LIVING & HEALTH
How long have you lived in this house? KT: I don’t remember. GC: This isn’t going to go well. He has no memory and I don’t pay attention. You were renters, first. KT: We had the top two floors. GC: There was a lesbian couple on the main floor and a guy in the basement who grew his own pot. Why did you buy? GC: The landlord said he was selling, so we could either buy it or move. And I hate moving. KT: And we love this street, even though when we first moved out here we thought it was the middle of nowhere. I don’t think we’d ever been past Ossington. What was the first renovation? KT: The front of the house, because that’s the most important thing in a home, that it look better than the neighbours’. GC: We gayed out so bad. It took months to decide on the colours. We still have 40 cans of paint, all different colours, in the garage. KT: Our neighbours probably thought we were crazy. “Oh look, there’s the gay guys standing in the middle of the street staring at their house again.”
Did you have a contractor at that point? KT: Our first contractor was terrible. I should have been suspicious. I picked him because he was the only one who let me do whatever I wanted. GC: Now we have a great contractor — he cares about what he’s doing, and actually lifts a hammer himself. Did you do any of the work yourself? KT: I did some of the design. We both did some demolition. And Gavin built a bookshelf out of our old doors. Was there major work? KT: The previous owner had already done much of the structural work, the foundation and opening up some of the rooms. We took out one load-bearing wall in the kitchen and added a two-storey deck in the back. Having lived here so long, I had lots of opportunity to figure out what we could do. We basically went floor by floor. It took us years. How would you describe the feel? GC: Modern country, cottagey. Since we worked in Halifax on 22 Minutes for five to six months of the year, I almost saw this place as a vacation home. We were only here in the summer. So I really did think of it as a cottage. I wanted lots of places to lie and read. Continued on page 15
→ city meets country Second-floor living room (opposite page) with barn board floors from Revival Flooring and distressed coffee table from Forever Interiors. Stairwell (this page, top left) showing Kirsten Johnson’s Homeland Security Colour-Coded Advisory System with Sockpuppets, Enrique Ferreol’s Paisaje con Manzana and custom ceramic chandelier from AM Studio. Gavin Crawford made the bookshelf (middle left) from doors reclaimed from the house. Kyle Tingley had the marionette (top right) made as a gift to Crawford; it’s one of his characters, Verna, the librarian. The mainfloor kitchen (bottom left) features a pebble bowl that Tingley bought at MOMA. “The whole house is designed around it,” says Crawford.
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