I had sworn, never again.

After completely gutting and fixing up the first home I bought, and a second partial renovation of house No. 2, I had planned to live out my remaining days with nary a sledgehammer in sight.

But life has a funny way with sworn resolutions. In 2019, my partner and I looked for a modest home in Stratford, Ontario that we could buy and then rent out during the theatre season to artists, with a view that, long term, once our work years in Canada’s largest city wound down, we’d have the option of giving up our rental apartment in Toronto and settling into small-city life.

Despite my desire to not undertake renovations, the house we bought needed work on the kitchen. The oldest part of the house was built in 1871. In the 1920s, someone added on a piece and the owners before us added yet another piece. The sellers, themselves, were frank: they had planned on fixing the kitchen, in the 1920s addition, but decided to move on rather than tackle it. We made a few necessary mechanical repairs at the house, with the idea of renovating the kitchen when we moved full-time into the house at a later date.

“It looks like a dollhouse!” exclaimed one friend when she walked toward the entrance for the first time. It’s a clapboard dwelling that feels like a 19th-century farmhouse, with a generous square front porch. Inside, given the add-ons, it provides enough space for us to live and entertain: very surprisingly, the dollhouse has 1,900 square feet of space over two floors. The upstairs bedrooms and office have sloped ceilings but strategic furniture placement means my 6’4″ partner can navigate up there without head bumps.

When COVID-19 restrictions began, both of our Toronto jobs moved to remote work. We ended up spending more time at the Stratford house as our opportunities to rent it out changed with first no, then a limited, theatre season over 2020 and 2021.

During 2022, both our workplaces committed to ongoing remote work policies. We had spent three months solid in the little Stratford house in fall 2021 when we sublet our Toronto apartment to neighbours undergoing a home renovation who needed to escape from the fuss and mess. We decided we could move full-time to Stratford, sooner than later.

And that meant coming up with a plan to tackle that kitchen.

I have a relatively decent eye for space and design but this room defeated me. It has a door to the front porch; a wide opening to the front hallway; another doorway opening to the back room of the house that we use as an office; a huge and lovely deep bay with three large windows. But all these doors and windows meant there was only one solid wall in the entire place, between that door to the office and the exterior wall. The stove and fridge were there: the sink was on the opposite wall, under a window overlooking the porch – an awkward dash carrying a pot of boiling water to drain. I reached out to professional cabinet makers; to contractors; to a young designer whose dance card was filled up for a couple of years but who agreed to give us a one-hour consultation.

They all tried, but none of the fixes and proposals for the kitchen worked very well. What I wanted, I realized, was a version of my Toronto apartment kitchen: an L-shaped layout cradling a butcher-block-topped island. One fateful afternoon, I took my measuring tape and started poking around the entire main floor: where was there enough space to place that L?

It turns out, there was space in the existing living room, if we just made one deep, long window half that size to sit above a new sink.

So what started as a “fix the kitchen” soon snowballed into a “fix the entire main floor” renovation plan. Because hey, if you’ve got the bin in the driveway to take away the old kitchen cabinetry, you might as well replace the flooring (which needed it: there were five different types of flooring used over the main floor). The existing kitchen (destined now to be the new dining room) needs lots of patching up and we were pretty sure there was little to no insulation in those 1920s’ walls; and while we’re at it, how about a gas fireplace in the new living room, which is to be located where we had originally set up our dining room table?

This will be a live-action diary of how this renovation goes, some musings on design and the perils of revealing the secrets of a century-plus old home.

And after this time, I swear: never again.