How to start a home renovation when you don't know where to begin

By Jacob Kirst

President & Visionary, Lagois Design·Build·Renovate

The night before our adventure, five-year-old Dawson had one request.

"Dad,” he whispered excitedly into my ear, “make sure you wake me up in the morning!"

He wasn’t sure what would happen, but he was excited because we would experience it together. It was the promise of something special.

Before I woke him up, when the house was still asleep, even before the sun had a chance to rise, I sat on the porch with a coffee.

These moments before daylight have become some of my favourites. The world feels different. It feels still, patient. The air is cool. The birds are starting their chirpy conversations with each other. It’s as though the day is waiting to begin.

As the first light appeared on the horizon, I woke Dawson. He jumped out of bed, but we didn’t talk much. We didn’t need many words. Some mornings are like that. The excitement in the air is enough.

By the time we launched the boat, the sky was perfectly clear – not a cloud anywhere. Everything suggested we were in for one of those picture-perfect summer mornings.

We eased away from the dock and headed toward one of our favourite fishing spots. Then we rounded a point, and everything disappeared.

Almost instantly, we entered a wall of mist. It was thick enough that the shoreline dissolved. The islands became silhouettes. The horizon vanished. The world we had seen only moments before was gone. It was as though we had crossed into another place entirely. The mist had settled across three large bodies of water.

Just beyond it, the sun was shining, but we couldn’t see it yet.

We could have turned around. We could have gone looking for blue sky. But we didn’t. We set our lines. We drifted. We waited. It was beautiful.

The water became perfectly still. The mist softened every sound. There were no distractions, just a father and son sitting quietly together in a world that felt suspended between night and day.

As I sat there, I realized something. The fog hadn't taken anything away from the morning. It had simply changed the way we experienced it.

Instead of watching the horizon, we noticed the water. Instead of looking into the distance, we became present with where we were. Instead of chasing certainty, we embraced the unknown.

It made me think about life and how few meaningful journeys begin with complete clarity. Marriage doesn't. Parenthood doesn't. Building a business doesn't.

Neither does creating a home.

Families often come to us with a vision rather than a finished plan. They know how they want life to feel. They imagine moments like the one I had before I woke Dawson, a morning with coffee while the house is still quiet.

They imagine children running through the backyard, or friends lingering around the table long after dinner has ended. They can see growing older in the place where they’ve built a life together.

How those ideas become architecture isn't always clear at the beginning. There are lots of questions, and discoveries, and unexpected opportunities. And there are moments when the path ahead seems hidden.

In many ways, every great project begins as our morning did, in a mist. As renovators and builders, we know there will be uncertainty at times. It’s our role to walk through it with you – to listen and explore, to understand what your home will become.

It’s a process, a journey, because the best homes are rarely designed all at once. Like life itself, they reveal themselves gradually. They start with a conversation, a sketch, a decision, one step at a time.

My morning with Dawson is something I will always remember not because the fishing was extraordinary but because of the mist. It reminded me that clarity isn't always something we're given before we begin. In fact, sometimes clarity only reveals itself because we’re willing to keep moving forward.

Eventually the fog lifted that morning. We could see the shoreline again. The sun found us. But by then, something had changed. The morning had already given us what we came for: not fish, but perspective.

Perhaps that's what Perfecting the Art of Living^® has always meant to me: not only creating certainty or perfect homes, but places that support you through every chapter of life, including the ones you can’t see yet.

The richest lives are built sometimes in the mist but with the courage to begin the journey anyway.

For more ideas, information and inspiration about your home from Jacob Kirst, please sign up to Perfecting the Art of Living®, our monthly newsletter, here.