Today’s episode is a split level renovation story about a house in the Chicago suburbs owned by two architects.

Katharine MacPhail  00:00

Hey, it’s the House Maven. Are you on Clubhouse? I just started a new club called Talking Home Renovations. It has a room every Saturday morning at 10am Eastern, where we can talk live. So join the club, and join me on Saturdays. I can’t wait.

Katharine MacPhail  00:28

Welcome to Talking Home Renovations with The House Maven. I am your host, Katharine MacPhail. I’m an architect, and I practice in eastern Massachusetts. Most of my work is additions and renovations to existing homes. I was thinking that a podcast might be a good way for homeowners like my clients to learn everything they could about home renovations before they get started. So they’d have some answers and maybe take a little bit of the stress out of the situation. So for almost two years now, I’ve been speaking to other architects and contractors, vendors and homeowners about their renovation stories. Today one of those architects has homeowner stories about an architect and her architect husband who bought a split level outside of Chicago. So my guest today is Cindy Lester, who is an architect practicing outside of Chicago. She met her architect husband at the University of Idaho. And then she came back to Chicago and got her master of urban planning and policy at the University of Illinois in Chicago. And now she lives in suburban Chicago with her husband and two kids.

Cinda Lester  01:31

We started 12/12 Architects eighteen years ago – actually, last week, we just started our nineteenth year. When I see “we” I mean me and my husband, who’s also a licensed architect. The goal was for us to both quit our jobs working at bigger firms and to do this full time, but the reality was because of health insurance, and being terrified of not having a regular paycheck, he still worked at a “real job” as my mother called it. Meanwhile, I was working at 12/12 Architects full time. It took fifteen years before we finally had enough work, and he hated his job so much that he said, Look, I’m coming to work with you full time. So, it’ll be four years in October. We do primarily residential work, but we’ve done plenty of commercial, medical, retail, churches, that kind of thing. Just sort of as they come in, we don’t really advertise for it. Most of that work actually comes from our residential clients – they own a business, or their church needs some help or whatever. We do probably…I don’t know, usually seventy-five percent additional remodeling and twenty-five percent new construction. And those numbers fluctuate based on the year and the economy. We really love specializing in lake homes, and that’s really what we’re doing a whole lot more of now. During COVID, we have a lot of clients who realized, “Hey, I don’t have to live in Chicago anymore because my office is closed, so I’m going to be remote forever, and my kids are out of high school so I don’t need to be here for the school district – we can just live at the lake full time”.

Katharine MacPhail  03:33

Yeah, sounds like a pretty good idea.

Cinda Lester  03:35

Exactly, exactly. Honestly, that’s where we’d love to be too. My kids are a junior and a senior in high school, so I got two more years that we need to be here for the school district and then we can move wherever we want. The vast majority of our work was remote anyway, even pre-pandemic.

Katharine MacPhail  03:52

Yeah. So today, you’re going to talk about your own house. Tell me a little bit about it.

Cinda Lester  03:58

So when my husband and I got married, we decided that we were looking for a new house to live in. We were total architecture snobs, and we thought, “We’re never gonna live in an ugly 1960 split level, that’s just so beneath us – we’re gonna find some old historic house or cute little Cape Cod or whatever”. And of course, we could not afford to live in any neighborhood that had any of those cute little houses. So like everyone else did in our age bracket at that time, we built a cookie cutter new construction home with some big box builder. We lived there for five years and hated it. And then we woke up and we said, you know what, this house is in a neighborhood that we don’t want. We want to be in a specific neighborhood, in a specific school district for our kids. So we bought in 1964 split level, actually the exact house that we had looked at five years earlier, that we said we were never going to live in.

Katharine MacPhail  05:11

I saw that one coming.

Cinda Lester  05:13

Exactly. But we were very, very lucky because we actually bought the house from the original owner. She and her family had built the house in 1964, and had done virtually nothing to it but paint it terrible colors inside. There were purple velvet curtains, and fluorescent green paint downstairs on the original paneling. It was awful.

