Before The Remodeling Started

This is the beginning of a project we did a while back for a family in Medway, Ma. We had a lot of fun doing it, these customers could not have been more friendly or courteous and at the end of it they had a beautiful new kitchen and dining room that provided everything they had been wanting.

When you look at the picture of the original area to be remodeled above, you will see the dining room on the right and the kitchen on the left. There is also a sunroom that you will notice through the dining room (we did some work in the sunroom as well, but that’s for another time). Now, of course, in this picture you can’t really see the kitchen. All that you can see is the doorway on the left, that enters into the kitchen, and the doorway on the left side of the dining room, which also enters into the kitchen. That was one of the main things that this customer was hoping to change about their kitchen/dining room area, to open it up to the other adjacent common areas of the house, i.e. the living room and sunroom.

We would achieve this openness by removing the walls around the kitchen and replacing the one load bearing wall with a post and beam setup that would span half the length of the house. I love these kinds of projects! In addition they wanted as much as of a cathedral ceiling as was possible inside of the affected area. Can do.

We achieved the cathedral ceiling by removing the existing ceiling joists and installing new rafters that went from the new beam to the midpoint of the existing roof rafters. Although we did have to add additional support to the existing undersized rafters, we still got our proper insulation r-value by using foam board insulation in layers. Creative engineering indeed. My design engineer earned his money on this one, and we got it done right and tight!

Another highlight was a brand new rounded-top Andersen picture window that we installed. The rounded-top was fitted with beautiful custom stained glass. You don’t have to wait for me to talk about them to see more pictures of this job. Visit the gallery for this project here. It also has pictures that I won’t necessarily be discussing specifically in an article, enjoy.

Up next: demo is done, framing is done.