“If you had bought the house and it had been renovated already and the finishes were not great, you would have paid someone else’s markup,” says Lauren. “This way, you could really create the space you were waiting for—and that’s what brings the excitement. We really wanted to bring out the warmth of this house and allow space for separation while creating a little cocoon. With all the moving around, we wanted to give the kids a sense of permanence.”
Lauren began referring to the home as “The Tree House” from the get-go, and the name stuck. The plan was to renovate what Neal calls the “huge disaster” of a kitchen down to the studs and redo the floors and ceilings. But then a delay caused them to change course. “We discovered it would take about a month to remediate some asbestos in the ceiling,” he says, “and we figured, if this is going to take longer than we thought, we should do the bathrooms too.”
Lauren was in full support. “Construction is so painful that you only want to go through that pain once if you can help it,” she says. “I feel like to stomach everything at once is better than going through all of that and moving in and still being left with hideous, creepy, gross bathrooms.” And so, with a tight timeline, the three of them visited the Ann Sacks showroom.