Inside the Renovation of the Art Dealer’s Italian Farmhouse

I’m happy with the outcome. It was just going to be repainted, the kitchen cabinets. We said if we are going to repaint, we may need to do new countertops. And if I’m going to do the countertops, then I guess I need to do the backsplash, and I’m going to do the backsplash… and I’ve always wanted a free-standing range instead of just a cooktop. Maybe we need to do that as well. And if I’m going to redo the kitchen, I might as well redo that fireplace. And if I redo that fireplace, it’s then I really should redo the one in the living room. We had these columns in the living room that it’s like, well, maybe we can put a stacked stone on those columns, too. It snowballed, and I’m happy that it did. I had seen people recommend him on Claremont connects. And so, people have great things to say. And so I thought, okay. Well, I’ll interview this person- he’s local, and your office is in Upland, down the street from us. He took everything in stride. Nothing I presented to him seemed like a challenge from a construction standpoint. My vision for the house was for it to be like an Italian Farmhouse. Within a few seconds, he had called up something on the Internet and said, what about something like this? Oh, I said, Oh yeah, I kind of like that. He listens? And he doesn’t try to steal the show. Joey was always very respectful, listening to what I said, and then would have Solutions or suggestions. And he would always say, okay, here’s a suggestion. You might not like it, but this is something that we could do. Joey was able to direct me to your suppliers for quartz countertops. And by this point, I had ordered all my appliances through Pacific Sales. We were sort of good to go! I said, you know, Joey, I’m thinking about flooring… We ended up doing flooring, and I said, okay, so we’re doing all of this and are not going to paint the downstairs Then! We had a little powder room and, you know, that was twenty years old, and it was sort of like, okay, it doesn’t seem like it’s going to go with the rest of the space. So we ended up re-doing that. And luckily, it was the only room I had a picture of. He looked at the picture and said, ” This is what you like. And I said, yeah, that’s what I like. And he said, well, I think we can do that. They were working, I was busy doing one thing or another, and then I came downstairs to take the dog out, and I just glanced into the room, and I said,” Oh my God?” He nervously said, “What, what, what?” I said, “that looks exactly like the picture!” The project kind of took on a life of its own. I just had to trust my instinct and then Joey’s professional experience and in the end. The two worked out well, and I’m quite happy with the result. I wish I had done it five years ago, but I’m thrilled we’ve done it now. I would say Joey has a gift for hiring good people. Everyone is relaxed. I felt comfortable talking to the people who were there. I felt very comfortable having them all in the house. He was really good at communicating. I would send a text. I don’t know if there was ever a time that it went longer than 5 minutes that I didn’t get a text back. I always had the feeling that everybody was on the same page. I’m happy that we did the floors throughout the downstairs. I wanted it to look as rich, layered and textured as possible, and it came out that way. His way of processing it looks like getting kind of quiet, maybe internalizing, thinking it through, and then he’ll say, okay, and then he’s got like a solution or a way that something can be dealt with or maybe a couple of solutions. I think he said it would be a 2 to 3 months job. He got it done in two months plus one week. At that time, you got married, and you moved. There were two holidays, and then there’s just the normal flux of juggling and running your business. We added quite a bit during the course. The fact that he came in one week later… I thought that was pretty phenomenal. He dealt with it all in a relaxed, professional reassuring way. So that must have been, to some degree, a fairly stressful time in his life. His stress never came into our job or our house. So that was good. And I believe he’s the, he thanked you took a bit for that, that you were taking care of a lot of them, the stressful things, outside of the business, the kids, the wedding. He’s got a young company, but he’s got good instincts and put together a good group of people. It didn’t seem like anybody was ever stressed or frustrated or, you know, bothered. He has put together a good group of people.