Remodeling is one of the most stressful things a homeowner ever takes on. You invite strangers into your house, you make a hundred expensive decisions in a row, and you live in the mess while it all happens. We say that out loud because we believe it, and because the best way we’ve found to stay honest about it is to keep putting ourselves through it.
Michele Tenhulzen puts it plainly: “Remodeling is a very, very scary thing for almost everybody out there. It’s a test of a couple’s resolve.” After 25 years of building and remodeling homes across Bothell, Mill Creek, Edmonds, and the Eastside, you might think that fear would fade from view for the people doing the work. That’s exactly why we don’t let it. We remodel our own home, on purpose, so we never forget what it feels like to be the client.
The bathtub test
Here is the story Michele tells first. During their own kitchen remodel, she washed dishes in a bathtub for almost five months. Not because the project ran long, but because they were fitting their own kitchen in around everyone else’s work. It was, in her words, “the worst thing ever.”
That memory does real work for us. When a client has to wait even a fraction of that time to get a dishwasher back in service, we know precisely what we’re asking of them. It changes how we sequence a job, how often we pick up the phone, and how hard we push to keep things moving. You can’t fake that kind of understanding. You have to have lived it.
A training ground where the only client is us
There’s a second reason we remodel our own home, and it has to do with our crew.
Every person we employ is skilled, but they all bring a different level of experience to a given project. The more we can train them somewhere other than a client’s home, the better off everyone is. So when we have a gap in the schedule, Scott and I look at what we can take on at our own house or the office, and we hand it to the team.
It isn’t a test they pass or fail. It’s a chance to help them become better communicators, better at protecting a home from dust, and safer on the job. When they do finally walk into your house, the standard has already been set: this is how we treat a client’s home, because it’s how we treated ours.
Twenty-five years, and still not perfect
You live through a remodel, you learn things. We’ve had 25 years to refine how we do this, and we’ve used them. But refined is not the same as perfect, and we’d rather tell you that than pretend otherwise.
What those years have taught us is where the pain actually lives. It’s rarely the big, dramatic moment. It’s the small stretch of silence when you don’t know what you’re waiting for. Are they waiting on a plumber, or on a tile that hasn’t come in? A good remodeler closes that gap with communication. A great one closes it before you ever feel it.
Living in a home teaches you to use every inch
There’s an unfair advantage to remodeling a house you actually live in. You know where the light lands, how people move through a room, which corner collects clutter and which nook never gets used. Michele treats those awkward spaces the way she treats a good puzzle, with patience and a little stubbornness. An empty cubby under the stairs, a few dead feet beside a deck: those aren’t dead ends to us, they’re storage and function waiting to happen. We carry that same eye into every home we walk through, because we’ve spent years finding the hidden potential in our own.
Why this matters when you hire a remodeling contractor
Most of the difference between a remodel you’d recommend and one you’d warn people about comes down to things you can’t see on a finished-project photo. How the team communicated. How they protected the rest of your home. Whether the schedule was honest. Whether anyone told you the truth when something went sideways.
We built our company around those things because we’ve felt what happens when they’re missing. That’s the whole point of doing our own projects first. It keeps us close to the experience you’re about to have, and it keeps our team sharp before they ever set foot in your home.
If you’re thinking about a project of your own, anywhere from Bothell and Mill Creek to Edmonds and across the Eastside, we’d love to talk it through. No pressure, just an honest conversation about what you’re hoping to do and what it really takes to get there.
Start the conversation at tenhulzenconstruction.com.
