Somerville triple-deckers and two-families, rebuilt right

City housing with a century of layers

About 80,500 people live on roughly four square miles in Somerville, according to census figures, packing it tighter than almost anywhere else in Greater Boston. The median home was built in 1938. Most of the housing is two-families and triple-deckers, many of them on narrow lots with rear porches and only a few feet of side yard. A triple-decker stacks three nearly identical flats, one per floor, which makes it easier to plan than it looks: what works on one floor usually works on the next.

Buildings that old have been worked on many times, and not always well. Expect plaster and lath under newer drywall, balloon framing, sagging floors where a previous owner notched a joist for a drain, knob-and-tube wiring that is abandoned or still live, and lead paint on nearly every original surface. Each unit can carry a different decade of repairs.

Foundations are worth a look too. Many buildings this age sit on fieldstone or brick, with basements that were never meant to be finished and that hold the building's shared mechanicals. Before we plan a laundry, storage or utility work down there, we check headroom, water and what the foundation itself is doing. In a two-family the basement is often shared, so work there gets agreed with everyone who uses it.

Either way you get the written scope before work begins and an honest answer about what an old building may add once it is open.

Working in a building with neighbors above and below

About two out of three Somerville homes are rented. A lot of the work is for owners who live in one unit and rent the others, and for landlords preparing a unit between tenants. Kitchens and baths are the core of it, and in a stacked building the plumbing for those rooms usually runs through the floors of the units above and below.

That changes how a job is planned. Walls and floors between units carry fire separation requirements, so whatever comes out goes back to code, and the building department will look. Licensed plumbers and electricians handle their trades, and we coordinate shutoffs so the other occupants are not surprised by a morning without water. Sound is the other concern, so new floors over a downstairs neighbor get underlayment chosen with that in mind.

Rear porches are their own category. On many triple-deckers they are structural, they serve as a way out for the upper floors, and they take freeze-thaw and weather every year. Rebuilding one is framing work done to the building code, not a carpentry touch-up. Stairs, guards and decking all get looked at, not only the boards that show.

Staging a job on a crowded street

Somerville is about 32 miles north of Raynham, but in a city the distance that matters is the last block. Materials arrive on a schedule instead of sitting on the sidewalk, and debris goes out the same day it is created whenever possible. With rarely a driveway to use, deliveries and debris removal are worked out before the first day, not on it.

Owners and landlords get the same process: a walkthrough of the unit, a written scope that spells out what is ours and what belongs to the licensed trades, and updates when the building shows us something new. Tenants who stay in the building find the stairs and halls protected and swept at the end of the day.

For owners who live in the building, the job is usually phased one unit or one floor at a time, so there is always somewhere to live. For landlords, the schedule works backward from the move-in date. Either way you get the written scope before work begins and an honest answer about what an old building may add once it is open.