Right-sized & right for them

Tessa Vancil is intrigued by design. The young Lawrence resident likes to consider how furniture should be arranged, how colors should be used and how to achieve clean lines in a room. That’s why Tessa, who aspires to be an architect, jumped on the opportunity to arrange her own bedroom as well as help her parents with color and tile selection for a recent bathroom renovation.

At the start of the COVID lockdown, Brian and Sara Vancil had asked Tessa to exchange her bedroom for a different room in the house so they could use her old room as an office. Tessa initially balked, but the idea of redesigning her own environment was too compelling to pass up.

The aqua-colored walls, the textured accent lamp, the bed with drawers, the slender tan couch — each item in Tessa’s room was thoughtfully curated.

“I love my room,” Tessa says. “I just really enjoy being in it.”

When the Vancils bought their three-bedroom home at 3116 W. 23rd Terrace in 2008, Tessa was not born yet, but the Vancils knew they wanted to have kids in the home.

“We planned to have children and definitely considered that when buying,” Sara says. “We decided to just have one child and the house ended up being the perfect size for three of us.”

The house is a smidge more than 1,300 square feet, a size that matches the Vancils’ minimalist mindset.

“I have slight hoarding tendencies, so not having unlimited space to expand means that piles of junk annoy us earlier than they would if we lived in a larger house,” Brian says. “For instance, I love board games, but not having space for all of them led me to subscribe to the Bring-RPG-Home game subscription program from RPG (Restaurant, Pub & Games) downtown.”

Buying an appropriately sized house, rather than one loaded with spare rooms that might have sat empty, or worse, filled up with unused junk, was important to Sara, too.

“(Our) house is big enough to meet all our needs but not so big that we have empty spaces that need to be furnished or cleaned but are never used,” she says.

When the Vancils first moved into the home, they concentrated their energies on improving the yard. The original raised beds in the backyard were overgrown but seemed like a promising place to start a garden. Now the Vancils have a 200-square-foot garden flush with fruits, vegetables, flowers and native plants for pollinators.

ABOVE: Both Sara and Brian Vancil worked at home during the COVID-19 pandemic and converted their daughter Tessa’s former bedroom into a shared workspace.

LEFT: Tessa Vancil sits in her room. She had a lot to do with creating the bedroom environment.

During the COVID lockdown, the Vancils started working from home full-time.

Both work at the University of Kansas, Brian as a statistician and Sara in the financial aid office.

Being at home more inspired the Vancils to make improvements.

In addition to creating a multipurpose office, they installed Marmoleum flooring, a brand of linoleum made with natural raw materials, in the living and dining rooms, and remodeled both bathrooms, one of which Tessa helped design.

Chris Powers of Meadowlark Construction did the structural work for the renovations.

“He’s a consummate professional, and we’ve been so happy working with him,” Sara says. “The final project on the house is to update the kitchen, and we’ll use him when the time comes.”

One feature the Vancils love is the bay window, which provides space for their many house plants.

“Noticing (the plants) always boosts my mood,” Brian says.

Though the Vancils like to think of ways to enhance their home, they are also happy with it as it is.

“Brian and I wanted a home that was right-sized and functional with the opportunity to make improvements, both inside and outside, to make it work for us,” Sara says. “It has everything we need. And we’ve made it our own through dedicated and intentional improvements to the garden and living spaces.”

But the bathroom wasn’t always a bathroom; Mike said Schachter previously had that space filled entirely by a 500-gallon hot tub. Schachter had installed screws in the exterior paneling that allowed it to be removed so the hot tub could be taken out on the balcony side. Mike said the family decided about 10 years ago to rent a crane and remove the massive tub altogether, allowing the space to become a bathroom.

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Some of the home’s most interesting elements might be its eclectic decorations, starting with artwork from a list of more than a dozen local artists. The list includes paintings by the couple’s good friend Geoff Benzing, cut paper artwork by Alicia Kelly and photography by Ann Dean. Other decorations are reclaimed items, such as the lighted “cashier” sign that hangs from the tin ceiling in the home’s kitchen. The Randolphs suspect the sign could have come from an old Woolworths or Ben Franklin store. In the nearby dining room, there’s an old church pulpit in the corner that Mike said has been in the home for around 15 years.

