Sleuths Solve Mystery of Dubious Decor

It seemed like a crime to remodel our home. Not that our 15-year-old Spanish stucco tract house wasn’t in need of a few renovations. Nothing major, mind you, just the usual small stuff to update the decor: carpeting, wallpaper, linoleum, paint.

What was criminal was the way we attempted to go about it. To my husband and me, every fix-up job seemed like a detective caper. We found ourselves asking lots of questions, just like a good sleuth would, such as what needs to be done, who will do it, when will it be done and how much will it cost. A diary of our remodeling projects, if we had kept one, might read like a detective’s casebook.

In “The Case of the Chameleon Color Samples,” my husband and I discovered that selecting the right shade of paint and carpet was a tricky business. We found that a carpet sample that could be called “Apricot Mist” under the fluorescent store lights turned into “Rusty Rose” in our home.

We were also fooled by misleading paint samples. The same color could look very different in different parts of the house. For instance, the light beige that looked great on the dining room beam turned a bright white on the banister.

In “The Elusive Countertop Caper,” our problem was to install a new countertop at a reasonable price. We first needed to determine the type of material to use. Should we use tile again, or some other material, maybe marble, granite, Formica or Corian?

One thing was for sure: I was sick of cleaning grout with Clorox and a toothbrush. The jury was in on this one--no new tile.

A friend had recently moved into a new house. It had all of the designer amenities including a drop-dead gorgeous granite countertop in the kitchen. When I asked him how he liked it, he said he always put a towel beneath any object he placed on it because he was afraid of marring the surface.

“You get used to it,” he said with a forced smile, but I wasn’t so sure that I could. So much for granite.

Formica is, well, something your mother has in her kitchen. Sure, it’s been updated, but we wanted something more sophisticated, something that said we weren’t afraid to face the turn of the millenium.

The only remaining candidate was Corian, a relative newcomer to the countertop scene. We didn’t know much about it except that it was solid throughout which meant that scratches and stains could be rubbed out.

It could also be made seamless--just one expanse of uninterrupted countertop to be wiped clean in a single stroke. Since my real dream is to have a kitchen that only needs to be hosed down, the Corian concept appealed to me a lot.

The next problem was to select an installer. After meeting with several, it became clear that we were the victims of our own ignorance. The salespeople knew countertops inside and out; we knew next to nothing. But we soon made it our business to find out such things as the difference between a non-drip and a bullnose edge, the virtues of an under-the-counter sink compared to an over-the-counter one, and exactly why a coved backsplash is so expensive.

Armed with a little knowledge, we felt confident that we could select someone who’d do the best job for a resonable price, and, as it turned out, we did.

How the job is to be done is as important as who is going to do it, because a ghastly mistake is a crime to live with. This is the moral to the following seafaring adventure, “The Case of the Linoleum Lake.”

I awoke with anticipation, eager to go downstairs and behold our new kitchen floor. The installers had spun their magic in one day, laying the new vinyl over the old. It looked great and I was happy . . . until I noticed it rippling under my feet.

Apparently, the workmen failed to properly reconnect the water line to the refrigerator, allowing water to leak out and drip down the wall where it became trapped between the old and the new linoleums. The result was a large puddle in the middle of the kitchen. The only way to get rid of “Loch Linoleum” was to push the water out, drop by drop, through the seams in the upper flooring. My husband and I spent a few days with a mop swabbing the deck, so to speak, before the last drop was forced out.

We learned from our mistakes. We found that you need the patience of a saint and the coolness of a cucumber to follow a project from start to finish. We also learned to develop a sixth sense about whom to trust and what materials to use. Through our own remodeling adventures, we’ve uncovered the following tips:

Select a decorating style and define a color palette. This will help you select everything from door jambs to door knockers, windows to wallpaper.

It was especially helpful to me during one of my most dreaded adventures--choosing the bathroom wallpaper. Mindful of our contemporary decorating theme and pastel color palette, I didn’t even consider such sample books as “Country Quilts & Tiny Flowers” and “The Tapestries of Versailles.”

Place your projects in order. We initially didn’t give much thought to how future projects would impact the existing decor. If we had had carpet installed first, the dirty handprints the carpet layers left all over our new silk wallpaper, as uncleanable as it is exquisite, could have been avoided.

Be a super-sleuth: research your project thoroughly. We visited many carpet stores before selecting the style that would best fit our needs and our budget. I secretly had my heart set on a Berber before discovering that it wouldn’t wear as well nor did it feel as luxurious underfoot as other carpet types.

Give it time, even if others do the work. I’m not only talking about the time it takes researching your project or conducting interviews with contractors, but the time you spend drumming your fingers, waiting in suspense to see if the workmen will show. Or the “sick days” you’ll spend supervising the carpet installation, anxious that some lax workman doesn’t move your antique end table by drop-kicking it.

Ask the contractor what he will do and what he won’t do. We made the erroneous assumption that the tile installer, who ripped out the baseboards when he demolished the old floor, would naturally install new ones. Apparently, that wasn’t part of the quoted job, so we ended up doing the work ourselves.

Home remodeling doesn’t have to remain as elusive as the Maltese Falcon. With a bit of detective work, you won’t have to empty your pockets for shoddy workmanship or settle for an inferior product. We didn’t, and we won’t in the future, for our next project won’t be a complete mystery.