Meet the Tux House!

A 1945 charmer that’s ready to be made over into a cozy AirBnB in Calgary, Alberta. This home still has *some* of the character, we’re planning to restore and add back in the rest! Here’s the before photos and an overview of our plans for the space.

Today I’m excited to share our latest adventure! A 1945 classic post-war era home in Calgary Alberta that we’re making over into a cozy AirBnB! This has been a dream of ours for some time, to get to renovate a space that others can enjoy, where we can renovate without losing our own kitchen for months, where we can try design styles that don’t necessarily suit or own home or style and I’m so so happy we are able to do that sooner than we’d planned.

UPDATE! TUX HOUSE IS DONE! HERE’S THE DETAILS:

MORE TUX HOUSE:

Now back to the post ;)

I shared a tour over on YouTube with our plans for the space and I’m going to try do that with photos and text here as well. This home is a 2 bedroom cutie with a legal 2 bedroom basement suite. We had originally planned to make the suite a long term rental and AirBnB the top floor, but now we’re thinking of going all in and furnishing both for vacation rentals!

This home has lots of work to do, but it’s so worth it with original wood floors, doors and trim throughout most of the house. We love the character that gives, but some of that has been stripped out by previous renovations that are now dated.

We’re calling this guy the ‘Tux House’ as it’s in a cute innercity neighbourhood in Calgary called ‘Tuxedo’. It’s such a great location for a rental for transit and walkability to cute coffee shops and restaurants.

The exterior of the house is classic post-war era architecture, very simple and functional but not a lot of extras. This era was known for budget friendly and functional design. We love the brick and while we’d love to eventually paint this, it’s not on the calendar for this year- it definitely works and is still in good condition. We are going to paint the window casings and railings though to clean them up where the paint is chipping.

Inside, the wood floor isn’t in terrible condition so we’d love to leave that and just add some area rugs to cozy it up. We really love the arches into the living room and the detail on the living room ceiling. While I am normally a ‘paint it white!’ type of person for main floor living spaces… I want to go with something a bit more pigmented to make sure that detail stands out.

I really don’t love the fireplace although it is original art deco style. I LOVE Florence Revival classic fireplace refresh but that’s probably out of the budget and quick timeframe we have to make things over before renting it out. We might come back and take this on in the following year!

You can also see that the big front window is cracked and a lot of the windows are rotting. We’ll clean those up and replace cracked glass- we really don’t want to go to vinyl windows (they’ve done that in the kitchen and bathroom) as these add so much charm!

The entry and hallway have closets with mirrored doors that I’m really not a fan of. I’d love to add moulding and paint them like we did here, but we’re on a total time crunch and budget so I’m not sure that will fit.

The other hallway doors are ‘updated’ and painted- I’d like to replace these for doors with more character as they’re the only upstairs doors not touched.

The bedrooms have the same hardwood floors and beautiful character wood doors with hardware. We definitely want to keep these and paint a colour that will complement them. We’ll probably opt for non-wood tone furniture to keep from having too many going on.

The bathroom and kitchen upstairs are definitely looking like the most in need for a makeover.

The bathroom floor is peeling from a water leak and it’s just overall dated. It does have a gorgeous clawfoot tub though so I want to play that up! We’ll keep the same layout to keep costs down, but update pretty much everything in here. These photos really brighten everything up to look white but honestly everything in this bathroom is yellowing and a bit dirty looking.

The kitchen floor and counter are… bright. Bold. Something else ;) I can’t wait to get in here and change these. If they were original, it would be fun to play with them but it’s definitely from a renovation in probably the 80s from the looks of the products.

The kitchen makes me sad because all of the character is stripped out of here. There’s no wood trim and the doors aren’t original either. The goal here will be do add character back into this space in an affordable way. The cabinets are also yellowing although the listing photos make them look bright white. I am thinking about painting them but will have to see if it works within our schedule!

There is no dining room in this home, it’s an eat-in kitchen with room for a smaller round table. We’ll work with this layout due to budget. The patio doors here go out to the back deck and because the front door has beautifully original hardware, we will be using the backdoor for the smart locks.

The deck is in decent condition although it needs some repairs. We’ll likely repair what is wobbly and leave painting or staining it until the following year. It’s such a great yard and I wish we had budget and time to remove some of those raised garden beds and add perennials so it will look wonderful even without regular maintenance since we are 8 hours away.

The side entrance leads to the basement suite. Right now, this stairway is also connected to the upstairs as they share laundry. In order to have two short term rentals, we need on site laundry for linen swapping. Since the changeovers will happen at different times, we’ll add laundry upstairs and close in the top half of the stairs for that laundry closet.

Downstairs, our biggest concern is that kitchen. It’s not just dated but it’s also non functional. The oven can’t open due to the fridge placement and the range hood is broken but the small size makes it more expensive. We will probably replace the appliances upstairs and bring the old ones from upstairs down.

Since we’re working on a budget here, we’ll be using IKEA cabinets and replace the flooring in the kitchen with an affordable vinyl plank or vinyl tile.

We would also love to add a door into the bathroom from the stairs landing to help the layout work better for the front bedroom. The bathroom is otherwise pretty updated although we’d love to replace the countertop, sink and mirror.

There’s two bedrooms down here, the front one is a basic bedroom but the back one is actually a double bedroom… so it’s kind of like three bedrooms but without a door in between. I’m thinking we will make this a kind of bunk room which will make it perfect for our family!

Prefer to watch the video version to get a better feel for the layout? Here you go!

Whew! There she is! What do you think about our new project? Any ideas I haven’t mentioned here? I can’t wait to show you what we’ve started on here!

Tux House is our AirBnB property in Calgary, Alberta. We’d love to have you stay with us! You can find more information on booking for Tux House Here and for Tux Suite (the basement suite).

MORE TUX HOUSE: