Remodeling Homes of a Certain Age

I recently ran across this article detailing the amazing restoration of the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Boynton House in Rochester, NY. In the interview for PBS, homeowner Fran Cosentino said, “You wouldn’t expect to drive a 100-year-old car on the road without a complete overhaul. The same is true for a 100-year-old house.”

This sentiment rings true for us every day.

Homes of a certain age simply have complicated interrelated issues and problems. And sometimes, those problems have been covered up, their solutions put off for a very long time. The homeowners know that a proper fix will be a major undertaking, and they often just don’t know where or when to start.

You may already be following our progress on a beautiful 19th-century Italianate-style Fairmount-area house project. We were called in to restore a storm-damaged cupola bay and attend to a series of other complicated and interrelated projects throughout the home. In order to obtain the exact information we needed to provide for permitting, zoning, and Historic Burueau approvals, our work began with peeling off the layers to uncover all of the original elements. We found that, at some point, the beautiful delicate cupola/bay had been turned into a vinyl-sided box, and the multi-pane clerestory windows were covered with aluminum. The curved panels of the roof had also been tar papered and tarred over many times. And this is just a small sampling of the kinds of issues with which the homeowners had been contending. When restored, the finished cupola/bay will appear as depicted in the rendering shown here, very much in line with its original design about the Swiss replica watches.

Diane Menke
VP & Production Mgr.