Lovat Gardens Renovation 2025: Apparently We Were Renovating the Whole House

We did not begin 2025 with a grand plan to renovate Lovat Gardens from top to bottom.

That would have required organization.

Instead, we did what we usually do around here: started with one project, discovered three more things that bothered me, opened a wall we probably should not have opened, and somehow ended the year having touched a fairly significant percentage of the house.

So rather than pretend any of this happened according to a beautifully organized master plan, here is the condensed version of Lovat Gardens: Renovation Year 2025.

The Kids' Spaces

A big part of the year was updating rooms for the kids as they got older.

T finally let me redo his bedroom after approximately two years of saying no. We added architectural woodwork, wallpaper, and custom furniture made from the walnut that had previously been our kitchen table. The goal was to give him something more grown-up without designing a room for a 45-year-old man who happened to enjoy Nintendo.

His bathroom followed. I had been trying to renovate that one for years too, but T was perfectly happy with the builder-grade version. Then his sister's bathroom was finished and suddenly he had opinions.

Specifically, he wanted a boutique hotel bathroom.

So Hotel Nyrduxi0 was born, complete with a darker, more tailored look, new tile, updated fixtures, and a design that can actually grow with him.

G's spaces got their own projects too, including the blue-and-white palm details in her room and the custom laser-cut palm cornice that became one of those small additions that somehow made the whole room feel finished.

The Laundry Room That Wasn't Supposed to Be a Renovation

Then there was the laundry room.

That one began with what looked like a little water damage in the garage.

A little water damage became an opened wall.

The opened wall became mold, damaged insulation, rotten wood, and evidence that water had been getting into the house for much longer than anyone realized.

From there, we were tracing water, opening additional areas, dealing with remediation, and repairing damage that extended beyond the laundry room itself.

At some point, once the room was already torn apart, my brain made the inevitable transition from:

This is terrible.

to:

Well, since everything is already ripped out...

So the repair became a redesign, with better storage, a more useful layout, new finishes, and a laundry room that works much harder than the original one ever did.

Absolutely not how I intended to get a new laundry room, but I will take it.

And Then the Outside Joined the Party

The water issue also confirmed something I had been worried about for years: parts of the stone exterior were not right.

I had questioned it repeatedly and had several companies look at it over the years. Everyone essentially told me it was fine.

It was not fine.

Water had been getting behind portions of the stone veneer, and a gutter problem had been contributing even more water to the situation.

So what started inside eventually became an exterior project too.

We dealt with the actual water-management problems first, because after seeing what had been happening behind the walls, waterproofing suddenly became much more exciting to me than pretty stone.

Then we started looking at the exterior design itself.

Once sections were already being repaired or removed, it made very little sense to spend all that money recreating something I had never particularly loved. So the exterior work became part repair, part redesign, with the goal of making the house feel cleaner and more intentional while still respecting the architecture that was already there.

The Garden Was Never Going to Escape

Of course, Lovat Gardens would not be Lovat Gardens without the actual gardens.

The landscaping continued to evolve as we cleaned up beds, adjusted plantings, dealt with areas that had become overgrown, and kept refining the outdoor spaces around the house.

Gardens are the one project here that will never actually be finished.

You move something.

Something dies.

Something grows four times larger than the tag promised.

You decide a bed needs more structure.

Then you see a plant at the nursery that you absolutely do not need and redesign an entire section around it.

So that project remains permanently listed as in progress.

One Project at a Time...Sort Of

Looking back at 2025, there was not really one giant Lovat Gardens renovation.

It was dozens of smaller decisions layered on top of each other.

A bedroom that needed to grow up.

A bathroom that finally got permission from its eleven-year-old owner.

A cornice that needed palm trees.

A suspicious spot in the garage that turned into mold remediation.

A laundry room that got rebuilt because the walls were already open anyway.

An exterior problem I had been side-eyeing for years that finally proved I was not imagining things.

And gardens that, as usual, refused to be finished.

That is pretty much how this house evolves.

I very rarely wake up and decide to renovate an entire property.

I just keep saying:

“While we're already doing this...”

And apparently that is how you accidentally renovate half a house.