seasons greetings everyone welcome to citizen herald reports i'm your host joanna journalist editor of the belmont citizen herald and wicked local belmont dot com today's guests are catherine and mood at by beach or owners  a home on school street in belmont which has become famous it's a subject of sixteen episodes of the thirty sixth season of the p b s show many of you must be familiar with this old house the renovation began in april and was completed in the first week in november the beaches had to live in temporary quarters for about seven months while their home had all its original windows refurbished our front porch and mud room were added the kitchen and bathrooms were gutted and renovated entry staircase was renovated mantles a renovated a fireplace was even added new basement stairs new insulation a master suite with a walk in closet a new waterline from the street and even a tree house in the backyard basically the house was completely transformed yet many of its original features were preserved and a lot of what was added is vintage or thousands from other homes catherine and thank you for having us now what was it like being chosen for this show i mean you applied you you know when you applied you weren't sure if you were going to get chosen right but when you actually found out that you were going  home was going to be on this old house and you're big fans of the show i'm sure that i mean how did you feel what was your initial reaction well we were very excited we actually so we apply only and then we didn't hear back for about two months so we had pretty much completely forgotten about it at that point and then we got a phone call or it was an email on a sunday you know we had a number of calls and then came over so it was a pretty long process it took us about two months yeah for we found out that we were eventually selected but then you know when they come from two very very excited static no well you know you bought the home and it was the summer of two thousand and fourteen and the home you bought it for a little over a million you were searching for a victorian home because you love victorians right what was it about this one that you fell in love with one of the things i think we both like the most were the windows they're huge and they're everywhere and so there's lots of light coming in and the details in the house were very rich the floors were beautiful there's crown molding everywhere and there were lots of little nooks and crannies that that were interesting and that we just sort of immediately fell in love with the and yet there were things that you knew you wanted to change you wanted to fix down the road which is which is why you you know you hired an architect to get the process started you originally thought you were going to do it in phases what changed your buy develop just do it go it  all out and get it all done so or actually we just wanted to or recent one to start with updating the kitchen and the bathrooms right and then once we had an architect and he showed us what else is possible with the house he drew some plans including the re building the front porch and changing the layout a little bit very small the dish and and i think when we sold that possible teams we got really excited about it but furthermore we knew that once we got into the construction whatever phase we were going to be in would be a lot of dust and dirt and most likely we would have to move out right so in the end we just said well if we move out and we do it all at once then at least i'll be done and we'll have to have  contractors in our house again for maybe thirty years or i think once we decided or once we understood that we just really have to move out that he said ok if you're going to do that we should just do everything at once right now i think it's great that you were able to do that and you are big fans of the show this old house and i know that what is it about this old house that you would say is different from using an ordinary contractor and that was that was better about it not necessarily the price tag money a lot of people think all maybe save money use in this old house but what were the benefits will be you get to use the amazing contractors that tom has assembled tom silva my builder has assembled including himself in his own team so you know that you're getting the absolute highest quality work right but a huge benefit of being attached to the show is that they have an external production schedule so they're keeping everybody moving and and so a project that could have easily taken any even a very good contractor a year was compressed and that was that helped us a lot because since we had did have to move out and we have small children a compressed schedule worked a lot better for us and it was so much fun of course because we love the show so for us to get to spend time with them and you know see them in action in real life was i think that was the best it was a very nice but how was it for you you had never been on t v before so what was it like to suddenly  expect but kevin and all of the other members of the cast are so good at their jobs and they just make you feel really come comfortable and confident so kevin asked a question you answer the question it's just a conversation and then we all get i think somebody says cut in the and then you remember oh this is being so it's almost like you're not on camera but right then you realize oh yeah yeah right it's really likely you were out of the house for seven months you recently moved back in the renovations actually done even though the show is still on the air right this how many episodes left is and there have been a through right now so maybe eight or nine left and then in march i think is when there's a magazine that this magazine number actually show the after pictures right through and that's when we might be able to bring you back on the air show the after pictures we're not able to show the after the after part of the project but i am going to cut we can either go inside right now or we could go out front because the focal point of the house was to bring back the original characters to the house so now if you look in this neighborhood and you look at all of the houses are the that's the new focal so yeah i know there was a lot of things that there was a couple of things that happened along the way that you didn't anticipate or tom silva the master builder didn't necessarily anticipate such as the replacement that was required of the water line to the house when you got news about that how earthshattering