When deciding what to reuse during a major renovation, three qualities are determining what’s sticking with us on Renovation Road: beauty; sentimentality; and indestructibility.

Beauty means keeping the art we love and incorporating it into our new space, including Kayo O’Young’s delicate pottery and art we’ve collected from various Stratford artists over the years.

When it comes to sentimental, top of my list is an old wood rocking chair, painted white. It was the nursery chair in my childhood home and I’ve hauled that thing around the country as I moved to study and work. It’s not the best design match for the mid-century-modern teak bedroom set in our guest room but, oh well. The rocker stays. Even though there’s a brass ban in the renovation design, the brass pitcher crafted from a First World War artillery shell stays as it was made by my partner’s grandfather. The wood “toonie bears” with acrylic tummies stay: products of my late father’s lathe.

Then there are those items that are neither beautiful nor sentimental but they do the job their forbearers failed at doing.

For once upon a time there were bookshelves in our Toronto apartment office: an IKEA Hemnes unit and floating shelves. And they served their purpose, until that very noisy day when we wondered what on earth just happened in the office. We discovered one of those floating shelves had given way and the books dumped on the floor. A closer look at the other floating shelf, and the standing unit, discovered they were on the verge of collapse, as well.

It turns out the doorstopper design books my partner has collected over the years needed a far sturdier home. So after we patched up the wall where the floating shelf ripped out, and got the remnants of the weakened Hemnes cabinet hauled away, we went shopping for sturdier freestanding bookshelves. We found welded metal units at Structube with a strong metal lattice making up the sides and cube-shaped shelf cubbies. “We’ve sold these to design studios all over Toronto,” the salesperson told us. Alas, nothing like them appear to be at Structube (or anywhere else) now: the Toronto pair will be on Big Book Duty in our Stratford office.

When I first moved to Toronto, I had basic furnishings for my new apartment already but needed counter stools for the kitchen island. Two Toronto friends each had the same stools in their homes: again from Structube, the seats were made from a moulded clear material, likely acrylic. Visually, they blended into the space and had a funky, fun feel. I liked that they were swivel attached to a circular metal base. So now, all three of us had the same stools.

But then one of us had a 6’4″ weight-lifting guy move in. Bonus: he fidgets when he sits.

After a few months, one of our stool seats cracked. We figured perhaps it was a flaw and got two more of the stools to make three at the island (the seats weren’t available standalone to replace). But then another one broke. And the final straw was when a third stool cracked apart completely while my partner was sitting on it, sending him flying onto the floor.

After shopping around, we found some of the most comfortable island chairs through Bouclair that, miracle of miracles, weren’t bulky in the least: They had a wood seat contoured for comfort, and a blunted-diamond-shaped back, held in place by two sleek chrome rods, that cradled your back in just the right spot.

And all was well — for a while. But then somehow the screws holding the seat to the swivel base stripped in the stool my partner usually sat on. He’s a mechanical engineer by training and his brother-in-law is a scientist with an expertise in aviation construction. They tried every trick they knew to repair these stools but, alas, no luck.

The third set of counter stools we bought for the apartment are my least favourite: they are black mesh seat fabric, for one thing. But after two years of we’re-home-all-the-time pandemic use, they had not fallen apart. So even though I would never choose these if I had a clean design slate, they somehow have to fit into our new Stratford kitchen. I am hoping that having touches of black elsewhere through that kitchen, such as all the handles and hardware, will make these chairs look less imposing amid the wood tones, teals and whites.

And if they look monstrous: I’ll be reaching out for suggestions on more suitable swivel counter chairs, with the proviso they must prove to be Bamm-Bamm proof.