Families grow and change, trends come and go, and there are millions of reasons why people remodel their homes.  Over the years our homeowners have asked us to help them renovate their homes and frequently we are approached by their neighbors asking for help.  With 30 years in the designing and building business we understand the process and we have the experience to make it as painless as possible for our homeowners. 

I would like to share with you a project that we did.  The homeowners called us because they watched us build a casita for their next door neighbor.  Their original home was built by another builder and was 8 years old.  When their third baby was born the house was definitely too small; especially since one of the grandmother’s was going to move here and live with them to help with the children.  The project consisted of building a new casita for the grandmother and expanding the master bedroom.  The casita was pretty straight forward.  It consisted of a new freestanding building with a bedroom, living area, small kitchen & bath that would match the exterior of the original home; appearing to have been part of the original construction.  Since the grandmother would be living there 9 months out of the year it was essential that it truly be a home for her and that she have her personal stamp on it.  Our design teams worked with the both client and the grandmother.  We were able to accommodate the needs of the grandmother and the meet the client’s budget.

The master bedroom expansion was more complicated since we would be doing some demolition to the existing home, then tying in the new structure to the existing house in a seamless fashion while the family occupied the home.  The original master bedroom was very small and also had a laughably small master closet.  We reconfigured the existing space to accommodate a second much larger closet and added new additional space to the master bedroom creating the spaciousness that it lacked. We accomplished this by taking the new portion through framing before actually doing the demolition needed to give us access to the existing construction to tie into the new building.  This meant that the family was not displaced for the entire project but only a small portion of it.  We provided a company to move and store the furniture for them.  They essentially camped out in the other 2 bedrooms for only 4 weeks of construction.  Of course the children loved this part of it.

We worked with them on the design, selections and handled all of the meetings with neighborhood design review committee.  While the plans were at the city for permits we coordinated the schedule with the family.  First we built a dog run to keep their dog out of harm’s way and a separate safe play area for their toddlers.  Then we provided a fenced access to the back yard for the construction subcontractors.  We started the casita first and two months later we started the new addition space and a month after that we were ready to tie the new addition space to the existing home.  Another five weeks the backyard was restored and they were enjoying their newly renovated home.