Becoming House Flippers

You know how noteworthy people get introduced at parties by their accomplishments. As in “this is George, he wrote that bestselling novel about vampire trees”, or “meet Trudy, she was named AD’s leading front door knob designer of 2025”.

I wonder when George and Trudy stopped being introduced as just George and Trudy, and advanced to getting a tagline attached to their introduction.

Personally, I think the start of a journey is wildly more noteworthy than the result. It’s fresh and brave. I love origin stories when there’s no result yet—seeing it unfold, not knowing how it will turn out without the judgy labels of ‘success’ or ‘failure’. George writing at 5am for three years about vampire trees? Extraordinary. The bestseller is just the epilogue.

Or, the person who can barely run a hundred meters but laces up their running shoes anyway? That’s more interesting to me than the marathon finisher. The one booking that first doctor’s appointment is perhaps braver than getting the all-clear. The beginning is the story.

Maybe I’m only thinking about this because my husband Sam and I just started one of those origin stories. Or maybe I just need to remind myself that starting counts for something when the result is still very much distant.

We’re flipping houses now. The kind of house that nobody else wants.

We bought a place from the 1800s found on 2.5 acres between lakes and the Nova Scotia coastline. Sagging floors, no electricity, water damage, root infested septic. Every potential buyer before us took one look and made the un-adventurous (or wise?) choice to walk away.

We think it was a cobbler’s shop. We keep finding shoe-making tools and half-finished Edwardian shoes in the walls, which is endlessly fascinating.

It took us three weeks to find the well. When we did, we felt unreasonably accomplished.

The 70s drop ceiling was hiding massive vaulted ceilings with 150-year-old beams. Criminal, really.

To date Sam and I have renovated 3 houses together—our 1900s butcher-shop apartment in Amsterdam Westerpark, an 80s Ontario townhouse and a 1900s coastal home in Nova Scotia. But this one is the first house we’re leveling up and renovating to sell, so I’ve been frantically learning interior design skills—taking so many courses, studying lighting design, trying to understand what makes a room actually work instead of just look nice in a photo.

But as it turns out when you spend your days thinking about 150-year-old beam grain, kitchen layouts, and layers of old papered walls, you can’t help but turn it all into new wallpaper designs. New pattern ideas keep popping into my head and I can’t get them turned into wallpapers fast enough.

So that’s happening. Wallpapers. Interior goods. Things for actual rooms, not just walls to hang art on.

I sketch them in the evenings between discussions about hallways and whether we can afford to keep those beams exposed. (We’re keeping the beams.)

One month in. Making wallpaper inspired by a cobbler’s workshop nobody wanted.

No tagline. Just us, a lot of old papers, and what might be a brilliant idea or might be us having completely lost the plot.

Either way, it’s the beginning. That’s the good bit.

Find videos and photos here.