A perpetual project

A local residential designer adds improvements to his routine maintenance to tailor the house more to his family's needs. Each task, even a five-minute fix that costs a few dollars, also makes the house more valuable.

By JUDY STARK, Times Homes Editor

© St. Petersburg Times, published July 15, 2000

[Times photos: John Pendygraft] Brad Husserl and son Dylan, 6, dig in their back yard to find the stubbed-out sprinkler piping they laid in place during recent construction of their new swimming pool. Brad drew a map of where he positioned the pipes “that was pretty accurate,” he said. The stubs are now connected to sprinkler heads to water the lawn. When the Husserls landscaped their front and back yards, they bought smaller, less expensive plants and waited for them to grow out.

TARPON SPRINGS -- Four years after they moved into their new home, Brad and Ann Husserl are still tweaking, fixing, rethinking and redoing.

"It seems like every weekend I'm busy doing some type of home project," said Brad Husserl, 40, a certified residential designer who designed the 2,600-square-foot home in a thickly wooded subdivision not from from the Gulf of Mexico. (It was featured in a story in this section in November 1996.) His list of things to do runs two pages of printout, with plenty of other jobs jotted down by hand.

Some of the items are basic maintenance and repair: touching up paint, cleaning the grill, installing a valance in 6-year-old son Dylan's bedroom, cleaning the ceiling fans.

Others are improvements that add value, beauty and detail to a home and are within the skill level and pocketbook of most homeowners.

Some of them have been on the "someday" list since the Husserls moved into the house, upgrades and extras they lacked the money or time to do early on. Others reflect changing finances and tastes, the use of new products and the desire to solve problems or tailor the house more closely to the family's needs.

Therefore, some of the items on their list could find their way to your list of things to do yourself or things to hire someone to do. So follow along on a Saturday morning house tour for suggested projects large and small.

Leftover terra-cotta roof tiles became see-through half-walls at the front of the house. Each tile was cut in thirds, then stacked and attached with adhesive caulk ($2 a tube). “It’s a very Florida, tropical look,” Husserl said.

One major project that adds visual punch to an unembellished room: Layering drywall on the ceiling to create depth and drama. "I do a lot of remodeling now" in his design work for clients, Husserl said, "and people don't want to rip the roof off and raise the ceiling." For about $250 he was able to create a layered ceiling "that gives a level of customization and takes the house one step further," Husserl said.

Another project: Installing wood casing around an uncased window to create a dressier, more finished appearance. Similarly, he plans to frame in the mirrors in bathrooms with stock molding and add trim molding to the kitchen cabinets for an extra touch of detail.

Husserl offers this piece of advice to homeowners: "It's good to live in your house for a while before you do a major remodel or change." For example, he cites the brick walkway he built that leads from the driveway to the front door. "Where should it go? How far should it be from the house? Where should it curve?" Those are questions he could ask, and answers he could come up with, only after living in the house for a while "to see what's the best thing."

For the master bathroom, Husserl scoured the classifieds for months until he found a six-foot claw-foot bathtub for $75. He paid $160 to have it refinished and have some chips repaired. He stripped "six or seven coats of paint" from the outside and feet of the 1920s tub, repainted the exterior and antiqued the feet. Then (a splurge, he admits) they paid $600 for the tub's new brass faucets, hand-held shower, drain and piping.

That tub, by the way, has been planned since the beginning, a move Husserl recommends. The Husserls couldn't afford it when they moved in, but they did run the plumbing and simply stubbed it off until they were ready to add the tub.

Painting cold-air returns and trim pieces around ceiling can lights makes them fade into the background.

Tired of the striped wallpaper they chose when they built the house, the Husserls have now stripped the walls and are about to install 4-by-8 sheets of beadboard ($10 a sheet) on the lower half the of the walls, to be topped by a chair rail. They'll paint the upper half of the wall. Initially they installed vinyl floor covering, "the cheapest thing we could find." Now they'll upgrade to a wood-look laminate. They also plan to replace the doors on the medicine cabinets.

Down the road there will be a shower door instead of a shower curtain, and new faucets at the twin sinks.

