This episode is a renovation story, told by Teresa Younkin. She describes four major renovations she has been through and what they taught her about life.
About our guest:
Teresa Younkin is a Leadership Coach, Consultant, and Expert specializing in helping healthcare leaders and teams bring their multi-level health IT initiatives to fruition and deliver powerful results. Leaders can be the respected leader they want to be, surrounded by an energized team that together can change the world. Teresa is a storyteller by nature who enjoys the creative process of bringing teams together to renovate a project or a house! Over the years and 4 major renovations later she shares the lessons she’s learned and how she found the deeper meaning in taking things apart to build a better life.
Website: www.teresayounkin.com
Facebook group: The Leadership Collective
Twitter: @teresayounkin
Instagram: @realsmartmethod
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Renovation Story – Transitions With Teresa Younkin
This episode is a renovation story. My guest is Teresa Younkin. She’s a leadership coach I met at She Podcasts Conference in Arizona and a storyteller by nature who enjoys the creative process of putting a team together to renovate a house. She shares lessons learned through four major renovations over the years and how she found the deep meaning and took things apart to build a better life. The way I like to have these conversations is by thinking about how I would be talking to someone at a party. You and I met at a party, and you were starting to tell me your renovation stories. I asked you this, “Do you want to come on the show and tell me the stories?” Here we are.
What grabbed you as I said, “In my very first remodel, my husband died.” That’s a little shocking.
I haven’t run into that before during the renovation.
I’m not at a later stage in life either. It’s not like we did this and were at that age when it was imminent.
You were young. Were you 30 or something you said?
Yes. My husband was 36. I was 38. He liked I’m older. I liked him younger. It all worked out. When he was 31, he was diagnosed with primary brain cancer. We knew that it was the terminal diagnosis. We had lived in Oregon at the time. Our families were on the East Coast and they were in the Southwest. We had to figure out what we wanted to do. He said, “Let’s go back to where your parents are because you’re going to be there with kids.” We did that and bought this great one-story ranch.
At the time, he had suffered a stroke after surgery and was in a wheelchair. It worked out perfectly. We were looking for houses near my parents. My parents said, “We’ve been looking around and found this great house.” I said, “Really?” They said, “Yeah, would you guys mind living together?” I was like, “That’s interesting.” It’s with my parents. It was cool because the way that they sold it was they said, “It’s big enough that you’d have to go looking for people.” You can get lost and not have to run into somebody. It was lovely.
We moved into it. It was pretty old school. It still had the green shag rug from the ’70s and one million doorways. A doorway and a light switch were coming out of every room. That was crazy. We lived there for almost four years. He ended up passing away but it was the funniest thing. Maybe four months before, my late husband decided that he wanted to do this remodel. I was like, “What are you talking about? This is crazy. We know that we’re at the end of this.”
He said, “I want to do this.” I said okay because how do you tell a dying person no? We decided to. It was his project. He hired the contractor and did all the things. He was a super gregarious guy and an entertainer. The funniest thing was that he and the contractor ended up being friends. I’d come home. They’d be chitchatting. I’d be like, “Where’s the work?” Lesson number one, don’t hire a companion for your spouse when you’re looking for somebody to do some work on your house.
We were in there. Every day I was cracking the whip saying, “You got to get this work done.” All of a sudden, I found myself in a William Faulkner novel as I lay dying because it was nothing but saws and hammers. My poor husband at the time was like, “The noises hurt my head.” I was like, “I know but we can’t stop. We’re in the middle of this. We had gotten rid of bulkheads and taken out cabinets.” One of the things that we wanted to do was have an open floor concept because the house we were in was a ranch built back East with lots of doorways and cutoff rooms. We wanted something open and that’s what my husband wanted. He wanted West Coast living on the East Coast.
It was his last act of caring. What he wanted to do was to make sure that we were okay. We go through the project. The contractor shows up periodically here and there. He loves hanging out with him. Unfortunately, my husband passed away on a Tuesday. Our friends come over as people do. Your community rallies around you. I look up and see him in the doorway. He’s like, “I think I’m going to go now.” I was like, “No, you were not.” I was like, “I’m going to have 200 people here this weekend on a Saturday for this funeral.” David’s last words were, “Finish the floor.”
