.01 - The Lake House

Client (Kai): “You want to move the kitchen to Pop’s room?”  I couldn’t quite wrap my brain around what my sister was suggesting.  “Tammy sent two designs,” she told me on the phone.  “One’s a pretty straightforward update of the existing floorplan; and the other’s a ‘this is how the house should have been designed’ plan.”  After living outside of the country for 30 years, I’d agreed to come home the year before to help with our aging mother, but it seemed the closer I was getting to my return, the more I was hearing about this person Tammy Skjenna and how she was helping my sister change a house that had pretty well stayed the same since my parents bought it in 1965.  Though my sister is by nature careful and circumspect (like her father), I couldn’t help but think she was warming to the idea of a major makeover.  I, however, was in the midst of working out the logistics of moving decades of my life several thousand miles, so trying to reconcile Tammy’s proposed new home with the only one I’d known since childhood was a bit more effort than I was willing to make.  What I could discern in the design was a couple more bathrooms which was all I needed at that moment to give it a resounding thumbs up!Tammy and my sister had been working on the plan and project scheduling for a while prior to my arrival at the house, and it was almost a full year before construction started.  In that time, I had lots of opportunity to connect with Tammy many times.  The finalized project would end up adding a second floor, significantly changing several outside walls, and except for one room entirely reconfigure the main living floor.  This was anything but a simple update renovation.  But every conversation with Tammy left me feeling just that much more confident that everything was going to be ok.  She always took the time to explain things in the clearest and most straightforward way; she was patient to a fault; and she offered her ideas, energy, and expertise to not only help me better understand what she was doing but also to make me aware of why I was feeling the way I was.  It’s not that common for various members of a family to live continuously in the same home for over 55 years.  While that familiarity may be comforting and reassuring, it can also be confining and suffocating.  The weight of so many years of memories can make change difficult.  Now that the house is completed, I know just how well Tammy understood this.  She was very mindful of the fact that changes my sister had in mind were in the spirit of looking to the future while honoring the past.  Because of this we have a vaulted ceiling in the family room with long hidden cross beams now exposed; a section of the laundry room with the original white wood clapboard siding; original birch flooring in the kitchen interlaced with wood panels milled a century later; and a stone fireplace looking just as attractive on the second floor as it always did on the ground floor.  I’ve often said that our house is most valuable for the 50 years of memories it gave us.  Tammy made sure it’s got at least 50 more years of memories to give.Nothing prepared us for the efficiency of the demo crew.  Seeing your home reduced to studs, hanging wires, and cryptic symbols telling a story of what’s going to be built is small consolation for the harsh realization that there’s no going back.  By then we had met Tammy’s contractor partners who were just as kind and accommodating and responsive as Tammy.  The project foreman repeatedly told us to ‘come and visit anytime’.  The anxiety of seeing your home reduced to a shell was quickly replaced with anticipation for what the team was going to do next.  Their professionalism, attention to detail and follow through gave me a sense that they were genuinely respectful of our home even though it now existed only in our memories.  At the end of every day the entire worksite was swept; all garbage and refuse were removed; tools and construction materials were arranged for the next day; and the bathroom and kitchenette were thoroughly cleaned.  Every team member was positive and polite and incredibly helpful.When the cable guy showed up one day to install a new router to get wifi to two floors, I wasn’t terribly helpful since I hadn’t lived in the house long enough to know enough of these kinds of details.  Who ended up on his hands and knees in the crawlspace helping out?  The project foreman.  He knew the house better than anyone.  It was clear he took his work very seriously and absolutely threw himself into the project because he is a professional.  But I couldn’t help feel that he seemed to care as much about the house as we did.  The finish of the new walls, the perfect fit of the latch bolts, the generous caulking of the bathrooms make me think no less.So now the house is different.  But visitors who were familiar with it before are hard pressed to give specifics because the changes make it seem that the house was always like this.  And true to form, just as Tammy described to my sister several years back, the house is now designed like it should have been; large windows offering plenty of natural light in return for spectacular views of the waterfront; a modern kitchen/dining/family area that makes it equally comforting to look out the windows eating alone or while entertaining company for a sumptuous holiday feast; a front entrance that makes hearty welcomes and long goodbyes the norm; an office, wet bar, media lounge and plenty of storage on the second floor replacing a drafty attic once accessible only by extension ladder.  And we have Tammy to thank for all of this.  It’s not that my sister didn’t know what she wanted for the house, not at all.  It’s that Tammy gave these ideas definition and specificity.  And then she made it all happen, on time, on budget and well beyond expectations.  It would be easy (and somewhat cliched) to say that Tammy is good at her job, which she is.  It was something else, and I couldn’t quite put my finger on it until I noticed one of the hashtags she uses for each of her posts on Instagram – #lovewhatyoudo.  There is no denying that Tammy’s hard work renders spectacular results.  But what we came to learn was that working alongside Tammy as the project unfolded would be as satisfying, fulfilling and memorable as it was precisely because she truly loves what she does.  And there’s a lesson in that for all of us.