Back to school
A century schoolhouse becomes a labour of love for a family with hands-on approach to restoration
With their children grown and out on their own, Katie Saunders and Simon White moved back to Toronto in 2015, and planned to permanently settle in the city.
Instead, they’ve found themselves, along with nine-year-old cockapoo Zoey, restoring an old schoolhouse in Marlbank, Ont., about 225 kilometres east of Toronto.
“I couldn’t deal with the idea of condo fees: paying off your mortgage and still having fees for the rest of your life,” Saunders said. She and her husband raised their family in Sunderland, about 100 kilometres northeast of Toronto. “I also missed being outside the city.”
White, 55, a printing company administrator, was happy to see his three-hour, round-trip daily commute to Toronto evaporate. But he missed working on the restoration projects their Victorian home in Sunderland had demanded. Soon, the couple began looking for a property within a few hours drive of Toronto.
“We had no grand plan, but we knew we wanted something unique: not just a small cottage on a slice of lake, but something more imaginative,” White said.
When the 1905 Marlbank schoolhouse appeared on a real estate website, the couple drove out to see it. White was delighted by the 1,800-square-foot brick building that was sound, had a good roof and a dry, concrete basement.
Saunders, 53, an entrepreneur who has worked as a chef, caterer and program designer-manager, saw its business potential as a future site for craft classes or retreats. So the couple took the plunge and purchased the schoolhouse and its three acres of land for $133,000 in July, 2016.
“It can’t go really wrong for us,” Saunders said. “It has given us a project with no deadline, so it’s not stressful.”
It is, however, labour intensive. To date, White has invested more than 1,000 hours of sweat equity into restoring the schoolhouse to its former glory.
Saunders, and their two children, Natalie, 26, and Rudy, 23, have pitched in with another 200 hours of work. They have turned to contractors for the few jobs that need a professional touch.
“It’s not work,” White said. “It’s something I look forward to. Nothing major needs to be done, and we get to do things with our own hands.”
“We’re working toward our future.” What White considers “nothing major” would cow most people.
The rectangular interior originally housed two classrooms divided by a centre hall. Each classroom had been turned into a two-bedroom apartment after the school’s closure in 1967.
A false ceiling brought room heights down to eight feet from the original 14 feet, and hid the large pendant lights. The tall windows that wrapped around the building had been shortened with boards — or boarded up completely.
The couple turned one of the apartments into a single, open-plan living space with a kitchen, dining room and family room, and divided the other apartment into sleeping quarters with four bedrooms.
White and his son took down the false ceiling and punched out the interior drywall and the framing used to support it.
White brought in scaffolding and, with the family’s help, took down the original pendant lights for cleaning.
He sanded and sealed the original wood floors, plastered the walls atop wooden wainscotting that emerged from behind the drywall and, with Saunders’ aid, installed and painted horizontal shiplap boards and gave a Cape Cod feel to the interior.
Saunders and White also installed an Ikea kitchen themselves — “and we’re still married,” she said with a chuckle.
They hired a contractor to remove and replace the 20 boarded-up, 6 1⁄2- foot windows. The result is staggering. “All you can see now is the sky and the trees,” Saunders said. “You can watch the moon and the clouds go by.”
Outdoors, they have begun landscaping, planting pink lilac bushes along the drive and relocating saplings and trees from elsewhere on the property. There are plans to replace the missing school bell.
“We spend all of our free time on it. We look for old furniture and things to fix up the interior; we’re trying to recycle and reuse,” Saunders said of their online searches.
After more than 18 months, about $50,000 in materials and outside labour, the main room is finished, aside from a planned electric fireplace, and the bedrooms are in the works. They hope to be finished by year’s end.
Meanwhile, many weekend evenings are spent watching the myriad stars sparkle in the dark sky.
Justifiably, they are proud of their labour of love.
“I love the idea of preserving a small part of Ontario history,” White said.