by Sarah Anne Lloyd, My Mercer Island

Dreaming of how to fix your house is easy, whether you want to build a functional home office, update your kitchen to match your culinary ambitions, or simply to breathe new life into an old Mercer Island house. The hard part comes in figuring out what it will actually cost, how long it will take, and how to even get started.

“It’s a process,” says Suzanne Zahr, who has been working on spaces on Mercer Island for her eponymous firm, Suzanne Zahr, Inc., for seven years. “It’s one that can be very enjoyable, very exciting, because you’re transforming an aspect of your world,” she says, but she also notes it can be stressful.

Preparation, planning, and a good team can help make the remodeling process easier, and Mercer Island has a number of experts on every aspect of remodeling, which leads to Zahr’s biggest piece of advice for people considering a remodel on their home: “Find a team you can trust, the rest will fall into place.”

If you’re anything like me, the past few months you’ve been spending a lot more time at home. Also, if you’re anything like me, the home that you have found yourself spending that time in now happens to be your office, school, exercise gym, art studio, sourdough bread bakery…As we are all now acutely aware, the Covid-19 pandemic has changed every facet of our lives, including the relationship that we have with our home environments.

Being at home 24 hours a day, seven days a week, our homes are now being asked to be something that they were never designed to be: functional multi-purpose spaces that accommodate numerous activities simultaneously and seamlessly. And in its current form, my home is failing at the task. We just didn’t foresee needing two dedicated work spaces for adults, as well as room to play and learn for two kids… and that’s not even mentioning the fourth pet we adopted early in the pandemic. With work-from-home and school-from-home guidelines in place for a seemingly indefinite time, it is time to make our homes the multi-tasking spaces they have the potential to be.