Katharine MacPhail  05:43

Or great, depending how you look at it.

Cinda Lester  05:45

Well, right. So we were very lucky that we saw it the day that it was listed. And you know, two architects walking in, we could envision what the room would look like without the blood red wall and the velvet curtains. I think she’s probably very lucky that we saw it, because I can’t imagine other people would have been able to look past how she was showing it. So we bought it. We were looking only in this neighborhood, so we bought for the location and the yard. Our neighbors on both sides of us are still original owners, like they’re the adult children who grew up in those homes. Much of our block is like that. It’s interesting, because we do a lot of work on split levels, but ours is a totally ridiculous kind of split level where only the front door is at the split. So if you’re on the sidewalk, you have to walk up the stairs to get to our front door, but then go down the stairs to get back into our family room even though we have a door that comes out on the side on the first floor. It absolutely could have been a two story colonial, but that’s not what they were building in this neighborhood in 1964.

Katharine MacPhail  07:07

Yeah, it’s kind of weird. Is it just to be fancy? I guess that’s technically called a split level entry, right? I’ve worked on a couple of those recently, and it’s hard to do anything if people want it to look more like a typical house.

Cinda Lester  07:27

Exactly, exactly. Like I said, we’ve remodeled this exact house for several of our clients over the past 18 years, and everyone wants something different. We had one client who wanted an entire third floor. To me, I don’t want to make my house any taller. We actually put on an addition on the first floor at grade, which the appraisers consider our basement. That’s the biggest problem with the split level, I can tell everyone out there right now – there’s actually no checkbox on an appraiser’s form for a split level. You either have a one story, or a two story. So they count us as a 1300 square foot, three bedroom, one bath ranch with a 1500 square foot finished basement. They don’t count our two bedrooms and our bathroom that’s downstairs because it’s a basement, even though I have three doors that walk out of my lower level directly to grade. It makes no sense at all, but that’s how the appraisers work.

Katharine MacPhail  08:47

That’s not great, it’s not as valuable as if you had a five bedroom house.

Cinda Lester  08:51

Exactly. They say you can’t find comps for a two story house without a basement, so that’s why they count it as a one story house with a basement. But then they don’t really count all of our square footage, and our lower level is bigger than our upper level. They don’t count that towards living space. 

Katharine MacPhail  09:17

Hmm, interesting. 

Cinda Lester  09:18

Yeah. So it’s a good little thing to know about if you have a split level, when you go to get your house appraised. It definitely makes a difference having the appraiser come in the house so you can talk to them about. “Hey, this is actually a living space, this is not a basement”.

Katharine MacPhail  09:37

That’s a good tip.

Cinda Lester  09:41

Not always good news on the other end of that outcome, but you know, it’s at least good information to have going into it.

Katharine MacPhail  09:48

You did your renovation to your house in phases?

