The Man Who Would Be Done

On a recent rainy morning, there was no easy way to reach the entrance of Scott Omelianuk’s house. Since well before Hurricane Sandy, he had been trying to get the sidewalk in front of the 19th-century brownstone repaired, after it was cracked by the roots of a tree. And lately it had become even more of an obstacle course, after a contractor tore up the pavement to fix the problem and left it covered with a patchwork of plywood.

But Mr. Omelianuk, a bald, broad-chested man of 48, seemed to be taking it in stride as he welcomed visitors and disposed of dripping coats and umbrellas. It was merely the latest in a series of home-improvement mishaps, the kind of situation that will be familiar to any average homeowner.

Except that Mr. Omelianuk is no average homeowner. He is the editor of This Old House, the magazine associated with the popular PBS show, which has turned home improvement into an art form, its knowledgeable contractors guiding homeowners through seemingly flawless renovations for the last 34 years.

To many, Mr. Omelianuk seems an unlikely figure to fill that post, which he has held since 2004. Fourteen years after buying the three-story house, his renovation still isn’t complete: the master bathroom hasn’t been updated, there are stacks of abandoned doors sitting in the mudroom downstairs, and so many other unfinished projects that he has refused requests to include his house on tours.

Worse yet, he has developed a reputation as a sort of lovable curmudgeon, using his editor’s notes in the magazine as an opportunity to rail against the images of perfection promoted on home-renovation shows. It’s an attitude that baffles some of his colleagues.

“I don’t understand how one homeowner can have that many problems,” said Tom Silva, a general contractor and one of the hosts of “This Old House.” “He hasn’t been doing his homework to find the right contractor to do the job.”

To be fair, part of the problem may be Mr. Omelianuk’s own desire for perfection. When pressed, he’ll admit that he repainted his living room a half-dozen times before finding exactly the right shade of purple. And that elaborate crown molding? He built it himself. He also worked closely with a contractor to make sure that the grain on the European brown oak cabinets in the kitchen would wrap continuously around the room.

Then, too, he has been preoccupied with other things. Since he bought the house in 1999, he has persuaded Cara Dubroff, who is now 43 and studying to become a nurse practitioner, to be part of his life and his renovation plans. He has been struggling to hold on to the readers of his magazine, which has a circulation of 966,312, in what has been a punishing publishing climate. And his time and finances have been consumed by what he described as the “emotionally disorienting” task of dealing with a diagnosis of unexplained infertility.

“The things that happen to us actually happen to lots of people,” he said, sitting with Ms. Dubroff in their television room, where they once had a narrow escape when the ceiling collapsed. “I’m in a unique position to let people know that happens, and that’s O.K.”

In fact, it may be those experiences that have made it possible for Mr. Omelianuk to create a magazine that acknowledges just how much time and love renovation requires — and how transformative it can be.

Longtime friends like Eliot Kaplan, a former boss at GQ, have observed how much Mr. Omelianuk’s own renovation has changed him. When Mr. Kaplan first met him, he was a “25-year-old know-it-all fact checker” filled with “youthful hubris,” Mr. Kaplan recalled. “It’s been a pleasure to see him grow up.”

In Mr. Omelianuk’s first year of homeownership, his ego took a beating when he discovered what a money pit he had bought. One of the central beams, it turned out, was being devoured by termites. The windows were so old that one of them fell on top of him while he was napping in a second-floor bedroom. And water poured out of a radiator like a garden hose, damaging the hardwood flooring throughout the house.

Ms. Dubroff, who grew up in a doorman building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, did not initially share Mr. Omelianuk’s enthusiasm for renovation. But in 2005, after they had dated for three years, she agreed to embark on three major ventures with him: getting married, starting a family and renovating the Hoboken house.

Among other things, they intended to install a new heating system, replace the termite-riddled structural beam and fix the floors, which were not only water-damaged but sloping. Like many people, they had their share of bad luck with contractors, and the renovations stretched on for years. Mr. Omelianuk and Ms. Dubroff offer stories of one contractor who was charged with restoring the fireplaces but had a heart attack before he could finish the job, and another suffering from hepatitis C.

