CAMBRIDGE — Like many a home renovation project, Fred and Heidi Jason say their eye-popping kitchen isn’t quite done.

That didn’t stop it winning them $10,000 for the next job in their Hespeler home: replacing carpet upstairs. And they’re getting $5,000 in new power tools, too.

Last September, they heard about a television contest sponsored by the DIY Network and The Home Depot. They took photos and wrote a 500 essay on their project and mailed it to the “Search For Canada’s Ultimate DIY’er.” Winners were announced last week.

It wasn’t easy, but it was worth living without a kitchen for two months, with the refrigerator and stove in the living room and takeout food wrappers filling garbage cans.

“I don’t want to think about it,” Heidi said.

“It’s always going to take longer. It’s always going to cost more, but you only want to do it once.”

In the end, they managed to keep their sanity and stay on budget even though they wanted to splurge on stone countertops and hardwood flooring.

“I built in flexibility in the schedule,” said Fred, whose day job is a production manger at Rockwell Automation.

Time, money and scope are the interconnected, unavoidable realities of any project, he said. You can’t change one without affecting the others, so Fred made sure to budget extra time to go bargain hunting and still stay on schedule.

“We could go out and get some killer sales for the things we really wanted,” he said.

They planned for nine months of domestic upset and met their target, while keeping costs in check,

“We figured it was going to be around $40,000 and it was close to $40,000, maybe a little bit more,” Fred said.

The kitchen was dated and dark, with painted cupboard doors and little storage. It was also segregated by walls and hallways from a dinning room on one side and a sitting room to the other.

“We said that’s horrible. That’s got to go. After a while you had gotten used to it,” Heidi said.

The project quickly grew from kitchen makeover to a whole-floor renovation of the split-level bungalow. The stove, refrigerator, sink and counters stayed as walls started coming out and the ceilings were ripped down. “We did it all on weeknights and weekends,” Fred said.

With rafters and studs exposed, in went insulation, plumbing and new wiring before new drywall and paint.

Along with pulling new copper wires, connections were run for a throughout-the-house home stereo system. Along with practicality, the rewiring removed fire-prone aluminum wiring in the 40 year-old house.

In the dining room, new French doors open to a patio and storage cabinets cover one wall. The divider between dining room and kitchen was rebuilt as floor to ceiling storage — Fred has a buddy who’s a cabinetmaker — and encloses the refrigerator on the kitchen side.

There’s no wall between kitchen and the new living room: a massive kitchen island now connects the two spaces. In a corner of the living room is a fireplace that used to be covered in man-made Angelstone. The Jasons had it refaced with cut-offs of real stone they hand picked from waste piles in a mason’s yard.

Their work impressed judge Frank Turco, Home Depot’s manager of trends and designs.

“I was looking for something quite dramatic” in the revamped kitchen, Turco said.

“I really liked how they redirected the flow ... planning ahead is king. Don’t plan only for today.”

Of more than 1,000 entries, the Jasons made the short list of half a dozen. Turco picked their work at best because they also spent smart on quality materials where they should, to deal with a decade of hard use by two soon-to-be teenage children.

In the recession, more people picked up hammers, retrenched to their homes and learned to do their own renovations, Turco said.

“We’re appreciative of what we have. We’re really starting to take that pride in our homes ... that momentum hasn’t gone away, even though the recession — we’re told — is over.”

The Jasons aren’t near done work on their house. Upstairs bedrooms await, as does the main-floor living room and the basement. There’s the backyard patio, too. Maybe it will become an outdoor kitchen with a wood-fired pizza oven.

But first, Fred has a bare spot to fill on wall near the fireplace, to complete the kitchen project.

“Now I have to get approval for my big screen TV.”

kswayze@therecord.com