Cinda Lester  09:52

Yes. As two architects, we had it measured and drawn before we even moved in. We knew the things that we wanted to do. That was 16 years ago last week, actually. We’d drawn a redo of the kitchen, and a redo of the lower level – it was a pretty typical split level, with a two car garage. We lived here for about two years, and as my business grew I absolutely needed an office with a door so that I could keep my toddlers from drawing on my desk and leaving Lego everywhere. Now, 16 years later, the Lego collection has only grown. Anyway, we had planned out a series of additions. So we did the first one, a lower level addition where we turned our two car garage into two bedrooms. We were able to extend a little bit towards the street on the lower level, which is why our basement is bigger than our upstairs. Then we essentially got the entire lower level down to the studs. We redid the bathroom, the laundry room, the family room, and we added these bedrooms. We also had to upgrade the water service and new furnace, the whole kit and caboodle, we did the entire lower level. That was our Phase One project. And now 16 years later, we’re kind of getting to Phase Three, we’ve done a whole bunch of smaller projects in between. But even as two license architects, and as an architect who runs their own business and deals with contractors all the time, we have all the exact same horror stories that any of our other clients have told. We hired a contractor who had worked on smaller jobs for our clients, and seemed like a super great guy. He was super nice and friendly and did great work, and he was starting this project for us. What I didn’t know then, and really should have asked more information about, was that this addition project was way bigger than anything else he had ever done before. I think I didn’t ask enough questions about that, but also, he was not completely honest with me. I think he did a lot of kitchens and baths, and maybe some basement remodeling. But dealing with the addition, upgrading the water service, and all the new concrete work was really much more than he could handle I think. In the end, we paid him for work he never finished, and then he literally disappeared from the state. So we’ve got tons of horror stories of that kind of thing, where we’ve got toddlers, we’re broke, our project’s not done…I borrowed $1,000 from my grandmother to buy drywall so that we could hang it. A bunch of my husband’s friends from the office that he was working in at the time came over and we had a party where I said look, we’ll pay you in beer and pizza if you can come over and hang the drywall, get it taped and mudded and then we can paint it ourselves. You know, all of those kinds of things that you don’t ever want to have to do. But the reality is that was all we could afford, so we had to do it. The downside of that is we’re not professional drywall hangers. Now, even 16 years later, if there’s a crack in the drywall or there’s a tape seam that’s showing it’s super irritating to my husband, especially because he’s the one who did it. And he did it because that’s what we had to do, this contractor guy ran off with the last of our money and we had to do it ourselves. It’s just super irritating now, every time we look at it. So the lesson learned is definitely find more references, get them to show you projects that are exactly like what you’re doing that they have done before. Just to prove that they actually can do what they say they’re going to do.

Katharine MacPhail  14:36

So I’m kind of curious about how he just left the state altogether. Do you think he took money from other people as well? I just don’t really get when people do that.

Katharine MacPhail  14:43

Wow. He was in the hole like, he just didn’t estimate it properly? So if he finished your project, he was gonna lose money?

Cinda Lester  14:43

Yes, I know he did take money from other people because at least one of them was a client of ours. So not only is that terrible for me because he’s working on my own house, but then my reputation is at risk because he was a contractor that I had referred to someone else. Now, those were much smaller projects. I do think that he was probably planning on leaving the state anyway, because I knew he had family on the east coast. That’s where he had been before, he had told me that. I think probably once he realized how much of a hole he was financially, he just picked up and moved back in with his parents or whatever. And we never heard from him again.

Cinda Lester  15:37

I think there was definitely that, but I believe he also was taking payments that we gave him from our project to buy materials for another project. So he wasn’t using the money that we gave him on our projects. I have also seen that with other contractors, who are no longer contractors I work with. I’ve heard horror stories from clients who said, yeah, we hired some guy to do our kitchen and we paid them for cabinets, but then we never got the cabinets. Unfortunately, I think it’s not entirely uncommon that contractors are good contractors but bad businessmen. That’s the hardest part to figure out – not only “is this guy a good builder”, but also “is he not gonna be bad at managing my money”.

Katharine MacPhail  16:32

Well, that is a nightmare. 

Cinda Lester  16:36

Definitely, definitely.

Katharine MacPhail  16:38

So then, what’s Part Three gonna be? 

Cinda Lester  16:42

Oh, yeah. So in between, we’ve redone the upstairs bathroom and we’ve replaced some windows. Even before Phase One we had done some stuff. For example, our front door on this split level was a fake double door – it looked like it was a double door on the outside, but it was drywall and a closet on the inside and couldn’t get a refrigerator in the house.

Katharine MacPhail  17:08

Whoa wait, I’m trying to imagine this. So from the outside it looked like a double door, but on the inside…

Cinda Lester  17:15

It was a single door, and the other half was drywalled on the inside and had a closet in front of it.

Katharine MacPhail  17:22

Wow, I’ve never heard of that. Is that common?