Then there are the eyecatchers on the front porch — a “Select-O-Rama” vending machine, which still works and is filled with toys, some of them the original prizes, and part of a train station sign that the couple’s friends found in a dumpster and has since been turned into a railing leading up to the front door.

Many items that decorate the home were found through Mike’s work flipping houses, such as the pair of post office boxes stationed in the living

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CONTINUED FROM PAGE 2C room. Mike said they were originally located in Baldwin City’s post office. They found a new life at the Randolphs’ home as decorations — and as a place for the couple’s daughters, who are now adults, to stash items while playing with their friends.

The couple’s collection of dozens of bowling balls is perhaps the most noticeable decor, given that those balls decorate both the front and back yards. Mike estimates there are upward of 80 of them, some of which are mounted to poles. The first set of balls was recovered from a home Mike flipped that previously belonged to a family who owned a bowling alley in Holton, a small town north of Topeka. There were 10 or 15 bowling balls in that garage. They went on display in the front yard, and the Randolphs’ small collection roughly doubled in size over the years. Then, about five years ago, Mike said a woman knocked on their door and asked if they’d like even more bowling balls. She was moving out of the state, and she gave the Randolphs another 40 or 50 balls that she wouldn’t be able to take along with her.

Age-in-place homes include modifications that enhance independence for people with physical limitations, allowing seniors to remain in their homes longer rather than moving to an assisted-living facility. Some age-in-place features that Pat, 62, and Linda, 60, integrated include wider hallways for wheelchairs, sliding doors, lever-style door handles, no-step entries and ample artificial and natural light.

Linda says builder Scott Weber helped acclimate them to the age-in-place concept.

“Besides being a great builder and craftsman, he helped guide us through the whole process of building a house,” Linda says. Pat helped physically build the 2,300-square-foot house and its accompanying 1,200-square-foot garage and shop.

Sarah’s favorite item in the house — a gift from Mike for her 50th birthday — is a plated dinner from a leftover cafeteria display the couple found in Sparks, Kansas. It’s positioned at one of the four seats at the dining room table, complete with its own “Reserved” sign. Sarah said it reminds her of meals with her grandmother at

Furr’s Family Dining, which closed its doors in Lawrence back in 2002.

With that many conversation pieces, it may not be a surprise that the couple don’t have a lengthy list of items they’re hoping to add to the current roster of decorations.

“We don’t really know what we want until we see it,” Sarah said. “We’re kind of on the down side of collecting, where we don’t want to add a lot more to our house and our stuff.”

Pat says. “We had to wait six months for siding; even our doors; it took four months to get our doors.”

Though the construction took a long time, it was also measured and precise, and the Slimmers find the house aesthetically pleasing as well as practical. For instance, the extra-wide hallway that leads from their living room to their master bedroom features clean, eye-catching lines, Pat says. It’s one of his favorite features.

The living room is an open space with minimal furniture and a gas fireplace. A skylight enhances the ambient light.

“I love the amount of light inside,” Linda says. “We both wanted a house that had a central courtyard and a lot of natural light.”

“I cherish the experience,” Pat says. “How many people get to build their own house? To be an integral part of that? I feel very fortunate to be part of that experience. I have a deep connection to the house, and from the first night we spent there it immediately felt like home.”

Building began at the beginning of 2020. The house normally would have been completed by May, but the housing-supply shortage caused by the pandemic hobbled the house’s progress, and work on the house didn’t finish until October.

“(Weber) said he’d never spent so long building a house,”

Glass doors allow the Slimmers to look out onto the courtyard, which features seating for guests. Integrating livable outdoor space was something they both desired. The house also has a screened-in side porch that serves as a greenhouse and a hang-out spot.

Recently retired from

Slimmer’s Automotive Service, Pat is also a metal sculptor. When he was working, he would create his art at his shop, but now that he’s retired, he wanted a workspace at home. He decided to build an extralarge garage so he could have an art studio.

“It’s a very large garage for a house this size,” says Pat, who has had sculptures on display in Topeka’s NOTO Arts District, the Juried Outdoor Sculpture Exhibition in Manhattan and the Downtown Lawrence Sculpture Exhibition.

