“We tried to make the house more itself”Renovating an old family home for how you live now (but the wonky floors stay!).
There’s a lot I can relate to in Annie Meyers-Shyer’s wonderful new book, This Oak House (out September 15), which follows her renovation of the 80-year-old home in L.A. where her mother-in-law once lived. Namely, Annie’s attention to detail—from light switches (consider room entry points, furniture placement, and allotting dedicated lighting circuits)—and her commitment to preserving some of the home’s original quirks and character, like the mismatched floor boards and millwork. I second her recommendation to document everything (e.g. photograph electrical outlets before the walls are closed back up; you never know when you’ll need to reference them).
But also, I shared Annie’s delight in being completely immersed in the project, which she sees as being a steward of sorts: “Every family that has lived here has changed the house in some way. When we opened the walls, we found evidence of those earlier lives: pocket doors that had been closed up, old wallpaper, traces of previous renovations. I loved that. It made me feel like we weren’t starting the story over. We were just adding our chapter.” As Annie’s mother, filmmaker and set design pro Nancy Meyers, notes in the introduction, “I can tell you from my own experience—a house is never really finished.” We can all agree it’s a process that continues long after the keys are handed over and the last item is checked off the punch list (ha!). Welcome to The Guest Room :) Yours in house chapters, Amanda
In April 2021, a few months after my mother-in-law decided to move out of her Los Angeles home, my husband and I decided to take it over, rather than give it up—embarking on what we thought would be a modest renovation. We knew the main systems needed an upgrade, and the current layout needed a rethink. While we wanted to move some walls, we weren’t going to alter the overall footprint. So how hard could it be? Four years later, we had essentially touched every inch of the house, and somewhere along the way the project completely changed the course of my life. ... Subscribe to Homeward to unlock the rest.Become a paying subscriber of Homeward to get access to this post and other subscriber-only content. A subscription gets you:
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