Cinda Lester  17:27

I think definitely for the houses in this neighborhood I’ve seen, it is definitely common. So it may have just been something that the original builder did, kind of making it look more fancy or grand. In 1964 if you had a double door entry that was fancy, but there was nowhere else to put the coat closet when you have your front door at the split level. So on moving day, we had to tear that door out because there was no other way to get a refrigerator in the house.

Katharine MacPhail  18:06

There’s no back door or anything?

Cinda Lester  18:11

We had a sliding glass door in our lower level, but the way the house was configured we wouldn’t have been able to maneuver the refrigerator around the corners and up the stairs. Whereas if we brought it in the front door, it was a straight shot right into the kitchen. So we said okay fine, we’re going to get rid of this dumb fake door anyway, but on moving day we had to go to Home Depot and buy a new front door so that we could get the refrigerator in. Good times. But so Phase Three, what we’re doing now is we…well, kind of as part of Phase One…twelve years ago as my husband and his friends were hanging drywall, my aunt and I thought, “You know, I really can’t stand this kitchen anymore”. It was divided awkwardly, and we have a cathedral ceiling upstairs in our main kitchen/living/dining area where the walls originally didn’t go all the way up. It was a terrible layout. So she and I emptied the cabinets, and we took down the cabinets and we started knocking the wall down.

Katharine MacPhail  19:21

During the drywall hanging party?

Cinda Lester  19:23

Yep, they were hanging drywall downstairs and we were destroying drywall upstairs. They came up to get pizza and beer for lunch and my husband’s like, “Um, what have you done here?” And I was like, “I couldn’t stand it”. I mean, we had talked about it. I’m the kind of person that makes a decision, and then I’m ready to go. So that’s what we did, and as a result our kitchen has been in a state of remodel for 12 years.

Katharine MacPhail  19:29

So that was 12 years ago, and you didn’t finish it. 

Cinda Lester  19:59

We did not finish it. The reason is, and this is a great example of what I tell my clients all the time, is that one part of one project can snowball into a much bigger project. The entire upper level of my house has hardwood floors. Living, dining, hallway, three bedrooms, and then there’s a bathroom that’s tiled. So there’s hardwood floor everywhere, except in the kitchen. In 1964, they put linoleum in the kitchen. So once we took the wall down and realized there was no hardwood under that linoleum, we went well, now we need to put in new wood floors. For twelve years, we’ve been telling ourselves we’re gonna do this. But to do it, the entirety of my living space upstairs needs to move out so that we can shoot in the new hardwood floors, and then sand and refinish them. 

Katharine MacPhail  20:58

Wow. 

Cinda Lester  20:59

So it’s taken twelve years, and we have finally decided in November, we are doing it. We are going to have to move everything out of my kids bedrooms, and our bedroom and the entire living room. Everything is going to have to be boxed up and put in a pod so that we can finish the kitchen that was started twelve years ago, all because of the floors. 

Katharine MacPhail  21:21

You know, pretty much every architect I know lives like that.

Cinda Lester  21:27

My grandfather always used to say, “the shoemaker’s children have no shoes”. The home of two architects will never be done. That is absolutely the truth. Even when we did our lower level, because we finished it ourselves, here in my office I still don’t have trim. We don’t have window or door trim anywhere in our lower level. Because that was the last thing that this contractor who ran off was supposed to do, drywall paint and trim, and then he would have been done. We just never did it.

Katharine MacPhail  21:59

Well, it turns out I was talking to someone else about this in another episode – you don’t really need the trim.

Cinda Lester  22:05

I like to tell people it looks very clean and contemporary, which of course is a lie. It doesn’t. But that’s my excuse. We are hoping, actually, that because we are now doing the entire upper level and we’ll also be redoing the trim – which, I should mention, the trim that is left upstairs is painted fluorescent yellow. That’s what the original owner had done in her infinite wisdom, at some point between 1964 and 2005. So we are hoping that when the trim guys are doing all the trim upstairs, that then we can bring them downstairs and put up the trim that should have been here for twelve years.