The Slimmers are pleased with their house: The central courtyard, the screened-in porch, the open living room and the natural lighting keep it cozy, they say.

“We were just trying to go for a house that was really comfortable and efficient,” Pat says. “I love how the house feels, the amount of natural light, the outdoor spaces, the flow and the peacefulness of the location. … I really love that it was something that Linda and I did together as a team and couple.”

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Douglas Co.

Magic

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On the main floor inside the house is an openarea living room and kitchen.

“I love the kitchen, the island, the way you can have a lot of people in there at once,” Zach says.

Socializing is important to the Parrs, and their large kitchen and open areas provide ample space for guests. The kitchen has multiple shelves for dishes and decor, and there’s a spacious pantry too. The refrigerator is integrated and stylishly set in the wood cabinetry.

Because of the multiple windows in the dining room, natural light often bathes the entire area. The Parrs recently had a third child, Wendy, and Lauren said the home makes it easy to keep an eye on her.

“Now that we have Wendy too, and she can crawl around, having the main floor being totally open is wonderful,” Lauren says. “She can’t get trapped somewhere, and she can see us so she feels comfortable moving around.”

The dining room doubles as a classroom for the

Parrs’ oldest child, Lulu, 6, who is homeschooled.

“The dining room table is where we do all of our schoolwork because that’s where (Lulu) wants to sit, in that big bright room,” Lauren says. “The kids do a ton of art at the dining table.”

The four bedrooms are all upstairs, and two of the kids’ rooms have window seats.

“That is something I loved about the house when we saw it,” Lauren says. “I just thought, what a sweet way to have a kid’s room.”

Tobin says he enjoys having his own room, and Lulu says she loves the “secret hideaway” — a very small room downstairs in the finished basement.

“It’s like my art studio kind of,” Lulu says. “It’s a secret room. It has my desk, my drawers, my karaoke machine.” She and her friends “tell scary stories and make confetti and stuff like that in there.”

Lulu and Tobin also love to play in the yard by the creek at least a few times a week in warm weather.

The house was built in 2007 and renovated in 2012; the renovation involved installing a custom wall made of skateboards. A few years after renovating, the former owners sold the house for a bigger home. The Parrs’ home is nearly 3,000 square feet, and Lauren and Zach can’t imagine ever outgrowing it.

“I was hauling dumpsters and dumpsters of trash out of here,” Fitzpatrick says. “The trash guys got mad at me and left a note saying, ‘You really need to get a dumpster; you’re filling the trash too much.’”

After three months, the house was ready for human inhabitants. For the final stage of renovation, Fitzpatrick, a self-taught artist, painted.

“I did that right away, because I have a lot of stuff, and once you have stuff inside, painting becomes very difficult,” she says.

Fitzpatrick used pink, white, and blue-green in the kitchen, and white in the living room. Upstairs she painted a pair of flamingos on the wall next to some built-in bookshelves.

“I don’t want the Realtor gray that every house is painted,” Fitzpatrick says. “I think coming home is something that should make you happy; I don’t necessarily sit in those (upstairs) chairs a lot, but I walk through that room a million times a day, and it makes me happy. I love it.”

Another feature of the home that Fitzpatrick loves is the half-moon table attached to the kitchen counter. She also appreciates the sunroom where she drinks coffee on spring mornings. The sunroom features hanging chairs and a $20 garage-sale mannequin named Claire.

Fitzpatrick decorated her home with antiques and garage-sale finds, including midcentury furniture and a collection of kitschy velvet paintings. She also refurbished items that she found on the roadside and elsewhere, including a colorful dresser that adds a pop of color to her bedroom.

“I don’t want to go to Nebraska Furniture Mart and get the brown couch everyone else has,” she says. “I look until I find something amazing that inspires me, then I look for other things that build around this great thing I found.”

Fitzpatrick lives in the house with her son, Shea Fitzpatrick, who loves cooking in the bright, cheerful kitchen.

He’s also a fan of the large backyard, and he and Fitzpatrick were planning to put in a garden and see what they could coax from the soil.