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Emma Williams blames it on the pool table. Her husband, John DeCoteau, was itching to brush up on his billiards skills when the couple moved into their house in Saskatoon’s Nutana neighbourhood in 2002. DeCoteau promptly purchased a pool table. As it turned out, the table was too big for the basement—at least, as it existed back then.
“The joke is that the pool table was why we had to renovate the house,” says Williams, a Saskatoon-based artist who paints from a studio off the home’s master bedroom. One project led to another and things “just sort of snowballed” from there.
After living in the house for nearly four years, Williams and DeCoteau (a doctor at Saskatoon’s Royal University Hospital) realized that while they were in love with the area and their location near the river, they were going to have to move out for a while if the renovation of their dreams was going to transpire. Fortunately, Williams’s parents, who live nearby, allowed their daughter, son-in-law and two granddaughters (now ages six and seven) to settle in with them for 18 months as the home makeover marched on.
In one of the biggest changes, the north-facing front entrance was replaced by a wall of windows; an addition was built onto the kitchen to make space for this new entryway. A contemporary wood and metal staircase (built by Williams’s father, a retired mechanical engineering professor) took the place of the former front foyer.
“Before, you opened the front door and went down into this dark, dungeon-like place. We wanted to make the basement part of the house,” says Williams of the reasoning behind the airy staircase and added windows. “I don’t think we’d anticipated this big of a transformation,” she admits, with a degree of disbelief. “Now we have all this light coming from the north and the south. It’s very comfortable.”
The house wasn’t always so cozy. Built in 1959, the A-frame featured five bedrooms over three levels to suit the needs of its first owners: two adults and six children, a bunch that rivaled the Bradys for size. “It’s kind of a California home right in the middle of the Prairies,” says Williams of the home’s exterior cedar siding and laid-back feel, both of which survived the renovations.
The original kitchen was galley-style with little room to move about; the eating area was unnecessarily large for its current owners. “We’re a family of four, not a family of eight, so our needs are a little bit different,” says Williams. The new kitchen’s massive island functions as a sleek and minimalist centrepiece to the main floor. The old dining room now holds a grand piano instead.
The changes didn’t stop there. More windows were added to other parts of the house, including the second-storey master bedroom facing the street. New maple replaced old hardwood floors on the top storey, while heated concrete now covers the main floor and basement, a luxury not lost on Williams as she stood barefoot in the kitchen on a supremely frigid January day.
“In 1959, all of a sudden this was a brand-new house in an old neighbourhood,” she says, noting that even today some renovations are plopping giant McMansions into the 100-year-old district. “We didn’t want to do anything to the house that was going to make it look out of place again.”
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