A remodel brings a couple closer together

Looking back, it seems that interior designer Gina Gutierrez and Max Maloney were destined to remodel together. After all, how many couples go to the paint store on one of their first dates?

“We were having a nice time and talking about what was going on in our lives,” recalls Gutierrez, principal and founder of Gina Rachelle Design. “I mentioned that I had to run by the paint store later and look at colors for one of my clients, and he asked if he could go with me. I thought, ‘wow, he’s genuinely interested in what I’m doing.’”

At the time, Maloney was a mechanical engineer at Apple involved with finishing processes designed to achieve the colors and textures of products, so he was no stranger to thinking about hues. “I thought it was really cool to be working on something individual and personal,” he says of the paint store run.

And thus, loved bloomed in the aisles of the Mission District’s House of Color.

Roughly a year later, the couple was ready to take it to the next level and buy a home together. They found an Edwardian flat in Duboce Park and, once again, they fell hard and fast.

“We had a real connection with this house,” Gutierrez says. “Not only did it have charm, character, and storage, I could see how we could easily improve it.”

For Maloney, it was all about the natural light. “It’s on the lower level, but there are two light wells and big windows,” he says.

When their bid was accepted, they were ready to take on the task—and take some matters into their own hands. As a designer, Gutierrez is no stranger to working with contractors and sub-contractors. But in this case, she and Maloney were willing to do some of the work themselves. “I like to get my hands dirty,” she says. “Max and I are both handy, and we thought we could take on some of it ourselves.”

As a rule, remodeling is not for the faint of heart and famously wreaks havoc on relationships (according to the Los Angeles Times, therapists rank the stress of renovation between infidelity and problems with in-laws).

Not only were Gutierrez and Maloney going to take on a big renovation, they were doing it a little more than a year from their first date. “I wasn’t scared,” says Maloney. “We knew what we signed up for when we bought the house, and we knew it would be stressful. But not only did we have a strong bond, we both totally geek out on house stuff.”

Gutierrez agrees: “It’s a lot to manage, but it’s easier when you enjoy it,” she says. “When the stress was high, we’d take a breather—we’d go for a walk or a hike to keep ourselves in a healthy state of mind.”

But before they got to the DIY, the couple tackled the things they couldn’t do themselves. The floor plan is familiar to those who know Victorian or Edwardian multi-family buildings. Prior to the remodel, there was a large front room followed by a long hall with a bedroom and split bathroom opening off of it. In the back, there was a living room, a kitchen, a breakfast room, and a closet.

The couple’s big idea was to take down the walls separating the small rooms in the back. “The room sizes were funky,” Gutierrez says. “It was a no brainer for us to make the back of the home one large room.”

Now, the kitchen sits at one end of the open space, a dining banquette and long table are to the side, and a media center-living room is opposite the kitchen.

For the kitchen, the couple chose two of their favorite materials for surfaces: walnut wood and Carrara marble. “We have a very similar aesthetic,” says Maloney. “We love walnut, marble, and brass. We started by picking the finishes we wanted to use and designed the home around them.”

The kitchen cabinets could be described as the ultimate Ikea hack. The couple purchased the cabinet boxes from the mega chair store and ordered door and drawer fronts from Semihandmade (a company that specializes in making new fronts for Ikea boxes).

Ikea kitchen cabinets are used in a nontraditional way on the other side of the room as well, where the couple used them on either side of the fireplace as built-ins.

The fireplace surround flanked by the cabinets used to be large, squat, and composed of dark bricks. They replaced a large, squat fireplace surround composed with an inexpensive mantlepiece they modified (slimming it down by cutting out a piece of the middle) and geometric Fireclay tile.

The bathroom used to contain an old clawfoot tub that Gutierrez loved, but she liked the idea of a double vanity more. “The old tub was really cool, but I could see that if I tucked a built-in tub under the window, we’d have room for two sinks and a vanity for storage,” she says. “But we kept the look classic with traditional subway tile.”

Elements the couple tackled themselves include building floating shelves (with the help of a friend), installing molding, and, most daunting, sanding and finishing the floors.

“It was a huge undertaking, and neither of us had ever done it before,” Guiterrez says of the floor project. “But there was a point in construction when we were done—except for the floors—but we hadn’t moved the furniture back in. We wanted to tackle it before we moved back in so we wouldn’t have to move the furniture out again. Unfortunately, we came to the realization on Christmas Eve. We started on December 24th and finished on New Year’s Day.”

Maloney says that it was a hard task, but it did come with some reward. “The whole remodel brought us closer,” he says. “I can still picture her with that drum sander...who else would do this with me?”

The front room, which was described in the real estate listing as a second bedroom, became the office. This is where Gutierrez runs her business during the day and where Maloney (now a design engineer at Peak Design) sit side-by-side and work at night.

You see, not only did this couple stay together through their remodel, they got engaged a few months after it was finished. It happened at (where else) the Parker Palm Springs, a high-design hotel.

Now, after hours, they work on their own projects. “I’m eager to do another one,” Gutierrez says. “I’m not sure what or when the next house will be, but I know I want Max by my side. He’s my person, for sure.”