Katharine MacPhail  22:57

And as soon as you finish you’ll just have to sell the house, basically.

Cinda Lester  23:00

Exactly, hindsight is 20/20. We think, boy, we really should have finished this kitchen twelve years ago. Unfortunately that’s the way it works, you have to go with when money’s available, and when time is available. I actually don’t know that I could have tolerated another project with toddlers, or even little kids. Now my kids are in high school, and can sit on the couch with their devices just as easily as they can sit in their room. So doing it now, it’s not such a big deal. But it certainly would have been nice to have the bulk of these projects done at some point throughout the last twelve years.

Katharine MacPhail  23:45

I’m pretty much in the exact same position. My daughter’s a senior in high school as of next month, and we still haven’t re-painted the trim that was here when there were hoarders before us. It’s been thirteen years now. So, I’m sure I’m going to paint that right before we put it on the market. And it’s going to look so nice.

Cinda Lester  24:04

Exactly. And that was our thought originally. In two years when our daughter graduates, if we decide that we’re going to pick up and move to the lake or wherever she goes to college, we would have to do all this work to sell the house so we might as well do it now. Actually, another little appraiser tidbit – when we did this lower level remodel we put two bedrooms in the garage, so we haven’t had a garage for twelve years. We do have space, and we’ve always had plans to put a detached garage in the back. We actually submitted for a permit two years ago, and then didn’t do it because of COVID and now we’re doing the kitchen instead. But, I asked my realtor friend and an appraiser about it because I thought we wouldn’t be able to sell this house if we didn’t have a two car garage, and they said there would be only a $10,000 difference in listing price and appraised value. I’m not spending $60,000 to build a garage if it’s only going to make a $10,000 difference. So that’s another one that we’ve been able to kick down the road a little bit longer. Now that we know that, if we had to sell the house without a garage, we sell the house without a garage,

Katharine MacPhail  25:32

Right, and you can just tell them that’s where you would build the garage. 

Cinda Lester  25:39

Yeah, we’ve got everything drawn. Maybe we could sell the garage plans with the house, so it’s ready to go. But yes, in the meantime, we have been living through twelve Chicago winters without a garage, and we’re managing.

Katharine MacPhail  25:57

Do you have other tips for people?

Cinda Lester  26:00

Hire professionals to do the job start to finish. I definitely will always tell my clients that, especially those who say, “we think we’re going to do this job ourselves”, or, “we did our bathroom remodel ourselves, with a DIY tile install and things”. If you’ve got people that you can hire to do it, if your uncle’s a painter, or lots of times you hear, “my cousin is an electrician, and he’s gonna do the work for me”. That’s fine, but understand that people go to professionals for a reason. You don’t say, “Hey, I’m going to do my own heart surgery myself, because I have a heart and I know that it needs to be pumping to keep me alive”. That’s not enough professional experience to be able to do that. There’s a reason why general contractors make 15% to 25% profit on their jobs, it’s because it’s a full time job. There’s a lot to coordinate. So I always try to let my clients know all the things that they’re coordinating, all the balls that they’re juggling, because most people just don’t have any idea. The reality is most people will do one major architectural and construction project one time in their lives. So most people just don’t have any experience, they don’t have that knowledge. I always tell them that even us as two architects who deal with this every day, we would never do our own job, ever. Because I get paid to do other things, you know, my talents are elsewhere. So unless people have that background in construction, and they don’t have another full time job, I strongly suggest that they don’t try to do that level of work themselves.

Katharine MacPhail  27:54

Especially having another full time job part, you can’t really find the time to do it. Because it’s a full time job, getting that done.

