Home Renovation

Services Provided: Curran Consulting was approached by a developer that we’ve had a long standing relationship with to redesign this home. This house was originally built for the owner in 1990 and he wanted to make some design modifications for his family. It was currently a two bed room home and he wanted to make it a three bedroom home with a live-in-law suite. Basically, he wanted to add a two car garage off of the left side of the house in place of the one in the basement, add a large farmer’s porch, add a second floor, replace all of the windows, and open up the main floor of the house. It wasn’t just your basic renovation job, instead it was a complete overhaul. The only three things expected to remain were the foundation, the first floor framing with sub-floor, and the main entrance. The owner had supplied a sketch with dimensions of what he hoped to achieve in the new design of his home. Unfortunately, it did not work very well and presented too many changes that they did not want. As an alternative, I chose to develop a few layouts of my own while still keeping the flavor of what the owner was looking for. After two minor revision, the home owner was really jazzed about the new look of his home.

During the early design phase of this project, it was determined that the rear yard had been (or was) wetlands. This added a whole new dimension to the project. When researching the original records at the town hall, it was discovered that there were restrictions imposed on the construction of the house because of wetlands located along the rear of the site. At that point, we had to create a new site plan and outline what we proposed to do with the existing house and handed it over to an engineer for review. It was the engineers position that the wetlands had actually dried up an were no longer an issue. So, he took the site plan created by Curran Consulting and filed it with the town to be presented at the next public meeting for discussion. It was at that meeting that the town agreed with the findings of the engineer and no restrictions relating to wetlands will be considered during the permit application stage of this process. All in all, the owner, the builder, and I were grateful that we no longer had to contend with those issues. After some preliminary pricing and a few more price related design adjustments, this house is scheduled to be built in the spring of 2002.