Revival Wrapup
“We can work with this house. I know this house. The crown is a bit fancier. The layout is pretty much the same; flipped side to side. The lavatory is in the wrong place. The doors are different but the locksets are the same. Same casing, ceilings are lower on the 2nd floor. Someone messed with the windows but there is an original in the back. This addition must have been an in-law suite. ”
I grew up in a house just like this. There must be tens of thousands of these Colonial Revival-style houses built in the Greater Boston Area in the 1920s and ‘30s. This ubiquity—that they’re all over the place—lofted this project into a different realm, and for me, this made it unique, if that makes sense. We, essentially, brought this 20th century vernacular house into the 21st century, maintaining its old New England charm, ensuring that it stands another hundred years.
We started demo in February and discovered the typical distribution of cool stuff—eel grass, old glass insulators…and alarming stuff: shady deck connection, mudsills way out of alignment with the foundation, huge bow along the back wall, failed support under the carrying beam in the crawl space. Framing was pretty uneventful. Some LVLs where we added pocket doors and moved load bearing partitions, straightened the exterior wall of the kids’ bath, and moved the window rough opening. We then did it two more times to get it flat and plumb, cut a new access doorway through the foundation wall between the garage and basement, and reframed the basement staircase.
We spent a lot of time getting the windows right. To us that meant sizing them so that the heads and sills aligned with the original siding courses and that the lights on the kitchen sink window array were the same size across two different width windows. We also had the opportunity to revisit our approach to window installation to meet the new stretch energy code requirements. We came away with some updated processes and materials, and improved our blower door performance (3.1 ACH (Air Exchanges per Hour) 50 for an envelope that is currently 60% tarpaper and blown-in cellulose).
The finish phases started after the 4th of July break. Everything proceeded pretty smoothly after we swapped the prime bath plank flooring for tongue and groove OSB. We also discovered a conflict between the pantry door edge and the pantry countertop. Something had to give and the hinged door became a pocket door.
And we are done…for now. Keep an eye out for some site improvements this spring. I’m looking forward to returning in a couple of years to replace the remaining windows, improve the rest of the building envelope, and bring the facade back to its original look.