Jennifer Garza is a woman who knows what she wants. And through hard work and a steel will, she usually gets it. That’s one reason why family and friends affectionately call her “queen bee.”
But six years ago, she saw a house with an awful lot of things she didn’t want. And bought it anyway.
“When I first saw it, I cried,” she says, “It was so dark and depressing.”
Still, Garza had her reasons for choosing the Northaven Estates house.
“It was the only house available here at the time,” she says, “and I really wanted to be in this neighborhood. It’s stable. People come here to live and raise their children. It’s not a stepping-stone to Highland Park.”
And deep down, she knew the house had potential.
“It had good bones,” she says. “And I’m all about infrastructure.”
So despite all the changes she knew it needed, Garza decided to make it home for her and then 2-year-old daughter Allison. Or, as the queen quips, “After I stopped crying and renewed my prescription for Zoloft, I knew I could give it a facelift.”
Reconstructive surgery, more like it. Because the changes, as before and after photos reveal, went well beyond a few nips and tucks.
In fact, the home in which Garza lives today is hardly recognizable as the house she purchased back then. And true to form, she acted as general contractor, designer and workhorse every step of the way.
Some of the most obvious changes Garza made were to the exterior. As she says, “It’s the walk up that really makes people flip.”
She started by shaving back the roof projection and covering the home’s dark brick façade with light-colored stucco. She replaced the aluminum bay windows with large box windows. She tore out the straight concrete walk and added a curved path of Pennsylvania bluestone.
She added all new landscaping in the front and back yards, and also added a pool in the back, complete with a Pebbletech lining of Garza Granite, a color created and named by the queen herself.
But she didn’t just change the outside. The kitchen, for starters, got a makeover worthy of an afternoon talk show. Formerly weighted down by dark cabinets and poor lighting, the room is now bright and welcoming.
“I wanted my kitchen to be as bright as an operating room,” she says. To achieve that, Garza added both recessed lighting and skylights, something that can be found throughout the house.
The kitchen opens to a breakfast area, which opens via sliding doors and floor-to-ceiling windows to the outdoors. In full view is the back yard, a mixture of modern luxury, careful landscaping and family fun, complete with a trampoline, cedar trees and flowering plants.
The living room also is like new, with a custom fireplace and mantel featuring water-themed tiles painted with fish and seagulls. The mantel and hearth are curved, connected by a group of small columns on each side.
“I knew I liked the design,” Garza says, “but we had to come up with a way to do the columns.”
When they couldn’t find the right size in wood, one of her contractors suggested PVC pipes. Painted with a pearl finish that matches the mantel, they worked perfectly.
The walls were painted a soft yellow, and the beamed ceiling was replaced with a seamless barrel-vaulted ceiling. Like the kitchen, the living room is well lit, thanks in part to more skylights.
“I hate bad lighting,” Garza says. “When I moved here, there were only four 40-watt bulbs in the whole room. So I added skylights here, too. I don’t like having electric lights on all the time.”
While the major changes to the house are impressive, it’s in the many details that Garza really excels.
“I’m very good at luxury finish out,” she says. “That’s my thing.”
The home is full of unusual features that a first-time visitor might miss. Take the small chandeliers in the hall, set inside more skylights, with a special feature for easy removal and cleaning.
Or the living room ceiling. Not only did it have to be a seamless curve, but Garza also had it covered with a Swedish putty to give it a smooth finish.
“It stays cool to the touch, almost like marble,” she says.
The living room’s parquet floor was grainy and highly porous, so she researched and found a special type of paint that would look like stain but absorb more evenly.
In the kitchen, Garza designed a way to dispense drinking water through an attractive porcelain tap on the side of the pantry, so the water cooler could be hidden inside.
The list goes on. But when and how did she learn to do this stuff? All her life and mostly by observing, she says. Growing up in the northeast, she watched her parents restore their 200-year-old farmhouse throughout her childhood.
Like them, Garza had the work done in phases, overseeing every aspect of it.
“We just put up plenty of plastic curtains in the house, and lived here for all but the first six weeks of construction.”
How much time does she estimate she’s spent on the house?
“Between interviewing workers, making sure they show up, choosing and tracking down the right materials…I can’t measure it in hours. More like years,” she says.
But all that time and determination have clearly paid off. Because the same work ethic and attitude that gave Garza her nickname also gave her a beautiful new home.
“The phrases I heard most often during the whole process were, ‘You can’t do that’ and ‘That doesn’t exist,’” she says. “But I knew I could do it, and I knew it existed, and eventually, we got it done.”
