The Unhurried House

Most people in the market for a house look for a place in reasonably good shape: a bombproof foundation, a solid roof, and a furnace that won’t die as soon as winter sets in. Ideally, they find something that needs nothing more than a few coats of paint before they move in and live happily ever after. 

Heidi Mack is not most people. Six years ago, Heidi, a psychotherapist in Kingston, Ontario, found herself at a midlife crossroads: She’d just turned 50, had just completed a doctoral degree, was tiring of her professional work, and was in a relationship that needed to end. Worst of all, her best friend had died after a grueling, four-year bout with cancer. To figure out how to move forward, she went on a restorative three-month pilgrimage to Portugal, while her daughter, Anna, participated in a 10th-grade student exchange in France. 

“I took a good hard look at my life and asked myself if I was living the life I wanted to live, which is kind of in line with the work I’d been doing in my doctorate,” Heidi recalls. “I was like, ‘What do you want? What do you love?’ And I was like, ‘I love houses.’” 

This notion didn’t come out of the blue. Though she has no formal training, Heidi has been buying and renovating houses for almost as long as she’s been practicing psychotherapy. She’s not a house flipper. She simply enjoys the creative process of making an old and tired home fresh and new, living in it for a while, and then doing it all again.  

So when she returned to Kingston, she started searching for a new fixer-upper. In October of 2019, she found one on rural Wolfe Island, a 25-minute ferry ride from the city’s downtown. It was a wood-frame, two-story house originally built in 1871, and it had seen better days. 

Someone seeking insulation had poured three inches of concrete between the cracked, crumbling lath-and-plaster inside walls and the exterior sheathing. The electrical and plumbing systems required a complete overhaul to meet provincial building-code standards. The roof needed replacing. But structurally, it was mostly in decent condition. Heidi picked it up for $180,000. 

As an environmentalist, her goal was to retrofit it to create a beautiful, net-zero home that incorporated as many of the original materials as possible. She wanted to do most of the work herself and didn’t care how long it would take, which is why she named the project, on social media and in real life, The Unhurried House. There’s a sign in her front yard bearing the moniker.

She got down to business as soon as the sale closed. The first job was to remove the concrete from between the walls, which meant first chipping off the plaster in each room and removing the lath slats, one by one, taking care not to crack them. She pulled out the nails and saved both them and the slats for reuse. She hired a couple of men to help her chip out the concrete, dump it into recycling bins, and dolly it out to her backyard. The grunt work took three solid weeks. The buried concrete rubble now forms the base of her raised-bed vegetable garden.

The demolition — or, rather, deconstruction — process continued through the pandemic. Heidi and Anna lived in their Kingston house and, with their border collie pup, Winnie, took the ferry to Wolfe Island every morning to keep the reno ball rolling. 

The work felt endless. After using a small hydraulic jack to raise the lightly sagging floors by fractions of an inch, Heidi replaced or reinforced the original, weight-bearing, hand-hewn wooden posts and beams. She gently pried off and denailed baseboards and door and window trim, then stashed them in tarped-over piles in the backyard until she was ready to put them back where they were or deploy them elsewhere in the renovated structure. 

She cut a hole in the west wall of the house to install a new studio window that would catch the evening sun. She removed the original staircase from the first to the second floor, and then removed its replacement because she didn’t like how it led into the living room. Finally, she had a carpenter friend custom-craft the staircase that’s there now. 

Essentially, she gutted and slowly reassembled the house’s interior, wall by wall, piece by piece, but in a way that left a good portion of the original guts of the home — supporting beams, wall studs, ceiling joists, cross bridges, the original exterior cladding — exposed. There are sections of drywall here and there (in her upstairs bathroom, for instance), and she even learned how to make a curved wall with it. (“It’s not as hard as people think!” she says.) Many walls and ceilings in the house, rebuilt using salvaged lath and boards, still bear a thin layer of plaster dust or a fine patina of old paint. 

But although Heidi wanted to create a beautiful living space and preserve her preferred bare-bones aesthetic, she also wanted a house that was energy-efficient. To make sure she did everything right, she hired Ian Kilborn, a professional engineer and veteran Kingston-area energy-efficiency consultant. 

In any home retrofit designed for energy efficiency, insulation is paramount. To safeguard the limestone walls of the basement against freeze-thaw cycles that might create air and water leaks, Ian recommended insulating the foundation exterior with graphite polystyrene (GPS) rigid foam panels. 

In most retrofits of existing homes, this kind of insulation is installed by digging a two- or three-foot-deep trench around the base of the house, attaching the panels to the foundation so that the top edges stop at ground level, covering the panels with a plastic moisture barrier, and burying everything. The problem with this technique is that it leaves the potential for air leakage between the top of the insulation and the base of the walls. 

