Kitchen remodeling in Tewksbury, MA

The houses this is written for

The stock here is a large post-war body of capes, ranches and splits, older housing near the centre, and continuing newer development.

Why the post-war kitchen feels smaller than it is

Capes and ranches went up here quickly and in volume, and their kitchens were laid out for a stove, a sink, an icebox and a small table. The room is not really tiny; it is chopped up. A door to the hall, a door to the dining room, a door down to the cellar and a door to the back yard leave four short walls and nothing continuous to work with.

Splits take the same square footage and stack it, with the kitchen half a level up and frequently open to a dining area already. The gain there is flow rather than floor area, and the opportunity is usually the half-wall or the railing between the levels. The older housing near the centre predates all of it and behaves more like a period house, with smaller rooms and framing you can assume nothing about.

What the last owner already did to the house

This town has a great many houses at the same stage of life that have already been worked on once, sometimes twice, and not always by a contractor. Rear additions, enclosed porches, finished cellars, and kitchens partly redone in an earlier decade. That history is the recurring variable on these jobs. It is why we go through the permitting record before pricing anything that will sit on top of it.

What we are looking for is plain enough. Whether the beam carrying an addition is sized and properly supported. Whether a circuit added for a peninsula is on its own breaker or spliced into a bedroom. Whether a wall came out with nothing put back above it. None of it is unusual and nearly all of it is fixable. It just has to surface at the start, not on the third day of demolition.

Opening the wall between the kitchen and the rest of the floor

In a ranch the wall people want gone often sits under the main carrying beam or runs across the ceiling joists at mid-span. In a cape it may be holding up the floor of the bedrooms above. Either way the answer is a header with posts, and those posts have to land on something that carries down to a footing instead of stopping at the subfloor and hoping.

The other tenants of that wall are the heat and the wiring. Forced hot air in these houses is commonly ducted straight through the partition an owner wants opened, and those ducts have to be re-routed or reshaped, never squashed flat to fit. We map the wall first, structure, duct, wire and pipe together, so the opening we describe on paper is the opening that actually gets built.

Water, waste and sewer in a house of this age

Municipal services cover most of the town, which takes the well and septic questions off the table and makes a kitchen easier to plan. A dishwasher gets steady pressure, a disposal is an ordinary option rather than a debate, and a second sink becomes a plumbing decision instead of a capacity one. On the outlying parcels still running on septic the answer changes, and we handle the disposal question differently there.

The waste side is where the years show. The original kitchen drain usually ties into a cast iron stack shared with the bathroom overhead, and after five or six decades those fittings do not enjoy being disturbed. When a sink wall moves, we plan on replacing that branch back to a sound connection rather than coupling new plastic onto something already thin enough to fail on its own.

The panel, the circuits and the hood duct

A kitchen puts more load on a house than any other room. Dedicated circuits for the range, the dishwasher, the microwave and the refrigerator, plus small-appliance circuits over the counters with the protection current work requires. A panel that suited a toaster and a radio usually is not enough now, and where an earlier renovation has filled the spaces with tandem breakers, the panel becomes part of the scope.

The hood is vented outside through an exterior wall, in smooth duct with a proper exterior cap. In a ranch that run is short and simple. In a cape with the range against an interior partition, the appliance placement generally has to follow the duct rather than the other way round, and it is far better to settle that on paper than halfway through framing.

How the job runs on a Tewksbury street

Design and scope come first, with the history of the house checked and the likely surprises carried as written allowances rather than buried. Then demolition, structural work, rough plumbing and electrical, and the rough inspection before anything is closed in. Insulation, board, cabinets, counters, tile, trim, paint, appliances at the end. Cabinets get ordered once the framing has been measured, which is what keeps the back half of a kitchen on schedule.

Site access here is easy. Driveways are short, streets are open, and a container and a delivery truck both fit without much planning. That means the disruption stays inside the house, and we manage it the ordinary way: dust walls at the openings, a temporary sink and refrigerator set up somewhere workable, and the work area swept out before we leave each afternoon.

Questions we get asked about Tewksbury