Home of the Week: Outdated house in Beaconsfield Village gets revitalized

18 Foxley St., Toronto

Asking price: $1,799,000

Taxes: $6,192.44 (2015)

Lot size: 25 ft. by 134 ft.

Listing agent: Ashley Gollogly, Sales Representative, Right at Home Realty Inc. Brokerage

Designing a new home can be the ultimate form of expression. So, when realtor Ashley Gollogly and her partner, Brad Bardi, found 18 Foxley St., they knew they had an opportunity on their hands.

The old house was in decent shape but outdated. They knew they wanted to make their own mark.

“It is fun to have a blank canvas,” Ms. Gollogly said. “Each home is so different, but to be able to visualize what you want to put on to that canvas can be really challenging.”

Ms. Gollogly credits Mr. Bardi with being able to see the potential of 18 Foxley right away.

“I always had this picture of opening up the house so you can see to the back from the entrance,” he said.

This required a lot of creativity since the initial home, which is located on a little residential strip near Ossington Avenue and Dundas Street West, was divided into a series of small rooms. For example, the main floor had two bedrooms in the front, a kitchen and a dining room in the middle and a bathroom in the back.

But Mr. Bardi could see through those walls when he pictured his soon-to-be new home. Ms. Gollogly, on the other hand, just had to trust him.

“It was really hard to visualize for me,” she said. “But once they tore all the walls down, I came in and was shocked by the difference. I could see how massive this home really was.”

Mr. Bardi’s instinct to build an open-flow main floor came from fact that the detached home is surprisingly big for the area, where narrow row houses are the norm.

“When you see it from the street, it doesn’t look nearly as big as it is,” he said. “You have the maximum amount of living space on this land because the house is so long.”

And it’s not just length; 18 Foxley St. is noticeably wide when you enter it.

“We are literally on our property line on the east side, whereas a regular detached lot has a home that usually sits a few feet off the lines on either side,” Ms. Gollogly said, explaining how that allowed for extra width.

In order to capitalize on the space, the couple turned to Houzz.com, an online platform that aggregates millions of interior design ideas and photos. “We had an eye for what we liked and we kind of pieced it together from there,” Mr. Bardi said.

The first step of the six-month renovation involved liberating the main floor from its divided spaces in order to create one long, flowing main floor that contains a living room in the front end, a kitchen and a dining in the middle and a family room, before its wall of sliding doors, which open to the backyard.

Upstairs they kept the separate rooms but took out a secondary kitchen. In its place, they put a home office. The rest of the floor houses a guest bedroom, a three-piece washroom and the master suite. The master bedroom, which used to be two bedrooms in the old configuration, now contains a walk-in closet complete with a laundry unit, as well as an elongated, hotel-inspired ensuite bathroom.

In the basement, they installed a kitchen and new drywall. The large space – with two bedrooms, two bathrooms and two separate entrances – offers the potential for rental income of $2,050 each month, Ms. Gollogly said.

Mr. Bardi, who is also the landlord of rental units in the property next door, understands that having the rental unit might dissuade some potential buyers, but he said that because the suite is freshly renovated it will be easier to maintain.

And they made sure to add cement to the floor on main level, which creates a sound barrier between the main living space and the tenants.

The house also has a distinctive aesthetic thanks to one main decor motif: wood.

“Even though it’s very modern we wanted to make it kind of rustic so every room has a wood feature in it,” said Mr. Bardi, pointing out the barn-wood accent wall in the dining room and the faux wood porcelain tiles tastefully used in the master bathroom.

Part of the reason for the wood theme was to bring in the outside space. The home boasts about 1,000 sq. ft. of useable outdoor space, including second-floor deck. The entire front and backyards and the two-car garage were all landscaped and updated in the summer 2013.

“There is storage above [the parking spots] in the garage, which is nice because when you are renting out your basement, you want this extra space,” Mr. Bardi said.

But undoubtedly the favourite feature is length of the home, especially on the main floor. It has four different living spaces, meaning Ms. Gollogly and Mr. Bardi can occupy the different zones without crowding each other.

“I love that on football Sundays he can have his living room back there to watch the game and I can sit up in the front of the house and not watch football but we can still be on the same floor,” she said with a laugh. “That is the beauty of the house.”

The house sold earlier this week for $1.78-million.