And while trouble with contractors makes great fodder for magazine articles, it doesn’t make for a comfortable home life. As Mr. Omelianuk put it, “It’s more like serial torture.”

He added: “I don’t know what it was that kept us sort of stumbling forward. Stubbornness, maybe stupidity.”

It didn’t help that fertility treatments were becoming so costly that they had to postpone renovation projects. They painted their bedroom in earth tones, in an effort to create what Mr. Omelianuk called a cocoon, and Ms. Dubroff contemplated whether the house was haunted or cursed.

“We thought we would be pregnant by the end of the renovation,” she said. “Sometimes, I think, the house — you did this to me.”

MR. OMELIANUK TRIED to share these frustrations with readers without divulging too much information. In his editor’s notes, he griped about how he felt when his in-laws bought a home and he suspected that they would want their “handy son-in-law” to work on it, although he hadn’t even finished his own renovation. And in one column, he admitted defeat, advising readers not to try to do it all themselves. Go ahead and hire a plumber, he told them, “everyone needs a break from the DIY grind.”

This sort of sentiment was not well received by some. In response to one of Mr. Omelianuk’s columns, a reader named William wrote in to complain: “How did you ever become the ‘editor’ of the wonderful world of This Old House, which has been going on for over 30 years with RESPECTED people?” He went on to add, “I think it is time for your retirement party!”

Nevertheless, the column developed quite a following. One month, when it was conspicuously absent, concerned readers wrote in asking whether he was still editor in chief, or if he had been injured doing home repairs.

Leave it to a nosy neighbor to sort things out. Beverly Savage, who lives down the street, was walking her Scottish terriers by Mr. Omelianuk’s house one morning when she peered in the front window. Inside, she saw Mr. Omelianuk holding up a newborn and laughing.

“I just felt so viscerally his happiness — you could just see it on the street,” Ms. Savage said later. “Just seeing him and Cara, they were happy in a way that they were sad before this. They were carrying something around that was a really big burden.”

She urged him to share the story of how he and his wife had spent nearly four years trying to get pregnant, just as he did his travails with home renovations. Several months later, Mr. Omelianuk came clean in his editor’s note.

“Maybe some of you understand,” he wrote. “The toddler-height rod in the hall closet sort of mocks you with no hope of tiny coats in it. The microwave you cleverly placed in the island — the better to give wee ones easy access — just becomes a bother to your grown-up back. And the mudroom you were excited about doesn’t hold the same interest when you’re told you’ll never have little feet bringing in the mud.”

Now, as the couple showed a visitor around the top floor, Luca, 22 months, somersaulted through the home office, tapped his fingers on an antique typewriter and offered his mother a pre-nap kiss. Any fears that the home was cursed, Ms. Dubroff said, have disappeared.

“Does the house feel like a burden?” she said. “It has, many times. But it doesn’t anymore.”

 

Source: NYTimes / http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/21/garden/the-editor-of-this-old-house-on-his-own-endless-renovation.html?pagewanted=all

 

 

Twenty interior designers transform a historic mansion: Inside the Villa de Luxe

From Classic to a Modern , that is what these top 20 designers did to the classic and historic mansion of the renowned architect  William Ward Watkin. Here is the full article:

 

We can only imagine what renowned architect William Ward Watkin would think today if he joined the throngs touring his 1920 Italian Renaissance creation in Shadyside. With the talents of 20 top interior designers at work in the historic home, we think he would approve for the most part.

Villa de Luxe, as the designer showhouse at One Longfellow Lane is dubbed, is open to the public for exploration this weekend and next. Wrapped around the tours is a series of lectures, book signings and garden presentations, all hosted by presenter Luxe Interiors + Design with proceeds benefiting Preservation Houston.

There’s a bonus for interior design buffs — most of the furnishings and accessories on display in the showhouse will be sold.
Luxe hand-picked the designers, who have dressed the house in various interpretations ranging from classic to modern to a mix of old and new. Jane Page-Crump and Bill Stubbs have coordinated the interior design effort and contributed their own talents in the living room and in the sun parlor, respectively.

