The Queen Anne

Where to begin with this renovation? If I could pick one house that I've always wanted to work on, it would be definitely be this one. This home sat vacant and neglected for approximately 15 years after the last owners moved out.  During those years of vacancy, the front porch had slowly but surely started to fall in and the back middle portion of the house had an enormous hole in the roof causing everything below to come to ruins. However, you couldn't actually see any of that damage from the street because of the overgrown yard so it became a bit of an eyesore. After years of vacancy, the owners sold the house to a young couple who had hoped to renovate the house to live in themselves. Proving to be a bit more of a challenge than they expected, a year later they were ready to sell and I was first in line despite everyone thinking I was crazy. They should already know I am.

The renovation took us almost nine months to complete and was in the worst shape of any home I had worked on previously.   Picking up where the young couple left off, we moved forward with the open concept for the kitchen and dining room but were able to rework the space to incorporate a walk-in pantry.  In the middle of the home we took part of a very large third bedroom and were able to carve out a spacious guest bathroom and an entry way to the master suite which also got reworked.  The back are that had so much damage from the hole in the roof had to be completely gutted down to a new floor joist system so we reworked that space too to get a private master bathroom and closet and a small laundry room.  The remaining rooms in the house stayed in tact in terms of floor plans and we were able to save much of the trim and plaster walls.  The entire house received new plumbing, electrical, HVAC, paint, and refinished hardwood floors and a few rooms were painted dark rich tones to add a little drama.  And speaking of drama, after the exterior landscape was cleared and repairs were made to the exterior including essentially rebuilding the front porch, the exterior was painted black with white trim and a soft shade of pink for the doors.  Like I said, drama, but in the best way possible.

While this renovation was one of the hardest, it's also the most memorable.  The opportunity to restore a charming  and somewhat majestic historic home like this doesn't come along that often and I took that responsibility to heart.  We restored as any original details as possible and with the new spaces we created, we worked hard to honor the time period in which this beauty was built.  It is always bittersweet saying goodbye to a house my team and I put our hearts and souls into but it's also incredibly rewarding to pass it along to the new owners so that they can make it their own.  It was a preservation opportunity of a lifetime.