HGTV's Farmhouse Facelift: A Dream Restored

For one family, their dream of renovating their historic Victorian farmhouse almost ended in disaster. But then Carolyn Wilbrink and Billy Pearson, co-hosts of HGTV Canada’s Farmhouse Facelift, stepped in – and the rest is modern history.

You’d think that a couple who are both holding down full-time jobs, while running a working farm and raising two active preschoolers, would have enough on their plate. But even with all that, homeowners Katy and Dalton embarked on a labour of love: renovating their 1886 Gothic Revival farmhouse.

According to designer Carolyn Wilbrink – half of the dynamic brother-and-sister design duo that hosts HGTV Canada’s popular renovation series Farmhouse Facelift – Dalton had just finished installing a new gas fireplace in the great room when disaster struck.

“He was working up in the barn loft on the farm when he fell through the floor to the ground,” Carolyn says. The fall broke his back, and the couple’s dream of finishing the reno themselves ended. That’s when they turned to Carolyn and her brother, contractor and Farmhouse Facelift co-host Billy Pearson, for help.

The old house, with its wraparound veranda and elegant front door with a big fanlight, was tailor-made for the HGTV Canada series, whose third season premieres this fall. (You can stream seasons 1 and 2 right now on STACKTV.) But inside, it was… well, ready for a facelift.

One side of the house had once been a coachhouse attached to the main living space. Today the former coachhouse’s awkward staircase, which led to a half-finished bathroom and storage area upstairs, was rarely used and took up needed room. A dropped ceiling and sagging support beam over the dining area, along with miscellaneous storage that included pieces of Katy’s mother’s old kitchen, added to the tentative feeling of this area.

A narrow doorway just beyond the staircase led to the kitchen at the far end, which cut it off from the rest of the house and made it difficult to keep an eye on the kids playing in the great room. But that wasn’t the kitchen’s only flaw. While it received plenty of light from big double-hung windows, there was no real organization, and even less counter space.

However, perhaps the biggest obstacle was the great room. Its central feature was a sunken “conversation pit” – a relic from the seventies – that dropped nearly two feet to a worn-out burnt-orange-and-brown ceramic tile floor. The exhaust duct from the newly installed gas fireplace snaked around at ankle level, fully exposed. It was basically a construction zone, and not a safe place for young children (or anyone else, for that matter).

But even with its challenges, Carolyn and Billy could see abundant potential in the home, just as the owners had. It basically just needed fresh thinking and some roll-up-your-sleeves work.

The first job was to deep-six that ugly old staircase. Suddenly, there was clear space from one end to the other – which Billy accentuated by replacing the worn-out strip floors with gleaming new wide-plank pine boards. Then Carolyn made a radical suggestion: swap the dining room and kitchen, turning the dining room into a more inviting space for family dinners and entertaining, and placing the kitchen where it belonged, smack-dab in the centre of the action.

Classic white-painted wainscoting now wraps three sides of the new dining room, with pegboard rails on the long sides. “Kathy loves wallpaper, but I thought stencilling would be really pretty in here, so we worked together on this leaf motif,” Carolyn says. But what really makes the room sing, she says, are the furnishings.

“We discovered that Katy’s an avid antiquer, and she had a barn full of great pieces she had collected over the years,” she recalls. “It was a ball to just go into the barn and pick out what we needed.” The family’s big harvest table and Windsor chairs fit perfectly in here; the only change was to paint the chairs black, as a crisp counterpoint to the white walls. In one corner, an old pine hutch with glass-fronted cabinets displays favourite white china.

The kitchen was one of the more anticipated transformations. Billy removed the dropped ceiling and restored the sagging ceiling timbers, liberating several feet of precious head room. With the old staircase gone, it became a perfect setting for creating a practical working area at one side, complete with a big island for feeding kids or chatting over lunch, and extra storage on the other side.

Carolyn and Billy then moved on to the great room, with its oddball conversation pit. After making it level with the rest of the main floor, they finished the fireplace hearth by cladding it in fieldstone – a timeless country-house touch. White-painted shiplap adds cohesiveness in this expansive room, while a big wraparound sectional and newly reupholstered one-and-a-half chair – a family favourite – make for cozy evenings by the fire.

The final challenge was the upstairs bath. Removing the old staircase added extra room up here too, enough to install a spacious glass-framed shower. “Katy asked for wallpaper here, and gave me carte blanche,” Carolyn explains. “So I chose this bold black and white pattern, which may have been a little bit risky. But with all the white and the penny-tile flooring, it works. And they love it!”

On the other side, a forlorn jumble of storage and half-finished mini-rooms (including, she laughs, an old sauna and a shower that measured a spacious 28 by 28 inches), was replaced with a roomy walk-in closet and separate toilet room, each fitted with sliding barn doors painted milky teal. And there’s a touch of Billy’s creativity here, a gift to the owners after their ordeal: a hand-crafted double vanity, partially built from boards salvaged from the old downstairs flooring.

“This was a really fun project for us,” Carolyn says. “Katy and I have very similar tastes; in fact, it’s very similar to the first house I ever worked on. So I really love that we could see what they had already done, and carry on and finish it for them in the same spirit.”