The designers’ works run the gamut from pure traditional laced with antiques such as Donna Vining’s master bedroom to the resplendent dining room dressed by Sandra Lucas and Sarah Eilers to Marlys Tokerud’s contemporary interpretation for a second floor bedroom suite. We particularly enjoyed the work of Connie LeFevre who furnished the pool area. One caveat — the swans, though very convincing, are not real.

There’s a bonus for interior design buffs — most of the furnishings and accessories on display in the showhouse will be sold Feb. 21 at OneKingsLane.com. And that’s with a 30 percent discount off of retail value.

Source: CultureMap (Houston) / http://houston.culturemap.com/newsdetail/02-05-13-twenty-interior-designers-take-on-a-historic-mansion-inside-the-villa-de-luxe/

Growth Predicted in Home Renovations

Homeowners who have been holding off on home improvements, be it a new kitchen or replacement siding, are more likely to call in the contractors in the year ahead.

A report from Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies predicts accelerating, double-digit growth in home improvement spending through at least the third quarter of 2013.

The growth projections reflect rebounding home sales, a rise in construction and low financing costs, according to Kermit Baker, the director of the center’s Remodeling Futures program.

“All the elements are sort of pushing in the same direction,” Mr. Baker said.

Spending on improvements and maintenance has been on a downward slide since 2007, when, according to the center’s data, it peaked at $328 billion. Spending in 2011 was around $275 billion; all the data aren’t in yet, but in 2012 it very likely rose about 12 percent.

Discretionary projects, like new kitchens and finished basements, were the first to go, as is typical in a down market. Now they are starting to come back, Mr. Baker said, “though people are a little more price-sensitive and a little more budget-conscious than, say, five or six years ago.”

A smaller share of improvement projects are likely to be financed this year. “People have less equity to borrow against,” he said, “and for those who do have equity, the banks are hesitant to loan. And also, people don’t want to overextend themselves.”

Financing for home improvements through cash-out refinancings and home equity lines of credit is generally available for up to 80 percent of loan-to-value ratio, said Penn Johnson, the president of the Stamford Mortgage Company in Stamford, Conn. A few banks will allow up to 90 percent for borrowers with very high credit scores, he added.

Mark Yecies, an owner of SunQuest Funding in Cranford, N.J., says construction loans for major additions are particularly hard to come by, with lenders typically requiring that the borrower have 25 to 30 percent equity, based on the finished value.

Borrowers with negative equity — that is, with houses worth less than their mortgage balance — cannot get any sort of improvement loan, Mr. Yecies noted.

Nationally, as of the third quarter of 2012, about 22 percent of all residential properties with a mortgage had negative equity, according to CoreLogic, a provider of data and business services. As with the other indicators, however, that one has been improving. CoreLogic reports that the equity status of 1.4 million borrowers shifted to positive from negative over the first three quarters of last year.

Greater equity does equate with more spending on home improvements. According to the Harvard study, homeowners with at least 20 percent equity spend an average of 22 percent more on improvements than homeowners with lower equity levels. The difference rises to 30 percent when considering discretionary projects alone.

Affluent households with healthy home values and access to cash are driving remodeling activity for now.

“The middle to upper-middle class is where we are seeing movement,” said Tom O’Grady, the chairman of the strategic planning and research committee of the National Association of the Remodeling Industry, and the president of O’Grady Builders in Drexel Hill, Pa. “People are starting to feel better about their jobs.”

Mr. O’Grady noted that his company was just now finishing up a custom basement — to be refashioned as a “man cave” — for a customer who had put off the project for several years because of economic fears.

The remodeling association’s most recent survey of its member companies showed that customer inquiries were up 2 percent in the last quarter of 2012, and the total value of jobs sold was up 4.3 percent.

The decline in home values during the last decade will most likely benefit the remodeling industry in the decade to come. Mr. O’Grady predicted that as baby boomers head toward retirement, more will probably decide to renovate — perhaps add a first-floor bedroom, for instance — rather than sell and buy anew.

“The aging-in-place concept will be a huge driver of the market,” he said.

Source: New York Times / http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/03/realestate/mortgages-growth-predicted-in-home-renovations.html?_r=0