The one-woman renovation band

Kathryn McBride visited the emergency room only once during the three-plus years she single-handedly rehabbed her Queen Anne Victorian home in southwest suburban Brookfield, Ill. And that was because when she was spraying the marble tile in an upstairs bathroom, she ignored the instructions to use the product in a well-ventilated space. Not able to breathe, she ended up in the ER.

No falls from ladders, no broken bones, no gashes from sharp-edged tools - all those hazards women suspect might befall them if they dared this on their own.

Not bad, as "for the most part I did most of it myself, except for work that needed plumbers and electricians," says the first-time DIYer. "One of my brothers helped me put up light fixtures, but that's about it." She taught herself to use power tools - "table saws, miter saws. Every kind of jigsaw. Anything you can imagine," she says.

She stripped and sanded and stained all her kitchen cabinets, put in the granite tile countertops, took down and rebuilt walls, put up paneling, put down floors, redid a 1960s psychedelic bathroom, and designed and created stained glass for cabinet doors and windows.

Today the turreted two-story 12-room house with 10-foot ceilings dating to at least 1895 is a lovely and warm gem. The finished interior could be the pride of any interior decorator. She achieved a look that quietly evokes the era of the house, but is warm, comfortable and very livable by today's standards, lacking the clutter and stiff formality of the original. As for the rehabbing, you would never know that crews of professionals with tool belts at their waists had not been working on it for weeks.

That is in contrast to the condition it was in when she bought it. (Her property covers three lots and includes a two-bedroom coach house, a rental, in the back.) The kitchen and bathrooms were functional but outdated. There were myriad layers of old wallpaper and paint requiring months of fierce attack to remove.

Many other single mothers can relate to McBride's concern she might not have adequate funds for her daughter Tori's college tuition when the time came. This was why McBride took on what she calls her "second job." She would work all day as a graphic artist, and when she was up in the middle of the night painting, she kept herself going with the inner mantra: "It's for college, it's for college."

"I felt overwhelmed some of the time," she admits. "If I got it done now, I would have done a better job, because I'd have the experience. The hardest part in doing things yourself was holding things like crown molding and nailing it up yourself." That was until she discovered the adhesive product Liquid Nails and bought a nail gun.

Another thing that kept her going: She tacked up pictures from magazines of how she envisioned each room "so I knew where I was going and what I wanted to have done."

When done, she would take down the pictures and move on to the next room. "Every Saturday morning, I would throw on (TLC's) `Trading Spaces' and those kinds of (home-improvement) shows, and it kept me thinking, what's the next thing to do," she says.

She took on the dining room first. Here she found the walls were done with plastered-over chicken wire, a technique used in the 1940s. That came out, and so did the curved steel beams used for the archway to the living room in order to be able to square off the arch. An antique tapestry she found as wrapping for an antique she bought hangs over the doorway.

In addition to the grunt work, artwork in the house is also hers, from photographs to displays of Scottish scabbards and swords straight out of "Braveheart."

The weaponry is a clue to McBride's Scottish heritage, of which she is proud. There are also a couple of world-traveling New Zealand missionaries in her background, which may account for her determined zeal.

She picked a blue and white color theme, using Ralph Lauren Black Watch Navy ("which appealed to my Scottish parts"), and a Behr pure white semigloss for the dining room. The upper third of the walls are a gallery for her Scottish swords and daggers. "I have a thing about honor," she explains.

The oak dining table seats 8 to 10 members of a large family with leaves extended. The doors of a built-in cabinet across one wall are made with stained glass McBride designed and created.

The second room she did was her daughter's. "She was a little unhappy when we moved. She was 10 ¹/₂ then," McBride says. "I didn't know what to do. A friend said, `Do her room.'" That did the trick.

The living room is circular, thanks to the turret. At one end is the original fireplace that McBride didn't want to rip out, so she reclaimed it with porcelain paint. "I think it is important to keep original elements for whoever comes after me," she says.

The entryway of the home now contains floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and introduces the staircase to the second floor. For a window on the landing, McBride made stained glass with the theme of a Maltese cross, an emblem used by the medieval Knights of Malta, a cross whose arms look like arrowheads pointing inward. Each point, she says, represents a different quality of a knight - such as loyalty, generosity, reverence for God.

In the updated kitchen, a large Tiffany-style lamp McBride bought is the central focus. She created a matching stained-glass piece to go across the top of the kitchen window. She modernized the kitchen with a stainless-steel KitchenAid refrigerator, dishwasher and microwave, but kept a large Chambers commercial stove and oven from the 1950s, a hot item among collectors today. She stained the existing kitchen cabinets a dark mahogany.

To start, she made a mosaic tile for the kitchen floor, "nice and fun, but I had to wash it every day," she says. So she ripped it up and had a wood floor put in. ("There's so much trial and error," she says.)

The back of the kitchen, McBride's tool-filled workroom, set up for her stained glass and other projects, stretches across the width of the house.

On the second floor, her blue and white master bedroom is a serene and personal nest ensconced in the turret. She furnished it with the first new bedroom set she's ever bought, a four-poster dark mahogany bed and carved dresser.

Her daughter's bedroom is furnished for an adolescent's taste with bunk beds and huge stripes on the wall, but typical of a teenager, the decor is always in flux. A third bedroom, office and bathroom with a Whirlpool tub complete the second floor.

"Now with the equity that this work has brought me, thanks to the growth in housing market prices in addition to my home improvements, I am hopeful that my daughter will be able to attend any college that she would like," says McBride. "It has truly been a blessing, giving us a home we love now, and assuring a bright future for Tori. She can either use the equity in the house or sell it to pay for tuition. "I don't know what the future holds, but one way or another, she can go to school," says McBride.

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STEPS TO BECOMING A SUCCESSFUL DIYER

Other renovation lessons learned by Kathryn McBride:

Watch, watch, watch. "I watch some of them (home-improvement and decorating shows) every Saturday morning to get my creative juices flowing before I head off to the hardware store ... I keep it on, in the background, while I work. It keeps me motivated and focused." She adds that "Trading Spaces," the English version, "Changing Rooms" and "While You Were Out" "give you an idea of what things have to be done to your home and in which order you should tackle your projects."

Take classes. She recommends the many classes at Home Depot and Lowe's stores.

Visualize. "My daughter and I pore through magazines and books. When we find something that we would like to do in a room, we rip the page out of the magazine, or make a copy of the page from a book, and tape it to the wall. The pictures can be of colors that I would like to use, furniture styles, wall or window treatments or furniture/accessory placement. I can't walk through a room without being reminded of work that needs to be done. It keeps me focused on completing the room. It took more than three years to take down some of the pictures, but no projects were forgotten."

Surf's up. "Most every question that you might come up with can be answered on the Internet. It might be the middle of the night and you want to figure out how to install a light switch; someone on some bulletin board has probably asked the same question. The Internet is also a great place to find odd-sized materials or even authentic Victorian doorknobs and floor grates." Faves: www.thisoldhouse.com, www.bhg.com (Better Homes & Gardens), www.marthastewart.com (Martha Stewart), www.diynetwork.com and www.hgtv.com.

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(c) 2006, Chicago Tribune. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service.