News — Renovation

Amy Peters didn’t have an issue with the dark brown vanity in her master bathroom—the wood could easily be painted white. She also didn’t care that the countertops were a veiny gray granite, because they paired nicely with the slate stone floors. For her, the biggest eyesore was the giant sheet mirror. “I called it the ‘builder’s special,’” she says, laughing. The Canadian design blogger had lived with her dated, mid-2000s bathroom as is for two years. Then she stumbled across two curved mirrors in a discount furnishings store and everything changed. “They were the perfect arch,” she recalls. “As...

Photography and Design by Studio Laloc; Illustration by Madeline Montoya In Renovator’s Notebook, homeowners open up about the nitty-gritty of their remodels: How long it really took, how much it actually cost, what went horribly wrong, and what went wonderfully, serendipitously, it’s-all-worth-it-in-the-end right. The hardest-working room in designer and Studio Laloc founder Lauren Lothrop Caron’s Seattle home is, surprisingly, the smallest. In a past life, the 50-square-foot space was a porch. Now it’s a multipurpose pantry or, as Caron, an Anglophile at heart, likes to call it, a scullery. The area is a pass-through between the kitchen and the backyard,...

It’s that I want to do a lot more of it, but my budget says one project at a time. We have a home equity line of credit (HELOC) of about $11k and that is the general amount we spend per renovation. We just completed the bulk of a garage renovation that ended up costing more than I anticipated and we’re in the boring cycle of paying down that 11k right now. But that isn’t stopping me from thinking about what’s next, and I have my eye on the bathroom. Our little ranch-style house is a 2 bedroom, 1.5 bath,...