NY Times Trilling Landscape
RIGHT AT HOME
Renovating for a New Normal
Working and schooling from home for the foreseeable future has prompted some homeowners to consider major home renovations.
By Ronda Kaysen Aug. 14, 2020
As the country approaches the six-month mark since stay-at-home orders were enacted, and coronavirus cases surge again, millions of Americans are struggling to stay in their homes through a punishing recession. In August, a third of respondents to an Apartment List survey reported failing to make their full rent or mortgage payment on time, the highest nonpayment rate since the rental listings site began conducting the survey in April.
But the pain has not been evenly felt. While many Americans are suffering through a historic economic crisis, those who have not taken a financial hit are focused on ways to make an extended period of isolation more comfortable. Facing additional months of distance learning and working from home, some are making extensive home improvements — permanent alterations that they would not have done absent a pandemic.
As bans on construction have lifted, designers, architects and general contractors have begun fielding calls from homeowners who are looking for ways to improve or expand areas in their home for work, school and exercise. In June 2020, professionals who list their services on the home renovation site Houzz reported a 58 percent increase in requests from homeowners from June 2019, with queries about home extensions and additions up 52 percent.Some homeowners are converting garages into work studios, or adding a shed in the yard for an office. Others are renovating the basement to turn it into a yoga studio or a classroom. Those who may have started projects before the pandemic, are looking at those original design plans and realizing they need an overhaul to work in this new world order.
Marlo and Michael Aragon, who live in Malibu, Calif., installed a shed in their yard, not for themselves, but as a classroom for their four teenage children who were suddenly studying at home. They spent about $6,000 on the shed and upgrades. Ms. Aragon, 50, a stay-at-home parent, left the decorating decisions to the children, telling them to measure the windows for blinds and letting them furnish it. Mr. Aragon, 50, works at the Pepperdine University bookstore.
During the school year, the children established a schedule with a spreadsheet. The oldest, Avalon, 19, claimed the space in the early hours because she was tele-schooling from George Washington University, and so needed to keep to an east coast schedule. During the summer, the teens have used it to socialize and as a dance studio.
“We were going to call it the Corona schoolhouse,” Ms. Aragon said of the shed that they erected in a spot on their one-acre property that once housed a large wooden playset. “It made them feel like they were going to class.”
Soon after California enacted stay-at-home orders, Valerie DeLong-Lambert decided she needed a space of her own to work. So, she added a shed to her half-acre lot in Westlake Village in Los Angeles county. She’d run her music consultancy, Moxy Entertainment, out of a home office off the kitchen of her 5,500-square-foot house for years. But with her 17-year-old son, 21-year-old daughter and her husband all at home with her full time, she couldn’t focus. “There was too much activity and energy in the house,” she said.
She bought a 150-square foot customizable shed from Tuff Shed. Working with Heather Trilling, a landscape designer, she added a white facade to match the main house, a deck with stone walls, pergolas over each entry and a cupola. Two French door entryways give the shed two walls of glass.
The family knows that the shed, which cost about $15,000 to buy and upgrade, is Ms. DeLong-Lambert’s private realm in a challenging time. “It now has become my sanctuary. I go and get away from everybody. It’s all mine,” she said.