Luxury Home Remodeling

What a floor-wide remodel in a finished house involves

Most of the owners who call us for this kind of work are not living in a dated house. The kitchen was done some years ago, the baths are fine, the floors are good. What has changed is how the family uses the place: a formal living room nobody sits in, a den too small for the people who gather there, a primary suite that never got the closet or the bath it needed. The fix is not one room. It is a floor, or a wing, rethought so the rooms work together.

That usually means moving or removing walls, reworking doorways and sight lines, relocating a bath or a laundry, and then finishing every affected room to one level so the new work does not make the untouched rooms look tired. It is a different job from whole-home remodeling of a house that needs everything, and different again from a paint-and-floors refresh. The planning is heavier because the house is already good and there is a lot to protect.

We start with a walkthrough of the whole floor, not only the rooms you want changed. Steve looks at what sits above and below the work, where the plumbing stacks and ductwork run, which walls carry load, and what the existing trim, flooring and ceilings are made of. You get a written scope that says what is being built, what is being matched and what is being protected.

Moving walls in a house that is already finished

Opening up a finished house is a structural question first and a design question second. If a wall carries the floor or the roof above it, we will tell you before anyone swings a hammer, and the opening gets a beam sized by an engineer and posts that carry the load down to the foundation. In older Massachusetts houses that load path is not always obvious. Balloon framing, past renovations and a fieldstone foundation can each change the answer.

Walls also carry things. Heating runs, plumbing vents, wiring and low-voltage cable all have to go somewhere when the wall goes away, and rerouting them is where an open plan quietly gets more involved. We find out before the price is final by opening small inspection holes where it matters, so the number you sign reflects the house you actually have rather than the one on paper.

Structural work is permitted through your town's building department under the Massachusetts State Building Code, 780 CMR, with inspections at rough framing, at rough electrical and plumbing by the licensed trades, at insulation and at final. Steve holds an unrestricted Massachusetts Construction Supervisor License, the license that covers supervising structural work on one- and two-family homes.

We put those on the calendar early so you can plan around them instead of finding out that morning.

Keeping the family in the house during the work

Remodeling a wing while people sleep, cook and work in the rest of the house takes as much planning as the construction. Before demolition we agree on which entrance the crew uses, which rooms are closed off, where materials are staged and which hours stay quiet. Dust walls with zipper doors go up between the work and the living space, and the heating and cooling returns in the work zone are sealed so dust does not ride the ductwork into the bedrooms.

Floors, stairs and banisters on the path in and out are covered and stay covered. The site is cleaned at the end of every day, not swept into a corner for Friday. If the house was built before 1978 there may be lead paint in the walls we open, and that work follows lead-safe practices under the EPA renovation rule, with containment and cleanup to match.

A few days are hard to live through, usually the ones when water or power to that floor is off. We put those on the calendar early so you can plan around them instead of finding out that morning.

Holding one finish standard across every room

The hardest part of a high-level remodel is consistency. When three rooms are new and two are original, the eye goes straight to the seam: a casing profile that is almost right, a hardwood stain a shade off, a ceiling that is flat in one room and wavy in the next. We decide at the start which existing details are being matched and which are being replaced throughout, and we write that into the scope.

Matching usually means having trim milled to the original profile, weaving new hardwood into the old so there is no threshold line, and skim-coating plaster so new and old walls take light the same way. Where the house deserves it, we carry the new standard into the untouched rooms as well, so the floor reads as one house rather than a renovated half and an original half. That choice is yours, and we lay out what each option involves before you make it.

Ceilings and lighting get the same treatment. If one room gets recessed lighting and a flat skim-coated ceiling, the hallway that connects it usually needs the same, or the change in quality is obvious the moment you walk between them. Door hardware, outlet covers and heating registers are small things, but replacing them through the whole floor at once is often what makes the work read as finished rather than patched.

Who you hear from and when

Steve started this company after years of working for guys that lacked communication, and this is the kind of job where that matters most. You know who is on site each day and what they are doing. When the walls are open and something turns up, like old wiring, a rotted sill or a joist someone notched decades ago, you hear about it that day with photos and a plain explanation of the options.

Changes are written down and priced before the work happens, never added to the bill afterward. If something is not right, it gets fixed before we move on. One customer put it simply: "If its not right; Steve wont put his name on it!"

Before work starts you get a sequence for the whole floor showing which rooms are worked on in which order and roughly when each one comes back into use. When that sequence has to change, because a delivery is late or an inspection moves, you hear why and what it means for the rooms you are living in.

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