About Us - Renovator Life

Welcome To Renovator Life

Hi! We are John and Bonnie. Thank you for visiting Renovator Life. We hope you find inspiration and, even better, some ideas you can use for your own projects. As our name suggests, our site is about renovations with a few observations on life thrown in.

Our Passion

We love revamping older homes and DIY home projects. A favourite pastime, when we’re not renovating ourselves, is browsing before and after photos.

Together We’re Better

We’d love for you to show off your latest renovation story with us here.

Let’s share and learn from each other!

How We Started

Every home we buy needs an upgrade. Some need little tweaks here and there while others needed major work, but regardless of the size of the renovation, nothing beats the satisfying sense of accomplishment when it’s complete. In fact, it’s a little addicting and we find ourselves constantly look for something else to renovate.

“Sooner or later, everything old is new again.” Steven King

John has been a builder since he was 19 years old when he decided to build his own log house. He went around asking the old timers in the area how it was done. He had one uncle that was a wonderful source of information and many hours were spent discussing all things log.

Early days John building log homes — John in the early days of building log homes.

Soon he’d bought himself some land and got busy building. When he finished that first log house, people began asking him if he could build one for them too and that was how he began his career building log homes. The dream to build one house grew into a full-fledged business that goes on today. Just not with us any longer. Fast forward a few decades and the time was right to retire and sell the company. (We kept it in the family though.)

Our Florida Connection

As it happens, some of our children settled over 3,000 miles away in Florida. We began visiting them more and more back in 2008. That was when the bottom had fallen out of the housing market. So many amazing deals! It seemed crazy not to buy a place down there. Then we flipped it and bought another, and then another, and another, and so it goes.

Neither of us golf and John likes to joke that Bonnie needs to be kept busy enough to stay out of the malls, so renovating fixer-uppers was our solution.

Today, we spend half the year in Florida and the other half in British Columbia. We get the best of both worlds by skipping the ice and snow months in BC and then escaping Florida in the spring before the humidity gets too bad. With family in both places, we can spend quality time with everyone and then get out of their hair before we annoy them.

The Why

We blog about our own renovation projects to document them and also to share what we learn along the way. We really hope that as you read about the various projects we tackle, you’ll find some great DIY tips that can help with your own renovations or home improvement jobs.

We’d love to showcase your renovation job on our page. Send us an email describing your project and we’ll be in touch to discuss publishing your photos on our showcase page.

Happy renovating!

Let’s connect!