Cinda Lester  28:04

Exactly. I’ll also let them know that there are enough decisions to make just as a homeowner, which in itself is going to take a considerable amount of time. I actually have this one room template that I give to my clients to let them know that even if you were only going to be renovating one room in your house, nevermind building a new house or an addition or whatever, what are all the things that need to be selected in this one room. So it’s not just the windows and the doors, it’s picking the flooring, the trim, the trim material, the trim color, the trim profile, and making sure the base isn’t going to be different than it is at the doors or the windows, and the wall finish, and the wall color. Where are your outlets going to go? Where are you going to have your cable jacks? Is your whole house wireless? What is your ceiling detail? Essentially, I have a checklist that tells them all the things that they have to pick for one room. When I show that to people, I tell them if you’re remodeling your entire house, it’s not an overstatement to say that you will have a thousand decisions to make. Then, they sort of get the enormity of that. So part of that is why you hire design professionals, whether it’s an architect, an interior designer, or a general contractor. That’s our job and our role. Really what you’re paying for us to help you and guide you through making those one thousand decisions. Because it can be totally overwhelming, even for me as an architect getting ready to redo my kitchen right now. I called my interior designer yesterday and said, “I don’t have the time, energy, or patience to pick a backsplash, so here’s what I like, you find four for me, and I will pick from the four”. And that’s the benefit. Even though I’m very knowledgeable in what we could put in, I don’t have the brain space to do that for my own kitchen right now. And my husband and I are going to have to decide together too. So I told her here’s our parameters, here’s what we want, give us some we’ll pick and then we’ll be done. I just don’t have time for that. And most people don’t either, because they have full time jobs, kids, and life responsibilities. So that’s the whole value of hiring professionals.

Katharine MacPhail  28:58

Yeah, you’re right. Hiring an interior designer for your own project is kind of brilliant, actually. Because then you don’t have to be bogged down in that, especially if there are two architects who are deciding. I am also married to an architect. 

Cinda Lester  30:47

Uh huh, so you know how that works. 

Katharine MacPhail  31:02

It isn’t always that simple. Right? If there were a professional involved who could help guide us, that would narrow the field. There are a million choices too, so many possibilities. So yeah, having someone narrow it down for you is helpful.

Cinda Lester  31:18

Exactly. My husband would like to have a dark oak, very high level of detail arts and crafts style kitchen. That’s what his favorite style is, and what he would love to do in this house. I, on the other hand, don’t want a dark kitchen, and definitely don’t want to spend the money to put that style of kitchen in a 1964 split level. 

Katharine MacPhail  31:52

Right. 

Cinda Lester  31:55

It took many months, but we decided we’re gonna do custom cabinets and get the detail the way we want, but it’s going to be white. The reason we did that is because it will be light and bright, but also because so many people prefer a white kitchen. If we’re selling in two years, I want to have something that is going to be the most easily saleable.

Katharine MacPhail  32:19

Yeah, that makes sense.

Cinda Lester  32:20

And just coming into that decision, that was hard for two architects.

Katharine MacPhail  32:25

Especially because we seem to…feel things a little more deeply, like we really know what we want. But then if you’re planning to sell, you won’t even be around to enjoy it. We have that conversation at our house all the time. We just redid our kitchen, painted the cabinets and everything, really just a touch up. Because we’re leaving, right? I mean, I’ll probably still be here in 25 years. But, you know, did I really want to put money into the stove I want the most if we’re leaving? No.

Cinda Lester  32:56

It’s funny, because one of the things that I really want in my dream kitchen is an icemaker. I want the good ice, like the ice that they have at Sonic, that soft crushed ice. But those machines cost $2,000 or whatever, to have an undercounter unit. I try to convince myself since we are redoing the kitchen, going in 100% down to the studs, if I want this ice machine I should get it. But then I think, if we’re moving in three years, why would I put that money into an ice machine that maybe someone else isn’t going to care about? I’m not gonna rip out a built-in ice machine and bring it with us. So yeah, I know. Architect problems.

Katharine MacPhail  33:46

I know, I guess there are worse problems. But I feel it though, with the decision making, worrying about what people are going to like. I’m always telling my clients not to worry that much about what people like, because how do you know who’s buying it? On the other hand though, if you know you’re leaving and you know people like white cabinets, it makes more sense to go with that.