Renovating can strengthen relationships every time that you find something.
The contractor said he was going to leave but he was like, “Things happened. I got to go.”
“I got to go. I’m feeling uncomfortable,” was what he said. He looked at me and I was like, “You will go back and finish out the day.” It was in the afternoon. He went back and true to his nature, he came back every day and the community rallied around us. Everybody pitched in. We got the remodeling done before the funeral on Saturday.
Did you finish it all up in four days or something?
Yes. It was the first time I had ever laid wood floors. When I look back on it, it was super cathartic, not just for me. It wasn’t transformational just for me. It was transformational for my community. It was a way for people to feel okay about what happened, participate, try and be part of a solution to a problem. It was wonderful. I love that house. It turned out the way that David wanted it. I am super thrilled. We ended up selling the house. I found a great guy on the internet. We bought a second house. We got married.
You found a guy for yourself and not for the house? Where is this house?
It was near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. We moved a couple of hours away. He and I decided that we wanted to do some investing. We were looking around and between two houses while we were engaged. It was between this smaller house closer to the hospital, which was prime property or this other house on the other side of the tracks. I took a look at both and said, “We need to go for the bigger one across the tracks.” It was an old 1890s farmhouse.
It had been chopped up into a double on one side in a downstairs apartment and an upstairs apartment on the other side. In addition to being old and historic, it was cool because we had secret passageways and people loved to come to visit. We looked under the house. I grew up in the military, so when I looked underneath the house and saw that it was on the stone foundation about passed out, I was like, “How could we live here?”
Do you mean a fieldstone foundation?
Yeah. I had never seen anything like that. I lived in military housing and the suburbs. It was a neat house. We renovated that one. Every time that we found something, it strengthened the relationship. The first thing was there were these doors to nowhere. They were doors from the inside, just out from the second story into nowhere. We were calling it the moon door from Game of Thrones. That’s what we felt like. They were doorways to nowhere. That’s a part of trying to meet the egress.
That’s not very safe. You open the door and fall two stories down.
Maybe you’ll get caught by the metal roof underneath on the porch. It was an interesting house. We had it completely remodeled because it was very old school. It hadn’t been remodeled probably since the late ‘60s. We came in and tore everything down. We had horsehair and plaster walls, which were neat. The heating was interesting because they didn’t have a lot back then. We didn’t have fireplaces. We had one chimney but the fireplace had been covered over.
Soon after we remodeled, we went away for the weekend. I came home and it looked like an alien had landed in the kitchen because the drop ceiling had fallen. It was nothing but can lights and wires hanging all over the kitchen. We came to find out that there was a slow leak from the tub upstairs. Thank goodness we had never filled the tub to sit in it or the cast iron tub would have come through the whole ceiling into our kitchen. When they took a look up there, the contractor realized that the support beam had been cut. It was super interesting. I found out a lot of things that I did not know. We learned a lot along the process, like sometimes you need to have a skinny plumber or a fat plumber.
When do you need a skinny plumber?
You need a skinny plumber when you’re in a very old house and people have built things. Only the skinny plumber can wiggle underneath the cabinets and between the walls.
I can’t imagine when you would need a chubby plumber.
The chubby plumber is the dude with good skills. We had both.
He has good skills but is not good for tight spaces.
We laughed a lot about that and kept the fat plumber when we moved to our third house. It was a great place, but that house was the building block of our relationship. We could do anything together. That was teamwork. When we first moved into that house before the remodeling started, it was 5 of us in a 2-bedroom, 1 bath and 1 kitchen that had a table in it for all of us. We were in the teeniest tiniest room ever. They were probably 8×10. Talking about blending a family, we were in each other’s skin.
Was it you, your husband and his kids and your kid either way?
