‘Humpty Dumpty’ house comes together again
Restoring home worth the struggle for radio, TV personality Taylor Kaye
Asked to describe the worst moment in the renovation of the home she shares with her husband, Greg, and three young daughters, Taylor Kaye hesitates.
Perhaps the popular radio and TV personality is thinking about engineers telling her the home needed four steel beams and a wooden one to achieve structural integrity, rather than just the one she’d budgeted for.
Maybe she’s casting her mind back to the day the beloved family dog went missing for several hours, only to be found — alive and well — at the bottom of a huge hole that had been excavated on site.
Or, had the nadir been reached when her daughter accidentally spilled an entire can of paint on tile that had been laid and grouted just a few hours earlier?
So many adventures, so hard to choose just one.
“It was a mess, a horror show,” concedes Kaye. “There were a lot of setbacks and we had problems with trades who moved on. But we knew from the start that to bring (the house) back to its glory would take time and effort.”
Kaye and her husband snapped up the century-old, 3,700-square-foot Queen Anne-style home in the Beach in 2013, despite it showing poorly, having at one point been chopped up into a rooming house and then clumsily converted back to a single-family residence.
“The price was fantastic, because it had sat on the market for four months, which is unheard of in the Beaches,” says Kaye. “And my husband fell in love with it.”
Because they owned another home at the time, the initial plan had been to live there during work on their new home. In the end, the family decided to live in the new home to get a sense of how they wanted to use the space.
“It had been so hacked up, it was like putting Humpty Dumpty together again,” says Kaye.
Finding out the home needed five extra beams had been a huge financial surprise.
“You always put aside some money for the unexpected, but we had not planned on that. So there were some things I wanted that I could not put in, like cute little barn doors. Those beams ate up a lot of our budget.”
They also posed a challenge for designer Jo Alcorn, who came on board after the house had been gutted, but before a design had been finalized.
Normally, the beams would be hidden behind a bulkhead. But Kaye, at Alcorn’s suggestion, opted to paint them black and leave them bare.
“I thought we should expose the investment,” says Alcorn.
“I love the way they look and how they outline the different areas of function in a big open space.”
High up on the to-do list had been making the 20-by-40-foot kitchen area functional, as Kaye had been cooking on a hot plate in the basement. The design is urban industrial: warm woods soften the greywhite walls and ceiling and dark metals that define the space, as does the wood motif on the infamous tile floor. Also a must: lots of storage. There’s an abundance of cabinetry (by Fine Line Kitchens), including cupboards under the anchoring nine-foot island, which is topped with white Caesarstone quartz (by Beyond Marble and Granite).
Kaye wanted a kid-friendly house, and to make it easy for little people to go in and out from the backyard pool. So there’s even a small snack fridge by the back door so hungry kids can grab a bite without entering the main living space.
In the end, Kaye is thrilled with the results of the nine-month reno, which she likens to a pregnancy.
“There was pain, but it was so worth it.”