So Heidi chose instead to wrap the outside of the entire house, from the base of the foundation to the roof, in a continuous blanket of insulation that would keep air leaks to an absolute minimum. She used a technique she’d come across on the internet called “the perfect wall.” 

There are minor variations in how people apply this technique. Heidi opted to begin by wrapping the house’s exterior with sheets of Blueskin vapor and water barrier, sticking them directly onto the foundation and, above grade, onto the old wooden siding. She then covered the vapor barrier with panels of GPS insulation: one four-inch layer of Halo Subterra below ground and two layers above ground, the first two inches thick and the second, three inches. To prevent air leaks, Heidi filled the seams between the insulation panels with spray foam and taped over them. She placed one panel layer vertically and the other horizontally, so few seams would overlap, then covered it all with another layer of sheeting manufactured by a company called Rothoblaas. 

Next, Heidi needed to attach strapping — long strips of wood three inches wide — on top of the insulation. The strapping would run vertically from the base of the house to the roof and provide a surface that new exterior wood siding could be attached to. The tricky part here was to find screws that were long enough to go through six inches of strapping and insulation and dig into the original half-inch-thick wood siding — but not so long that they’d poke out the other side and be visible on the bare inside walls.

Heidi couldn’t find any off-the-shelf structural screws that were the right length, so she tracked down a company in Italy that was able to custom-fabricate them to exactly the lengths she needed. Unfortunately, when the screws arrived, Heidi discovered that they had rounded heads, not flat ones, which meant that she had to drill holes for every screw she placed and countersink each hole so the top of each screw would be level with the surface of the strapping. It seemed to take forever — but again, Heidi wasn’t in a rush. 

Ultimately, she covered the house with wooden siding made by a local sawmill that replicated the original siding, hand-stained every board in a teal color she created herself, and sealed each with tung oil, a natural, eco-friendly, waterproofing wood finish. The shade of the stain was inspired by the shell of a crayfish Heidi found on a nearby beach.  

The custom-built windows — 22 of them, crafted by a Canadian company called LePage Millwork — were among the few items Heidi bought new. They required some thought to install. The exterior insulation made things tricky: Windows require secure support, typically from wooden frames known as “bucks” that they can rest on. Rigid foam insulation isn’t strong enough on its own. 

Heidi ended up building open-ended plywood boxes that fit snugly into the window holes in the wall. Then she simply slotted each window into its box and screwed it into place. The plywood boxes were deep enough to create little ledges for plants or books. The windows themselves have wood frames, are double-glazed, and, unusually, open inwards.

In such a well-insulated home, with few air leaks, there needs to be a way to replace stale indoor air with fresh air, and also a way to expel moisture — which, if left unattended, can allow mold to grow. Energy-efficient heat recovery ventilators, or HRVs, perform both of these functions. Heidi discovered a German-made HRV brand and uses three of the units. They’re small, unobtrusive, quiet, and effective. 

Heidi also replaced the house’s old oil-burning furnace with 10,000 BTU/h mini-split air-source heat pumps that run on electricity. The heat pumps work well, but it turns out that Heidi rarely needs them. In winter, sunlight streaming through the windows and radiant heat from the hefty cast-iron Italian wood stove she uses for cooking provide more than enough warmth. 

The renovation wasn’t entirely glitch-free. In 2022, Heidi suffered a brain injury in an accident involving a ladder. After that, she needed assistance from others. She hired a crew to install the steel roof, as well as a plumber, an electrician to upgrade the electrical service to 200 amps for the EV charger, and a professional tiler for the upstairs bathroom. 

She watched them work, learned from them, and pitched in when she could. She came to welcome the help she sought and received from friends and neighbors when installing the insulation, siding, and other elements. 

“A hundred, maybe 200 people have laid their hands on the making of this house, which is the opposite of what I thought I was going to do when I bought it,” Heidi says. These days, she hosts workaway visitors from abroad, one of whom helped her build a deck and patio, and another who assisted in the installation of an outdoor sauna and shower. 

Heidi is currently at work on a memoir about the project and what it taught her. Meanwhile, inside the house, an erstwhile bookshelf from a lawyer’s office is now home to pots and pans. The walls are adorned with everything from driftwood to encaustic paintings to old picture and window frames and some of Heidi’s excellent street photography. A blackboard on one wall features pictures chalked by neighbors’ kids and visiting friends. 

“This is a community house now,” Heidi says. “This is a place where lots of people come, and there's usually somebody sleeping here. It’s just been an amazing melding of different skills and different peoples and different needs.”