Cinda Lester  34:10

I was talking about this with my interior designer yesterday, who I love. She’s actually a former student of mine. I said, “Christy, I really want a blue ceiling in my kitchen and living room”. She’s like, “you want what?” And I said, “I really want a light blue ceiling in my kitchen”. And she said, “no you don’t, you’re just gonna do a white ceiling, it’ll be fine”. I’ve had this vision of what my kitchen is going to look like, with this really pale blue ceiling. Not sky blue, I’m not painting clouds on it or anything. Just a really light blue, something that is a little bit different from the walls. But she convinced me not to do it. Partially it’s because cathedral ceilings are a pain to paint. So within two years, if we were gonna sell, some realtor would tell us to paint the ceiling white. Really when we bought this house, we figured we’d only be here for five years. Both my husband and I moved a ton. When we built that new construction house, we lived there for five years to the day, actually. That was the longest that either one of us had lived at the same address in our entire lives. And now we’ve lived in this house for sixteen years, which is insane. We didn’t think we’d be here this long at all. But it’s kind of nice, because we’ve given our kids a totally different childhood, growing up in the same house their whole lives, which neither my husband or I had. So like you said, we think we’re going to move in two years, but we could be here in another twenty.

Katharine MacPhail  35:57

Anything else before we go?

Cinda Lester  36:00

I have to say, not just because I am a licensed architect who people hire to do this, but as a consumer too – really spend your money wisely on hiring a good team. Whether that is an architect, a builder, an interior designer, a lighting specialist, or whoever, go to the professionals and make their value part of your project. Because their value really is invaluable. They come with education, background, and experience that you don’t have. There’s a reason why people hire professionals, and don’t discount that value. The dollars that you’re spending on those professionals are going to save you dollars down the road. That’s really my biggest tip – don’t be afraid to hire professionals, even if you don’t want to spend the money up front. Even if you think something like, I don’t want to hire an interior designer, I can pick my own hardware, the money that you’re spending on that person is likely going to save you money down the road. So that’s my number one tip, hire good people.

Katharine MacPhail  37:16

Thank you so much Cinda for joining me, and telling me your story. It’s very relatable. And thank you for listening. If you’re looking for more photos of Cinda’s project, and you’d like more information about various things, check out my newsletter which comes out every Wednesday morning. That’s what contains the episode enhancements. You can find a link to sign up in my show notes, but you can also go to Talking Home Renovations dot com where I have the episode enhancements for this episode and previous episodes. You can email me about story ideas, or if you want to be a guest. My email is The House Maven at Talking Home Renovations dot com. You can join me on Facebook or Instagram, where I’m Talking Home Renovations. On TikTok I’m The House Maven, and on Twitter my handle is Talking Home Reno. Sorry that it’s different on all social media. 

Katharine MacPhail  38:07

Speaking of social media, as I mentioned at the beginning, I have a new Clubhouse club called Talking Home Renovations. I hope you join it, and join me on Saturday mornings to discuss, live in person, whatever we might have been talking about in our latest episodes. I’m also on Clubhouse Monday afternoons 6pm Eastern, with Mona Ying Reeves of Kickstart House. She has a club called House Renovation, I believe. 

Katharine MacPhail  38:33

If you like the show, please leave a rating or review, and of course subscribe. Tell all your friends who might need this! That would be so helpful to me, if you spread the word. This podcast is a member of Gabl Media, which is the most engaged architecture, engineering, and construction multimedia network on the planet. So check out the podcasts and video channels that are part of that network at Gabl Media dot com. That’s G A B L M E D I A dot com. If you’re looking for any kind of design advice, or you want to make sure you’re doing the right thing, I have an ‘Ask An Architect’ design helpline. Information about that can be found on my architecture website, Demios Architects dot com. I’ll link for that in the show notes. This episode is produced by my architecture firm, Demios Architects, where we believe architects are for everyone. Until next time, take care.

Episode enhancements for episode 66 are available here.