Before and After

Southwest Florida can't claim the abundance of classical architecture and gingerbread trim that New England can, but plenty of local homebuyers brush off the attraction of building new and give in to the romantic allure of renovating an older home. It's just that here, older means younger when it comes to architecture.

Here, young couples turn cookie-cutter houses from the '60s into contemporary showplaces, knocking down walls and erasing the scars of bad decorating phases. Children in tow, families turn the rare 80- to 90-year-old building upside down. Whether working with their own hands or working with contractors, they've all fallen for an older structures then nurtured it into something new and special.

Here are some of their love stories.

An osprey coasts overhead, circling toward an aerie in the yard next to Scott and Diane Lampitts' home. A red-bellied woodpecker pokes at a Southern pine while a heron ambles around an adjacent pond. It's all in a morning's stroll through the grounds of the Lampitt's Pine Island home.

Peace and simplicity lured the couple to the remote, unspoiled Lee County island best known for its fishing, groves of tropical fruit and palm trees, and historic Indian mounds.

"We got out of the car and walked around and just got a good feeling," explains Diane, 45, a consultant for a Catholic publishing company. "The energy drew us here."

"It's a very spiritual place," says Scott, 54, an artist and garden designer whose plantings and metal sculptures sprout all over the yard. "With all the Calusa people that were here before, it's no wonder."

The house, however, was less than heavenly.

It had been on the market for more than a year. A 900-square-foot stilt structure with unusually small windows that let in little light, the house was only 17 years old when the Lampitts bought it in 1998. Dropped ceilings and a bowling alley of a master bedroom created the sensation of being boxed in.

They decided to gut it and the 300-square-foot companion cottage.

"We knew it was going to take a lot of work, but we didn't realize how much," says Scott, a jack-of-many-trades who did most of the renovations himself. "We thought we would just remodel the kitchen, but when we took it apart we started seeing that not much thought was put into the house."

The couple stayed in Fort Myers with Diane's parents while fixing up the cottage. Then they lived in the cottage for seven months until the main house was livable. Scott tore out windows, doors, sheet rock and the plumbing and electrical systems. He also frequently consulted Diane, who travels several times a month. "It's important to collaborate with your partner on everything," Scott says, "so you don't end up with 'Why did you do that?'"

Scott recycled whatever materials he could. The living room's knotty pine walls, for instance, became the cottage floor. He adapted remnants from his brother's construction business. All told, he spent about $30,000 on materials he couldn't scrounge.

Exposed-beam ceilings and more and bigger windows now brighten the once-dark abode and afford airy, panoramic views of the pine scrub, pond and wildlife. White spackled walls and light wood surfaces give the entire space a pristine glow. Throughout the home, Scott's artistic hand reveals itself, whether in a telephone nook, styled moldings, arched doorways or a Murphybedesque ironing board.

"It would have been a lot easier and probably cheaper to have something built, but you end up with something that's empty," Diane muses. "Every nook and cranny here is really us."

And then there are the intangible additions: time, energy and vision. "When you put your soul into a house, it becomes one with you," Scott says. "You're wed to each other."

WORDS OF WISDOM

o Stay focused.

o Before moving in, finish as much as you can. The Lampitts still haven't polyurethaned their new wood floors.

o Sketch all the options before construction.

o Figure out a budget, then add $10,000.

Renovating by the River

When the house Darrel Adams and Chuck Lieze bought was built in 1967, it was showcased as a dream home by Michigan Homes. In 1999, when the pair moved in, it was anything but.

Decades of foot traffic had stained the pink carpeting brown. Smoke from thousands of cigarettes coated the walls. Four bedrooms and five bathrooms were wedged into 2,300 square feet under air. Even the owner suggested they tear it down and build a new house.

"People thought we were crazy," says Adams, 37, news director for WBBH (NBC-2) and WZVN (ABC-7) in Fort Myers. "They asked, 'What do you see in this place?'"

Despite a template-traditional floor plan, cowering 8-foot ceilings and the likelihood of throwing thousands of dollars into renovations, the pair saw potential.