was working well architects all along the process had been preparing us for the fact that there would be things that we wouldn't we wouldn't know they were coming but that there would be unknowns and so we end in our mind we had sort of set aside some budget for fixing things that we couldn't have anticipated i think that's of every old house you take a while down you discover something that you just couldn't have known until you are really in the guts of it so it certainly wasn't a good thing to have to spend extra money on these fixes but now it's fixed in and we and you know even maybe the homeowners after us in forty years will will get that benefit yeah and they also have to do something where the house wasn't level right they have to like that was a made there was some structural work right and we knew some  it was you know going to happen but i think we ended up well partly because we changed the layout relatively significant in the backend of the house so including removing some walls which meant strengthening  project i think it was probably the front porch was a big chunk of the project and in some ways you know we're probably not going to end up using it as much as some of the other parts of douse like the kitchen or you know some of the other improvements we made but on the other hand i think it made a huge difference and this just coming around curb appeal of the house it always felt like it was always a beautiful house but you could tell that something was missing right fun to work with and we would say i think that's absolutely true is that it was not what we wanted but it was also a very fun process right with him the mudroom edition what was there before the mud room there was no was there was a back entrance to the home but it just was really small like no where there was or there was a back entrance that was fairly small and then of a very large powder room right off of it and it was a large and we wanted to sort of flip that and have a larger mudroom a smaller powder room ye and the way we live now of course you know all of us one we see the kitchen is sort of you know the central part of the house right that's where we hang out and i agree you know the kids do their homework and all that so now we have a much bigger kitchen right i want to ask you with so what ago when the previous owners had moved in and really hadn't been significantly changed since then so so style wise it was ready for refreshing when the so was very small and some of the burners had stopped working so we're all size was very us and the size of the kitchen was small and so the new kitchen has a tremendous amount of storage it's very well thought out our kitchen designer did an excellent job they had to break some walls for that right they did have to break some walls down and the area that we designated as sort of the working area of the kitchen is not significantly larger than the old working area of the kitchen but when they took the walls down they opened up the whole space so now it feels combined with an eating area and a little sort of you have that's not a traditional island it's more like a mud room island and you try to help people how you got the idea for that and what exactly well that that matter architect calls that area of the modern extension so after you've done the initial modern activity of taking your shoes off in your coat off and putting them in the company and i no longer think that never leaving them on the bench you still have your groceries and you have your school bag and you have your lunch and you have your mail so that's a place where we can immediately put things down there's cubbies in there that we where we can organize a place to plug in your phone things like that and then on the other side of that modern extension island is an area where we are currently using organizer art supplies so that's considered the table that it's their hands get the paper so it's just additional ways to organize all the junk and in our life i know what you mean about that when you have kids is always a lot of stuff  now what about your master bedroom that was also transformed because i think there was originally four bedrooms upstairs right so you actually took one of the bedrooms and combined it with another to make a master suite that's right you want viewers about that yeah so you know again in line with historical victorian obviously didn't have master suites back then but that was something we really wanted to have so we ended up combining the two  really nice flow so that we have a master close it so we removed one off the doors so we have only one door going into the street and then you know view media if they see the master close it and then share left so essentially one of the bedrooms became the bathroom and the master close it and then the other one status the bedroom which we didn't really touch right right so we didn't get any increased sleeping area right the area  we moved it into our bathroom right and it looks beautiful in there it does and the outside was painted a deep eggplant color so it's nice pop of color and right and we really really love the way that it looks and since it was something that was already in the home and it's something so very victorian it was important to us that we could we could bring it bring it back to life yeah now you did that with a lot of other things in the house  traditional renovations where you turn old into new you preserve a lot of the old and if you couldn't preserve it you actually went to it was a place where you told me where they sell salvaged where's that place we used a number of different kitchen table a chair and i don't know i think that might maybe want to other things but a lot of a lot of things and most of them in beautiful condition and a few of them i actually  that sort of with an open concept and underneath the sink so in our mind it looks again it looks quite victorian yeah and the other thing that try find really fascinating is that you actually kept your original windows yes but you had them one of the first things that we really love it's just immediately loved oh yes all the house for the first time i mean we knew we wanted to buy the house within five minutes or less of being in the house and then in the windows themselves are so beautiful and  it was also you know a lot of people believe that from an energy savings perspective new windows give you a lot better insulation but we've done a lot of research on that and basically if you have good weather stripping on an old window and you have a good storm windows