2 This old house
February 2023
A 2015 pre-renovation view of our house
We loved our home even before we renovated it.
Ever since I was a kid, I always wanted to live on a hill with a view. And I had always admired this hill neighborhood on the south side of town, but rarely saw any of the houses come to market there.
We’d been living in our town for about 15 years when one day in 2002, my wife Carolyn said she wanted to go look at a house advertised in our local paper. I said, “Sure, go see it, but we’re not moving.” Did I mention that I hate to move?
Carolyn returns and says, “I’ll watch the kids, go see this property. It’s your kind of house.” And sure enough, when I came back, I said, “Let’s make an offer.”
What was there not to like? This 2,700 square foot house had so many features that our then-current house didn’t, including:
- Four upstairs bedrooms. Our old house was a modern cape, with the upstairs floor split into just two bedrooms – one for us and the other for the two boys – and a bath. While that was great when our children were small, we wanted each of our boys to have their own room.
- Two and a half baths. Our old house had two baths, but only one upstairs with the bedrooms. Two upstairs bathrooms would greatly simplify getting the family ready for work or school in the morning.
- A garage. After 15 years of parking in our driveway, shoveling snow and ice off our cars, and shivering until our car warmed up, we were excited to see that the new place had a two-car garage that would keep our car out of the elements.
- Nearly 1,100 square feet of deck. Our old house had a small deck that looked over a small back yard and a forest. Standing on either of the two mahogany decks in this new house (one off the primary bedroom), we could see for miles and miles. In fact, there was so much deck that it could serve as an additional room for entertaining in the temperate months.
We did make an offer on the house that day, persisted through a couple rounds of negotiation, and in the end, lost out to a much younger couple buying their first home. While we were crushed we had lost the auction, we submitted a back-up bid just in case the buyers backed out due to finanacing, inspections, or just cold feet.
And much to our delight, the winners of the auction did back out, and we were able to buy the house.
Since that day, we’ve made many improvements to this house we love. Many of these improvements are because our house faces due south with no trees for shade. Further, the south-facing wall of our first floor is almost entirely glass and sliding glass doors. To take advantage of and control all that delightful sunshine, we’ve added:
- Awnings to shade our deck and save on air conditioning. The cheapest way to manage our solar heat load in the summer time is to never let the sun in. We added 22-foot and 15-foot awnings over our deck to shade our glass sliders. Those allowed us to use our deck as another living space in the summertime while substantially reducing our air conditioning needs.
- Solar panels. Our south-facing exposure and near-45-degree angle roof made our house nearly ideal for solar power generation. As is visible in the photo on this posting, we added a 9.2 kW solar array to our roof back in 2013 that has long since repaid us its installation cost.
- A whole home heat pump. Because of our southern exposure, our house had a 5-ton air conditioner, which (spoiler alert) we replaced with a 5-ton Trane heat pump in 2023. This allows us to only use our oil burner when the outdoor temperature drops below 30 degrees or so, substantially reducing our carbon footprint.
- Mini-split heat pumps. Despite having a 5-ton whole home air conditioner, the house only has one zone of ducting. Over time, we added 3 Mitsubishi mini-split heat pumps for our bedrooms and den to allow us to heat and cool individual rooms without affecting the rest of the house.
- Powerwall batteries. We installed 3 Powerwall 2 batteries to store our solar power for use at night. A side benefit is that it allows us to use our solar power array when the electric grid is down. In 2023, the Powerwalls allowed the house to sail through 13 different power outages, some of which were multiple hours.
While we made a lot of improvements, the house still has many quirks and issues that could use fixing. These included:
- Poor ventilation in the kitchen and bathrooms. Cooking anything in our kitchen that generates smoke tends to set off the smoke alarms due to inadequate ventilation. Similarly, a prior renovation of the top floor bathroom allowed mold to grow on the ceiling due to its vent being located badly.
- Zigzag hallways. The hallways on the ground and 2nd floors jog back and forth instead of following a straight line. The hallway from the garage to the kitchen is particularly annoying because it makes carrying groceries into the kitchen more difficult.
- Limited kitchen storage. One of the disadvantages of our existing kitchen design is that one wall is a sliding glass door to the deck. This combined with a half-wall connecting to the dining room means that we don’t have much actual wall space for storage.
- Better bathrooms. The primary bathroom has no tub. Instead it has a 1980s Jacuzzi that leaks and a prefabricated shower. If we’re going to age in place, we need to have a curbless shower and a more traditional bathtub that we can get in and out of without fear of falling or drowning.
- Rotten windows. Time and rain have taken their toll on several of our garage and basement windows, as well as a couple of casement windows in the uppermost bedrooms. It’s really time we replaced those with new ones.
- Cracks in the walls and floors. Because our house is built on a hill, it has settled over its 35+ years. That has resulted in some cracks in the drywall plaster and in the concrete foundation. Both types really should be repaired.
- Rotted decking and trim. While we love our mahogany deck, it was not built with enough space between the mahogany boards for it to properly drain. Also some of the trim of the house has been worn down by wind and weather, allowing some of it to rot. While both problems are important, the deck is probably most pressing — we now see some of the joists have also decayed because of the poor deck installation.
- An uneven walkway to our front door. The brick walkway installed when the house was built has settled unevenly, making it dangerous for folks who don’t know where the lumps and valleys are. Also, for reasons unknown, it incorporates a railroad tie step in the middle, which gets in the way of both walking and snowblowing.
One other restriction that we haven’t mentioned is that the house uses a well for water and has its own septic system for waste. While not a problem, having a well and septic system does pose limitations in how much we can expand past the existing footprint.
With all this said, we envision our project as a renovation, not a complete rebuild of our house. But at the same time, our renovation was a pretty big one. We envision renovating our kitchen and 2 bathrooms, redesigning our primary bedroom and bathroom suite, and possibly even reconfiguring our roof. That means that we need architectural design, structural analysis, and a rigorous assessment of what’s possible and what’s not. We don’t see this as the sort of thing to leave to a general design-build contractor. Instead, we’ve decided to begin by hiring an architect to guide the design.