The year 2012 will have to go down as one of the biggest years in the life of Beverly Guthrie, the cover subject of this issue and the chairperson of the CALF Festival (see related articles), for which her initiative and leadership were instrumental. But besides all the effort that went into launching that initiative, Beverly and her husband Russell also chose this particular time to remodel their existing home. It’s been a massive undertaking and, truth be told, the Guthries, like many couples, might have wished to have called a halt midway just because of the sheer pandemonium of having all parts of their world topsy turvy. But now that the hard work and the disruptions are over, they can relish the planning and handiwork that went into their stellar home remodeling effort.
It all started when they decided that they should call off their home search. At one point the couple was looking to purchase another, different home. “But our place was almost paid for,” Beverly said. “And when we realized that we already had a great location [their neighborhood is in the Wylie ISD, south of Abilene], plus ten acres, a tank, a barn, mature trees, and a paved driveway, we realized that buying a comparable place would be very costly.
“Plus, we like our neighbors.”
So the Guthries chose to remodel what they had. And now that the dust has settled, they are delighted.
“We utilized only the space we already had—there was no building onto the outside of the structure,” Beverly said. “We just moved walls, doors, and so forth to make it more functional.”
Were there any serendipitous moments along the way?
“We are joyful to be back in it, and there is something else,” she said. “It is hard to select a piece of granite, a piece of wood, some paint colors, a tile chip, and so on and not to be able to see it as a finished whole. And so as we saw it coming together, my heart was so excited, because it did come together!”
For more on Beverly, see our item on page XXXX. Russell Guthrie, meanwhile, is president and CEO of Davis Kinard and Company, one of Abilene’s largest CPA firms. The Guthries, married 17 years, have two daughters and they also have a grandson, Trevor, who lives with them.
Space for Living
The living room received some of the most ambitious treatment as the ceiling was raised—to create a two-tiered recessed ceiling—and the floors were redone in hickory, pre-scraped and pre-stained. “I chose the dark because to me it makes it look warm and welcoming,” Beverly said. “I was raised on a ranch, and Russell was raised on a farm, and when you look in the older homes, or at photos of them, you see they had dark hardwood floors. It looked warm and inviting and that’s what we wanted.”
Raising the ceiling to ten feet called for construction of an elaborate beam (not visible) that bridged the room. “When you do a ‘stack up’ like this, the shape can be oval or some other shape,” Beverly says. “I liked the octagonal shape—I think it gave our living room more character.”
The fireplace was removed because Beverly and Trevor are both asthmatic. The sofa table features the same granite that appears in the closet and master bath.
Pantry… as a Pass-Through
Probably no change to the home is more pronounced than the reconfiguring of the pantry/laundry area. The original layout and the new one seem almost incompatibly different, but the angles shown in these photos are the same angle. The Guthries extended the pantry by opening a wall and appropriating (on the other side of that wall) what used to be a closet. At the far end of the room (as it now stands) there is a door that has been there all along. Past that door and to the left is a door that leads outside. This new doorway had to be opened up. But the effect is of a pass-through, with pantry shelving—in rich hickory—on either side of the passageway. The farthest-away portion is now a mud room opening onto the back patio. The laundry that was once near the threshold of this room has been moved to the space past the shelving, just before the mud room. The whole changeover is, as Beverly put it, “just more efficient.”
“It flows with the kitchen easier,” she says. “Before, I had a teeny pantry. Basically all these shelves and you couldn’t see what was in them—the shelving was so deep. This made it more user-friendly.”
Dream Closet
Prior to the Guthrie’s remodeling effort, the one room that Beverly was least happy with was a hot tub/sauna room. Over the years it became essentially a storage room. Beverly says Russell used to ask her, “If you could have anything you wanted in this home, what would it be?” And her answer, which became a running joke between them, was, “A dream closet.”
Thus it came about that, when they got serious about remodeling, the hot tub/sauna got the heave-ho. Out went the all-windows exterior wall, replaced by a solid wall mounted with shelving and clothes racks. The portion of the room where the hot tub resided was given over to an island that is also a maple dresser. One corner was converted to a dressing vanity, and another corner became the place for a full-length mirror that swings out to reveal yet more shelving.
Bathroom Luxury
As for the master bathroom, the alteration “just kind of speaks for itself,” Beverly said with a smile. “The bathroom had not been updated from the seventies. You went from Harvest Gold to yellow linoleum. We had painted the room and had tiled it—that was about all.
“The cabinets in the bathroom and closet are all maple, and are all from a company called Wellborn. Jim McCathren of McCathren and Associates is the distributor.
“The granite was one we saw when we first walked into Pinnacle [Countertop Solutions]. I didn’t realize you had to buy a whole slab. I was just after something for our master bathroom. But it ended up that it [the slab] just kind of flowed throughout the rest of the house.”
Kitchen Switch
The kitchen, pre-renovation, was “tiny and kind of claustrophobic,” Beverly says. The Guthries had their contractor take out an adjacent bathroom and extend the kitchen some five feet in that direction. By doing that, and by knocking out a wall—one which stood where the kitchen’s corner pillar stands now—the space was opened up to the living room and the home’s entryway. Red was used for color accents—not just here but in other rooms as well. The kitchen surfaces were made over in a different kind of granite countertop than is found in the rest of the house. This cultured granite is a synthetic that contains chunks of real granite in it. The cabinets are constructed of hickory.
Leave a Reply