Yeah. We’re all super close. It was a good journey. After a couple of years, we decided that it was time to move on up and out. We decided to turn that into an investment property and loved it. Everybody who came in loved having the cool things happening, the pass-throughs and all the fun stuff. We had a realtor that we had been friends with. She called us up on a Tuesday. My life happens on Tuesdays. She said, “This person is getting ready to put their house in the market. Do you want to come and look at it?”
We were like, “Sure.” We walked through the door and it was hours. I’m sure that other people have walked into a property and thought, “This is us.” It was us. We didn’t have to do a whole lot. We had to put in a bedroom downstairs and bathroom to the basement because it wasn’t big enough for all five children to have their rooms. We’re trying to get things together, so we did that. It was interesting. It was our house. It felt like ours on the inside, like the things that we could do but coming up to it. It wasn’t our personality. That was our first large landscaping project. We decided that we wanted to take this colonial, revamp the outside and make it a little bit more modern than it was.
You did that with the landscaping or do you mean with the windows and other things having to do with the house itself?
We could learn a lot along the renovation process.
We did it with the landscaping. The front of it was pretty.
What did you do?
We ended up tearing off the front porch and making circular front porches on the front. We pulled up all the bricks and relayed a new brick walkway. One of the things was that the step up into the mudroom into the house was super high. The ground had settled. We put a brand-new step there, tore everything out and made it ours. We put in lots of new beds, plants and things that were more reflective of us and not so much the last people we tore down the back of the deck that was on it. It was in horrible disrepair and needed to go. We took all that out.
We drew out and designed. We took out the yield protractor, drew circles to map out what we wanted and sprayed paint and strings. It’s old-fashioned the whole way and ended up doing in the backyard three circles that merged on the left side. We put in gravel, wood fire pit and stone wall to sit on for the kids so that they could do smores. The grownups got the larger circle in the middle of the gas fire pit and the pergola. On the side, we put in an area for my husband to put his grill.
Marking it out on the ground helps a lot because you can see how much space you allocate to the different parts. That’s a good way to do it.
We did that and learned how to calculate how much stone you would need to fill these areas. I didn’t know that there were so many different types of stone and how many tons they were in shovelfuls you can count. It was a joint project between our landscapers and ourselves to do all the work. We got that and loved it. Finally, at the very end, as life would have it, we ended up selling that house when our last child went to college. We sold everything, went to Scotland for two weeks, came back and moved in with our parents.
Was that the end of the housing renovations?
No. We renovated our last house in Virginia. When we came back, we purchased a house in Virginia with my parents, who live there. We purchased a home in Arizona with my in-laws and they live in our Arizona house. We go back and forth so that we can be and spend time with them. Every 6 to 8 weeks, we travel back and forth between the two houses and get to spend time with our parents.
They live in the house. You don’t have to worry about it being vacant while you’re gone. They get some time to themselves while you’re with the other parents.
You were a never persona non-grata in there because about the time you start getting sick of one another, it’s time to go.
Did you have to renovate those two houses too?
Not the one in Arizona. We did the one in Virginia. It had been the home of a husband and wife who were middle-aged. She had passed away from breast cancer. When we purchased the house, he’d been living there and decided it was time for him to move on. The funniest thing is he married the lady across the street, so he didn’t go very far. It’s always nice to have the homeowner around if you’ve got questions about things.
One of the things that this house came with was geothermal. We haven’t had a system like that before, so it’s nice to have him there to explain things. It’s very interesting when we started doing work on the house that he was like, “What are you doing?” He still felt a little bit ownership. That’s where he had raised his children even though he had moved on. My mom would wake up in the middle of the night and there would be a woman standing in the room. It happened a couple of times.
There was a time where she was like, “I jumped out of bed. I told her to get out. You don’t belong here anymore.” What we figured was it was probably the woman who had lived there before coming back. We were like, “The dude across the street is not here. You’re going to have to go find him somewhere else.”
My mother is from Panama and one of the old sayings that people say is when you have visitors who come that you don’t want anymore, you clean your house. That means that you pull out all the old carpet and paint the walls. We ended up doing that in our home to get the lady not to come back and so they don’t recognize the place anymore. This house has two masters, the master downstairs and upstairs. The master upstairs was still very ’90s. We had pink tile. It needed to be revamped. We ended up redoing that one and pulling everything out.