In their kitchen, Brad and Ann chose white painted cabinets and solid-surface countertops because that's what was popular and affordable when they built the house. Now, prices have dropped on the wood cabinets and granite countertops that were out of their price range a few years ago. "The house is kind of stuck in the period when it was built," Husserl said. "Buyers today have more choices" because of greater affordability. To improve the looks of the cabinets, "the least expensive mica cabinets and shelves we could find," he is carefully painting the edges to hide the brown line.

The Husserls' two-story family room has taken on a dramatic new look thanks to the installation of built-in drywall niches that house the TV and other electronics and provide storage and display space. A carpenter friend added a wooden mantel above the existing fireplace and boxed in shelves and drawers. Husserl estimated the mantel would cost $500 and the drywall work $1,000. He installed an industrial swivel for the TV so it can be viewed from any angle in the room.

Outside, he added coated foam brackets that look like exposed rafter tails. They are attached with adhesive expanding foam and screws and emphasize the house's Mediterranean Revival look. These came from Sun-Rock Inc. in Tarpon Springs, where they cost about $15 each.

After four years in the house, the thing Husserl still likes is "the flow of the house. The floor plan. We're not tired of anything." The location, on three-quarters of an acre with many trees, "worked out nicely. . . . There are always butterflies, fox squirrels and flying squirrels, and woodpeckers," he said.

An upgraded light fixture adds a stylish touch to the house.

The pool, a recent addition, "really made a huge difference in our lifestyle." If there were no pool, Dylan probably would have spent a recent morning inside watching TV. Instead, in goggles and snorkel tube, he spent the morning practicing cannonballs into the water, with his mother at poolside to watch. The pool cage allows the family to eat dinner outdoors without providing a meal for mosquitoes.

They made a smart move there: They prewired for the pool-pump electrical works when they built the house. But they didn't think to add some exterior outlets. "My wife is saying, "It would be nice to have a little refrigerator out here,' but we don't have anything to plug it into," Husserl said.

"When you work in design like I do, every day's a learning situation," Husserl said. "Your projects are sort of a classroom, including the things I'm doing to my own house."

Quick upgrades

• Add dimmer switches ($12 apiece).
• Replace the most heavily used doorknobs (typically polished brass finish over metal) with solid-brass knobs ($65-$75).
• Paint air-conditioning registers and trim pieces around can lights to match the walls or ceiling.
• Upgrade drawer pulls and cabinet knobs.
• Upgrade light fixtures.
• Paint the edges of laminate cabinets to hide the brown line. Brad Husserl uses Rustoleum Painter's Touch latex and a fine brush.
• Add terra-cotta planters outside. The Husserls' are filled with weather-resistant artificial greenery.
• Install crown molding and chair rail to add detail to a room.

For the next house

If he had it to do again, residential designer Brad Husserl would make these changes in the house he built for himself and his family four years ago:

Make the home office bigger. His business, Husserl Design Group, is based in a one-room office at the back of the house with a separate entrance. "Extending it another three or four feet would have made a minimal difference in the price overall. Yet it's a place I'm in for such a long time every day," the extra space would make a big difference in comfort.

Run the plumbing for a bathroom adjacent to the office. Husserl doesn't mind walking through the garage to the house to use the bathroom, but he wishes he had stubbed in the plumbing for a bathroom and run a waste line under the driveway during the construction phase. That would allow a future owner to build on a bathroom and turn the office into a private in-law suite.

Rethink the master shower. "It's actually too big," Husserl said. A bather has to step out from under the water to reach the valve and adjust the temperature. And the seat is outside the flow of water too, which makes it less comfortable and pleasant than it might be for someone sitting there to attend to grooming rituals.

Make son Dylan's room larger. Above the foyer, between the master bedroom and Dylan's room, is an open space that Husserl designed to be enclosed some day, possibly as a sitting area for the master bedroom. He now wishes he had used that space when the house was built to expand Dylan's room and closet.

Look at the air-conditioning duct layout before the work is done. Husserl said he was promised two cold-air returns but only one was installed.

Make more saw cuts in the concrete floor and the driveway slab to avoid cracking.

Add windows. He'd now like to add two windows to the home's west side to open up a view of the yard.

Add a covered front porch. "The front of the house feels so flat, so straight up and down," Husserl said. "As I mature in my design work, I want more changes there."

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