outside then you're pretty much very close to that you know double pane new window so one's feet realize that it's actually kind of a myth that you have to sort of go to a new window to get the savings then it became an easier decision because rio like you said you know we always want to keep them it's just that we don't want to spend a lot of money restoring them on that end up with a house that we can't even keep warm right so it's good to you know and it's been perfect so far over the sets not been you know if di cold yet had unusually warm you know right but we did have a very bad winter last winter and we may have another bad winter coming up i know that your house like many houses in belmont did did suffer from that when what kind what kind of damage did it have we had some fairly significant damage in three of our rooms and some water that dripped a through the wall even down into some of the rooms follow and part of the renovation was to what did they have to do so that that won't happen again i know that was right said de basically more so if it was sold by insulation to he just makes it look so easy he's like doing these things like can't carving a piece of wood trim and he just makes it look so easy so so second nature well i think it to him is a he grew up he's with all the new you work with a decorator and you helped you with all your window treatments and your paint color densa ling on the walls i think some wallpaper furnishings and all that you had to pick  was it like making those making those decisions i was it hard to decide on things with so it was where hard and i think we had no idea how many decisions were need to be made initially you know at first we weren't even thinking about interior design  the show helped us find one amanda reed she was just really great and you guys clicked right yeah but i mean she basically came up with pretty much the entire design and then she would give us a few options but even within that i mean the side tables in our living room we went around and around and around between the two of us and just we couldn't decide couldn't decide argued and argued and then really you know and then we actually ended up just picking just agreeing to pick the ones that she'd originally picked but it was it was very very difficult but imagine how much harder would have been if we were picking from the infinity of  when you try to mission the whole house being that color it was a really dark color so anyway so we ended up picking the yellow but even then picking the trim color was also very difficult because a lot of houses have white trim that's the most traditional added your front porch they have a very pretty to me it looks like a sunburst design on the front and also on your staying glass windows on the side of the house that has that seem yellow so terry i really just i i love think you're if the house comes on the market i would love to buy one just for yours i mean it is it will be on the market would you ever do something like this again do you ever think you could go through this again i well i because of all that right a lot of helping us reminding us that we needed to pick the hardware by today reminding us that it's i can't even imagine doing that hard you know without the support of the whole crew so answer to your questions no i don't think we want to go through that again was stressful at times definitely oh yeah yeah yeah it's good that you so now that you're back in the house it's all done you know what's it like to be back in your house it's fantastic we we've only as you mentioned we've only owned the house for a little over a year about a year and a half but half of that time we haven't even lived in it so we're new to belmont we didn't have a chance to really feel like we belonged in belmont and now we're in the house we're here in the house forever and we can really start to  sew some roots down here and i can see that already in my my children that they're starting to feel very comfortable with the neighborhood they're making friends with children that will disagree with them and be about won't yeah absolutely and we feel really lucky that we have moved in in time to be able to use the underwood pool next year and i know you actually hosted thanksgiving not too long after you moved in how did that go i think it went really well we have very  turn answering what is your favorite part of the house your favorite room in the house or your favorite part of a minute nation if you want to go first serve so now that it's the holiday season we put up christmas lights and i'm loving the fact that we have a gorgeous supports that we can decorate oh yeah and that we have a plug outside we don't have a plug last year so we couldn't put lights on and i'm appreciating that and i'm taking my kids out almost every night they want to see the they want to see the house but i also really really happy for the two of you you know and i really hope everyone will tune in it on thursdays eight o'clock p b s you can also watch it online can you enjoy it dot com this old house dot com so if you missed any episodes don't worry can you can watch them online i want to have you back for the reveal because this old house does not want us to show viewers what it looks like now until after march fourth when t magazine sunspace really long i have everybody back we have some more footage for you to enjoy at the end of the show so please stay tuned you'll get to see some more footage of what went on at this unbelievable queen victoria on school street which i'm sure everybody knows where this house is now if you don't already and again thank you for coming thank you for tuning in be sure to pick up a copy of the belmont citizen how old the latest copy comes out every can see the wall boy if you look down here the baseboard so when you come up the stairs she would walk straight into that door there was a bedroom and then there was a wall on the other side to point straight across that wall that's straight across dividing these two rooms up and gave them closets ok so what we did is we took this space in here eliminate that door made this the main entry into the know back in the days they get oh yeah so today you have to put plastic under the slab so what they could do simply right now is they could but have a very they could put a  water that actually has like a heat source down all that's gone so this basement is going to hold so what we're going to do is just sets up a separate zone and you put the radiators down here and you set it fifty degrees the heat rises the temperature