall, his favourite colour. The McFarlands’ own bedroom is a spacious 600-square-foot retreat that includes the bedroom, updated bathroom in white and grey, and a sunken sitting area with fireplace and flatscreen TV.
Next year’s plans for the house will focus on the exterior, including new windows and new landscaping. The basement rough-in for a bar that McFarland’s dad installed more than 20 years ago is still intact and she plans to create an entertainment area and wine cellar in the future.
Although the address and even some of the neighbours are the same since she lived there 15 years ago, McFarland says she doesn’t feel caught in a time warp.
“I don’t get any déjà vu living here now,” she says.
“I think we managed to make the house feel like our own.”