The house that James (and family) rebuilt

The diagnostician in him needs the inner woodworker to keep his life in balance. Lucky for him, his family supports his passion

By Ilina Stranberg

"The Arts and Crafts interior had been butchered by the 60s mod-runs," says Dr Jim Nasmith, "they surgerized the thing to death." The original oak banister posts on the main stairwell had been replaced with brassy Plexiglas panels. A flimsy metal staircase spiralled down to the back garden and, most hapless of all, a great chunk of the main floor had been excavated to carve out a cold and steep box canyon of a living room below.

On the first Saturday afternoon in January, the doctor, who is Clinical Director of Cardiology at Toronto Western Hospital, is home alone in Toronto. Wearing a neat plaid shirt, paint-splattered chinos and worn-out running shoes, after completing the renovations upstairs he's happily absorbed in the construction of a new basement workshop. His wife not only supports the do-it-yourself man inside her husband, she also often pitches in on these projects. She is Dr Louise Nasmith, a medical powerhouse in her own right and chair of the Department of Family and Community Medicine at the University of Toronto. On this particular afternoon she surmises that the inner man is best left to his passion and has gone to the movies with the couple's daughters, Trudy, 20 and Moneen, 23. The day before, they'd joined in to help him knock down a wall then remove the plaster and rubble to the dumpster that, he says with satisfaction, is often parked in the driveway.

Like every house the Nasmiths have ever lived in, this three-storey Tudor has undergone a swift succession of renovations, restorations and overhauls. Everything has been done according to the doctor's exacting standards -- much by his own hand.

When the family moved here from Montreal a couple of years ago, there was a shortage of property on the market and houses were being snapped up like batteries in a blackout. The Nasmiths bought this one because they liked the location and saw the good bones beneath the faded glitz of some pretty tired renovations. He's been working hard to restore it since they moved in. Why? "Because I'm a good Scot, so I hate spending money. And it would be most unattractive to have people come in and do things you could do yourself, especially when the money you save allows you to finance a tool that will enable you to do the same thing another time." The doctor, like most craftsmen, has a passion for collecting fine tools.

He puts them to good and regular use. In what is still a relatively new house to the Nasmiths, he has already painstakingly restored the stairwell to its original oak-posted dignity and salvaged the wreck of the sunken living room. It's now two warm and functional family spaces. Downstairs, in what is now the music room he's insulated to stop sound vibrations from disturbing the peace in the living room above. The proof will be in the pudding: a drum kit in the corner awaits the arrival of the Nasmiths' 19-year-old son Greg, currently studying in Montreal, who'll be challenged to do his best to rock the house.

Glass doors lead outside to new wooden decks and staircases. With a nod to clean design as well as solid Scottish practicality, he built the handrail as a simple piece of bevelled wood with a rabbet, or step-shaped channel, underneath to support the posts. They're secured at the bottom with an open sandwich construction that lets rain, leaves and pine needles fall through to minimize rot and mildew.

The showcase of the house so far -- and the innovation he's most proud of -- is the way he's repositioned an upper door to offer a better panorama of the city skyline from both the breakfast room and the new living room. When the work is finished, this room will be the house's centrepiece and Dr Nasmith is taking great care to make sure it's to his liking. He plans, for example, to add an elegant oak surround to the Chinese marble fireplace. That's one reason he's in a hurry to finish building his workshop. "To have that fireplace look like the main stairwell will be of great interest to me. I'm taking a leap up in terms of my skill set. I think I'm getting there, but I never had a workshop before -- I've been working downstairs under conditions that are just god-awful."

Despite all that, and the 55 hours or so a week he puts in at the hospital, he's managed to cut, sand, prime and paint his way through most of the house. He's "blown out holes" in walls to make way for improvements; meticulously crafted foot-high baseboards and completed a hundred other small "improvements." Perhaps more important, he's obviously getting a lot of enjoyment from the process. "You can really see the results. Medicine can be very cerebral and as a diagnostician, what I do is not tangible. You can't be categorical, so you need something else to balance that. When I put in a wall that's perfectly straight, I get a visual reminder that it's perfectly straight every time I walk in to the room. That feels good, and I need that. Cars bore me and golf would drive me crazy. This is what I do."

A trim and articulate man with a low-key, boyish charm, Dr Nasmith traces his affinity for working with wood back to his "Tom Sawyer childhood" in small-town Ontario, where leftover construction materials were plentiful thanks to the postwar building boom. He was enthralled by the door factory his father ran and got his first saw, "not a little wee one, but a full-fledged adult saw," when he was five-years-old. What did he build? An archway as a bridge for his electric train. Tree huts. A ground hut made of packing crates and odd pieces, but finished in grown-up style with a front door and padlock.

His love of building gave way to a fascination with science so strong he thought of becoming an engineer. He changed his mind the day his science teacher showed him pond algae under a microscope. "I can remember thinking no batteries, no diagrams, no wires, nothing to connect. It comes all self-contained and all self-propelled. So when I saw these cells with all their moving parts streaming around under the microscope, my fascination with electronics was overwhelmed by my discovery of biology. And that led to medicine."

Good as medicine has been to the doctor, he says woodworking gives him a sense of inner peace and at helps him keep his mental balance. "I exhaust myself down here," he comments happily.