When house hunting, they invoked the old real estate mantra: location, location, location. Their quarry: waterfront property in the charming McGregor Boulevard area of Fort Myers.

They bagged their trophy in a 30-year-old ranch house on a canal-front double lot with direct access to the Caloosahatchee River. Three years, gallons of sweat and $100,000 later, the faded "dream home" can reclaim its title. Stylish, eclectic and comfortable, it reflects its owners, who've been together four years and worked morning and night to realize the potential they saw in the house.

The kitchen alone merits oohs and ahs. Gone are the harvest-gold Formica countertops and avocado appliances, replaced with brown granite and stainless steel. Solid-pecan cabinets, a one-of-a-kind glass-tiled backsplash and an island crowned with one solid slice of Baltic granite create an ideal arena for entertaining.

Like many couples, Adams and Lieze scheduled a housewarming party to boost their motivation during the hours they toiled before and after their day jobs and on weekends. "It's all we did for six months," Adams says.

They stripped walls down to the two-by-fours, laid wood floors and sand blasted ceilings. Adams had renovated a bungalow years earlier in Minneapolis, while Lieze had worked for 18 years as a property manager before becoming a realtor with Re/Max Realty Group. What they didn't know how to do, they learned. "You just read the directions," Adams says. Lieze has a different take on the learning process. "I look at the pictures," he says. "It's usually done before he gets done reading."

Only those kitchen cabinets, the massive marble shower in the master bathroom and the pool cage expansion were contracted out. "The most difficult part is getting contractors to respond and get on schedule," says Lieze, 39. "We had to stay on top of them and make sure the work they were doing was done on time and right."

When they didn't, disaster struck.

A plumber's apprentice installing a toilet in the master bathroom wound up flooding the house. When Adams and Lieze returned home from work, they found the floorboards they had laid the previous night floating in the house. Worse still, that line of floorboards had been discontinued.

Crises like that can stretch patience, confidence and creativity to the breaking point, the pair admits. "Remodeling is a true test of a relationship-so many decisions, so many challenges," Adams says. But they're still together and are even pondering another project. "We're so twisted we've thought about buying an investment house and redoing it and selling it," Adams says.

WORDS OF WISDOM

o Lieze and Adams's Bible was The Big Red Book, a slim binder that started out with a few pages including the budget, blueprints and magazine clippings. It's now overstuffed with paint samples and photographs. "After all's said and done, we get the biggest kick out of showing the pictures of what it looked like before," Lieze says. "People say, 'This is great-will you help me with my house?'"

o Use paint colors and lighting to create room distinctions in a poorly designed floor plan. Lieze and Adams also turned three small rooms into one sprawling master suite.

o "The key to our success is being very good at dividing up projects," Adams said. "Do some together, some separately."

Neighborhood revival

Herb and Sandy Glover had already purchased two lots with the intention of building their own house when they read about the Dean Park Historic District. The neighborhood that attracted the high society of Fort Myers in the early decades of the last century had fallen into disrepair and disrepute; but a renaissance in the 1990s promised to restore the downtown district's porches and gardens to their former glory.

Once the Glovers visited, they were hooked on the neighborhood's diversity of architecture-Victorian, Moorish, Colonial and Craftsman. In 1990, the Glovers bought a 3,000-square-foot 1922 bungalow that needed a lot of attention. Vermin nested in the walls of the three-bedroom, two-and-one-half-bath house; there was no central air conditioning or heat; plumbing and electrical fixtures needed updating.

"It wasn't in the best condition," Herb says wryly.

The fixer-upper was a jarring change from the ultramodern home they left in Cape Coral. Even their mortgage lender urged them to tear it down and begin anew. But the Glovers, who both work in children's social services, already glimpsed hints of glory-detailed moldings, framed doorways, leaded glass. Although they'd never undertaken such a project, they rolled up their sleeves and began resuscitating the old house with their own hands.

"A lot of people see the charm, and a lot don't seriously look past it," Sandy says. "You have to ask yourself, 'Do I really want to be married to this?'"

The Glovers, wed 26 years, said yes, seeking outside help only for a kitchen addition.

"The first six months to a year, all we did was take out plaster and lath," says Herb, 55. "You'd start one thing and realize before you fixed it that you had to do this. We were completely ill-prepared."

As months folded into years, the couple worked on the house whenever they could afford to. "When we ran out of money, we started working in the yard," Herb said. "We went where the house told us to go."

The couple tag-teamed emotionally: When one was down, the other was up. There were times when the magnitude of the undertaking took its toll. "One day a friend was working on the electrical system, and he called me at work and told me Sandy was at home crying," Herb recalls. "It was one of those overwhelming moments."

Mostly, though, they maintained a dogged patience, partly by chatting with neighbors going through their own home-improvement trials. One man down the street regularly dashed over with a towel to take a shower in the Glover's guest cottage.

About two years ago, they finally had finished major construction. Only details and decorating remained. They didn't keep track but reckon they spent about $140,000, including the addition.

"At this point, not all of our money is going into the house," Herb says.

WORDS OF WISDOM

o No matter how small the job, do something every day.

o Don't send a sledgehammer to do a jackhammer's job. Rent the right tool for the task.

o Don't overplan. "You can't be rigid," Sandy says. "You have to have a good sense of humor."

o "You've got to have a partner; otherwise there's no one to hold the other end of the board," Herb says.

Converting a carriage house

Phil and Kathy Kinsey's home has had many past lives.

In the early 1900s, it stored carriages and perhaps housed servants. Decades later it was subdivided into three apartments, sometimes rented to George Brett and other players for the Kansas City Royals in Fort Myers for spring training. Then it turned into a duplex, and the Kinseys moved into the ground floor in 1986 with their first child, 9-month old Ashton.

Now, this old house on the edge of the Caloosahatchee River has metamorphosed yet again into a single-family home. Its dozen rooms include a spacious master suite, a luxurious living room with a fireplace and individual rooms for 16-year-old Ashton and her brothers Philip, 14, and John, 6.

The building's latest transformation unfolded in 1997, when the upstairs tenants, Phil's sister Eva and her family, moved out to Pine Island.

The Kinseys decided to turn the house upside down-literally.

Flooding was always a concern at the low-lying Kinsey compound. (Phil's mother also lives there, in a large Victorian house.)"We decided to reverse the house," says Kathy, 37. "We'd put the main living area, the kitchen and the master suite upstairs. We just had to come up with a structure to make it work."

The children's rooms and family room remained below, and the couple started knocking down walls, tearing up carpet and rethinking the upstairs layout. They worked on the master suite first, so their daughter could have their old room downstairs.

Known as a savvy shopper, Kathy cut costs wherever possible.

Borrowing high-end ideas from magazines, she and her husband of 18 years achieved a sophisticated design that looks more expensive than it is. Once, they discovered a 300-pound ceramic bathtub at Reilly Brothers, an old hardware store in Fort Myers, for $50. After admiring a $5,000 four-head shower system, they put together their own with $15 showerheads. For the kitchen cabinets they stuck with plywood covered in oak veneer.

"We spent money on nice wood doors, which is what people see anyway," Kathy says.

Kathy figures they spent $25,000 on materials, and they also saved money by doing most of the work themselves. "I was the designer; Phil made it happen," Kathy says. "He would say, no, it couldn't happen. I'd say yes, it can. He'd say OK."

Because he had worked in construction since he was a teen-ager, Phil, 40, had experience and skills to draw on when making the seemingly impossible possible. He also had Elmer Linder, a retired carpenter and old family friend, beside him.

Other friends and family pitched in, too. A firefighter, Phil could count on his buddies to show up when extra hands were needed. Even son John picked up a brush when he was just 4 or 5.

And Kathy got dirty right beside them. "I have my own toolbox, my own hammer," she says.

WORDS OF WISDOM

o Be patient with old houses, and be prepared for surprises. "I don't mind that all the walls aren't plumb," Kathy says.

o Shop around.

o Molding can make everything look good.