IKEA is amazing. I love IKEA furniture. We redid a completely modern bathroom and master bedroom and took out all the closets. It’s one big, wide-open space where we can live and enjoy ourselves. The bathroom is amazing balls. I don’t know if people know but you can buy lights that go up and change color. They connect your Bluetooth speaker. We have a dance party in the bathroom when you need one. We finished that one. It has been awesome. We have not had any visitors since all the work has been done.
Is there a word for cleaning out a house to get rid of the visitors?
I don’t know. My mom says that’s what the older people say and that’s what you do. I take her for her word. She hasn’t steered me wrong yet. When we had the work done on the second remodel, we decided to hire a younger couple who was getting started. There’s one million and one shows on television where everybody’s like a remodeler.
They didn’t give us a contract beforehand. They did a lot of work. The work took longer than we expected. We got to the end and said, “Let’s settle up.” They were standing there like, “It’s going to be twice what we quoted you.” I was like, “I don’t think so. Like you said, it was going to cost this much. You didn’t send the invoice.”
It was a time that where we could have gotten ugly. Things could have gotten worse. My husband and I took a step back and said, “We’re not trying to take money out of your pocket but this is probably a life lesson for you that you need to charge what you’re worth.” We took the other estimates that we had gotten, put them together and came up with a fair amount. We paid them more than what the original was because they did run into some issues.
We understand that and pay them a little bit more but I felt like it was at a moment that you could mentor a younger couple. I’ve been an entrepreneur. I know what that’s like, how scary it can be to walk into this new life and not be unsure of yourself, your skills, what you can do, putting together a team and leading them effectively. My husband and I took that being the elder ones in the room.
Take it as a teaching moment to let them know. These are the things that you need to do. You can be enthusiastic but you have to have your house in order or you’ll never be able to make the strides and get to where you want to be. Will I hire another young couple again? Probably but we will probably guide them along the path if we find that they’re misstepping. I truly believe that we should be supporting other young entrepreneurs. It’s so hard. That was it.
We should be supporting other young entrepreneurs.
I feel like all of my remodels have been transitions in my life. They’ve been marked by transitions. I didn’t think about that until we decided to come on to talk. I’m sure I’m not the only person who that’s marked by. Is it unconscious? Maybe. It needs change and something new, providing something for somebody else like a gift but in the end, every single one of my remodels is a great lesson and experience. I wouldn’t trade any of them at all.
Do you have 2 or 3 big lessons you learned that other people could learn from?
Big lessons, yes. Always treat your relationships as a business. There’s a place for business and personal. If you like the person, wait until the job’s done before you befriend them. That’s the biggest one. That’s hard. There are contractors that you meet that you like. That happened twice with the first contractor when my husband was sick and then with this young couple in our last remodel. We felt connected. Number one is business is business and personal is personal. Wait until the job’s done and then develop a relationship.
The second thing is to know where you’re getting into. In our 1890s remodel, we were like, “This is great.” We’d watched 1,000 remodeling shows and thought, “How come we can’t be like so-and-so? We’ll go in there and tear down these walls. Do this and that.” That’s not it. Structural engineer, hire one. I mostly learned to appreciate them and their suggestions because sometimes what you think or maybe your contractor thinks is needed may not be what’s needed in there.
The third big lesson is you got to learn to roll with it. Things are going to come up. You got to take a deep breath, take a step back and this too shall pass. You’ll get through it. The idea of remodeling is sexy. The work, maybe not so much. We’ve got channels 24/7 that tell you it’s an easy road. Always plan for longer than you ever anticipate, have a little bit of grace and you got to be flexible.
That’s good life advice beyond renovations. A lot of these TV shows within 30 minutes or 60 minutes are giving a different impression than how long it takes. It’s also wearing on people having it underfoot every day.
