Property Renovation

A walkthrough of the whole property before any plan

A property that has sat empty, or been patched by the last three owners, has to be looked at as one building before anyone talks about kitchens. The first visit with Steve is a full walkthrough. Roof and gutters, the foundation from inside the basement, the attic, the electrical panel and whatever wiring we can see, the plumbing and the heating plant, windows and doors, decks and stairs, the grading around the house. We take notes and photos in every room.

What you get afterward is a written list sorted by urgency: what has to happen before anything else, what should happen this year, and what can sensibly wait. Some owners do all of it at once. Others handle the first group and live in the house while they plan the rest. Either is reasonable, and the list makes plain what each choice leaves for later.

That list is also the honest answer to a question new owners often avoid asking, which is how far the house is from sound. Sometimes the answer is closer than it looks, because the problems are cosmetic. Sometimes a fresh coat of paint has been hiding a sill that is gone. Better to know in the first week.

The order of work: water, structure, systems, then rooms

The order we push for is unglamorous, and it keeps you from doing work twice. Water comes first: a leaking roof, failed flashing, a wet basement or gutters dumping against the foundation will ruin anything you finish inside. Structure is next, meaning sagging floors, rotted sills, undersized beams or a porch pulling away from the house. Then the systems behind the walls. Electrical and plumbing are done by licensed electricians and plumbers, as Massachusetts requires, and heating and ventilation get sorted at the same stage. Rooms and finishes come last, once the walls are not going to be opened again.

That order is not always popular. A new owner usually wants the kitchen first, and we will build a kitchen in a house with a tired roof if that is the decision. We will just put in writing that the roof is next, so nobody is surprised by a ceiling stain over new cabinets.

Insulation and air sealing fit naturally into the sequence. Once walls or ceilings are open for wiring or plumbing, it is the easiest moment to fill them properly. Many Massachusetts towns have adopted the stretch energy code, and where we open and close walls the insulation follows what that code requires.

On a house you did not grow up in, that file becomes the owner's manual the property never had.

What dated Massachusetts houses tend to hide

Older houses around here share a set of habits. Plaster on wood lath. Balloon framing with open cavities from basement to attic. Fieldstone foundations that weep every spring. Knob-and-tube wiring still live in a ceiling somewhere, and an addition framed by whoever owned the place in the seventies. Triple-deckers in the cities have their own list, starting with the porches and the rear stairs.

Houses built before 1978 may have lead paint, so renovation follows lead-safe work practices under EPA RRP. That means containment, careful surface prep and a real cleanup, with dust kept out of the rooms we are not working in. It matters even more when a family with small children is moving in soon.

We open things up early on purpose and tell you what we find. When a wall comes down and the sill under it is soft, the call happens the same day, with photos and a written change before the work goes on. A whole-property job is where hidden conditions show up most, and the way a contractor handles them is most of what you are hiring.

Inherited houses and owners who live elsewhere

Plenty of these jobs start with someone who did not plan to own the property. A parent's house, a place picked up at a quick closing, a building taken back from a tenant who left it rough. The owner may live an hour or a state away and may not know the house well at all.

In that case we spend more time on the walkthrough and the write-up, so you can make decisions from a distance with photos in front of you. If you have not yet settled on keeping, renting or selling, the ranked list gives you a clear picture of what the property needs before you commit. Vacant houses add their own checks before anything gets turned back on: plumbing that was winterized and has to be brought back carefully, a boiler that has not fired in a season, signs of mice in the walls.

If the plan turns into renting or selling, some choices in the scope change with it, mostly finishes, and we revise the list with you instead of starting over. The water, structure and systems work stays the same, since any future owner or tenant needs a sound building just as much as you do.

How a whole-property job runs day to day

You have one contact for the whole job and you know who it is from the first day. Permits are pulled through the town building department under 780 CMR, and the job follows the inspections the work calls for, typically rough framing, rough electrical and plumbing by the licensed trades, insulation, and final. Steve's unrestricted Construction Supervisor License covers the structural side on one- and two-family homes.

Changes are handled the same way every time. If we find something, or you change your mind about something, it gets written up with what it does to the price and the schedule, and nothing proceeds until you agree. Work areas are protected and the site is cleaned at the end of every day, which matters on a long job where part of the house is lived in or being shown. At the end we walk the property with you against the original list, room by room, and nothing is called finished until it is right.

We keep a running file through the job as well: photos of framing, wiring and plumbing before the walls are closed, the permit cards, and a record of what went where. On a house you did not grow up in, that file becomes the owner's manual the property never had.

See the rest of our restoration work, or browse the gallery for rooms we have finished.