Kitchen remodeling in West Boylston, MA

The houses this is written for

The stock here is late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century houses on the rebuilt village streets, a strong band of mid-century ranches and capes, and newer construction toward the town edges.

Absorbing the pantry into the kitchen

A West Boylston village kitchen from the turn of the last century is a small back room with a yard door and a pantry off one side. The pantry has the shelving, the kitchen has the stove and a sink under the window. Take out the wall between them and you gain a full run of counter and a fridge spot that is not a doorway.

That wall is often a partition rather than bearing, but not always, and in a house altered several times the framing follows no rule. We open a small section of plaster, look at what is above and below, and then decide. If it is carrying the floor above, the header is modest because the span is short and the load is light.

Check the sills before you spend on cabinets

This is the West Boylston rule. The village houses sit on fieldstone or early poured foundations, and a century of gutters dumping against the base of the wall and grade sloping toward the house has rotted sills and rims on a lot of them. The kitchen is at the back, where the grade is usually worst. We check the base of that wall before anything else.

If the sill is soft, it gets repaired before the cabinets go in. Levelling a floor and hanging cabinets over a sill that is still moving is throwing money away. The repair is real carpentry, jacking and replacing, but it is done once and the kitchen above it stays square. We price it from what we find, not from a guess.

Where the pipes and wires run in a village house

The waste line from a village kitchen usually drops straight through the floor to the basement and runs to the street, and in the older houses it may still be the original pipe. We inspect it before connecting new fixtures. Municipal water serves most of the developed town, so pressure is rarely an issue and a dishwasher needs no treatment first.

On the outskirts, houses are on septic and sometimes on a well. There, a disposal is left out because a Title 5 system does not want food waste, and we check pressure before specifying appliances. The panel in a village house has usually been replaced at least once, but a modern kitchen still adds several circuits, so we count the spaces early.

The mid-century band and the newer edges

West Boylston also has a strong run of ranches and capes from the middle of the last century. Their kitchens are the closed galley type, and the job there is opening a wall to the living space, which in a ranch means a bearing wall and a proper header across the span. The pantry problem does not exist in these houses; the wall problem does.

Toward the edges of town the construction is newer and the kitchen is already open, usually with an island. The work there is surfaces, lighting and a better layout in the same space. The range hood in every case is vented outside through an exterior wall with rigid duct and a damper. We do not recirculate a hood into a kitchen we just rebuilt.

Staging on a close-set village street

The rebuilt village streets are tight. Side yards are modest, driveways are short and the neighbour is near. A dumpster and a cabinet delivery need a plan, and we make it before day one so the street stays passable and the neighbours are not surprised. Away from the centre there is room for everything and staging is not a topic.

Our order of work is written scope, demolition, sill and structural repair if needed, rough plumbing and electrical, inspection, then insulation, drywall, cabinets, counters, tile, trim and paint. If an upstairs bath is on the list too, both rooms get planned together as one job, because in these houses the bath is almost always directly over the kitchen and shares its plumbing run.

Questions we get asked about West Boylston