When you have huge life changes thinking about things like, “Will the doors always be wide enough if I have to have a wheelchair?” You don’t think about those things until you have to. One thing that we learned too is to have a ramp on the front of the house, you have to be sometimes careful. I didn’t know this but it’s a signal that there’s somebody inside who may not be able to walk and be impaired in some way. It was something I’d never thought about until somebody brought it to my attention. I was like, “I don’t know.” I try to see the good in everybody. You have to be realistic about what’s happening.
What do you think we should call this episode?
It’s transitions. Remodeling for me has marked several transitions in my life. I’m sure that there’ll be more. The next home that I go to. Our next house will be mid-century modern. We’ve planned that out and learned that our taste is organic modern. I love a slab table, glass, all that beautiful greenery and lots of light. That’s super important. I was being able to walk outside when I felt like it. I don’t know if I’ll be able to do that because I don’t know where we’re going to be going. I’m open to moving anywhere in the country. I’ve lived in a lot of different places from the East Coast to the West Coast and most places in between.
I heard the Upper Midwest has a lot of mid-century modern ranch-type houses that are pretty great in Wisconsin, specifically. Do you still have that one house that was on the other side of the tracks?
I do not. I sold it to a young woman I mentored. She wanted to get into real estate. I was like, “We’re looking to get rid of this house because we want to do some other things.” I sold it to her. She took it and ran. She got married. Congratulations. It’s happy endings all the way around. The people that bought the first house have been there for many years.
Do you think your first husband visited that house? Did you ever hear anything about that?
We left town so I don’t think so but he visits me in my dreams. He knows where I’m at.
Do you want to share your information in case anybody could use whatever else you’re doing? You’ve been talking about mentoring.
My world outside of renovations is being a leadership coaching consultant. You can find me on my website, TeresaYounkin.com. There’s a link to a quiz if you wanted to take it called Are You Motivated To Change Your Leadership Style? That’s not true. Many people may know what their leadership style is and may want something different but are you motivated to do it or not? It’s a quick little thing to show you where you’re at in that journey.
You can find me on the website and all my contact information is there. If you want to talk about home renovations, you can book some time with me on the website too. A lot is going on. If you want to talk about living bi-coastal or with your parents like this whole sandwich generation, I’m open to a conversation. There are lots of lessons learned.
There’s a lot to talk about. I’ve enjoyed talking to you about your whole experience with your houses, life and relationships building through the houses. Not all relationships managed to survive these multiple renovations. I’m glad yours did. It does test people because it involves almost everything. It’s differences in tolerance levels for all sorts of things and situations. It sounds like you’re pretty balanced and aware of all that, which is great.
That second marriage is having to figure out all the new expectations, new hopes and dreams from what you had before to where you are. It’s a journey. We talked about what this was going to look like because we knew each other’s trigger points.
That’s very mature of you. Not everybody looks at their partners as well because you have to get ready for that.
There’s a lot of prep for it. How much are you going to spend? Money is a big thing. I pictured this and they may have pictured the same thing but differently. How do you negotiate those difficult conversations like, “I think that’s ugly?” I don’t want that in my house. It’s a relationship builder or terror downer. You have to renovate your relationship at that point.
There’s a lot of that goes on when I’m working with two people and they don’t agree and are expecting me to settle it.
There’s a lot of emotionalities tied to it. How you grew up and what you thought in your mind like, “I grew up with this in my house and I like it this way.” You may not be with a person who values that or feels the same way. Maybe they had something different. I always think of that story about the young woman who buys a roast, always cuts off both ends, puts it in the pot and cooks it. A lot of times, we tie that to our home.
It was important for us to find a place that we felt was ours. Even in our two homes here, we don’t feel like this is ours. We always talk about what our next place is going to be. When we find our place, it’ll be down the road at some time but we’re thinking and talking about it. It’s going to be a long-range plan. We have plenty of time to dream.
Remodeling is sexy. The work around it, not so much.
The most fun part of it for me is dreaming with your partner about what your lives are going to be like or what they could be like in certain kinds of houses. It is pretty fun.
I’m looking forward to sitting in a beautiful leather chair and watching the sun come up in the window with a hot cup of coffee in the morning.
That’s very specific. You can make that happen.
I’m going to.
I don’t doubt it. I bet you will.
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