Ten thousand gallons went through this house before anybody knew.
An 1844 mansion in Trevorton, six months of work, and one change order in the whole job. The owners live in California. Keeping what makes the house worth owning was the entire point.
Sandy grew up in Trevorton. She and her husband live in California now and come back a few times a year to see family and friends, which is why the house was empty over the winter of 2023 when a radiator pipe let go upstairs.
Nobody was there to hear it. By the time a water bill turned up, more than ten thousand gallons had gone through the second floor, through the first floor, and into the basement.
Two contractors looked at it before we did. One of them sent the owners to Lowe’s to pick out materials. Neither ever came back with a price.
We gave them a firm number. They paid that number.
One change order in six months.
That change order was rotten framing in the roof over a porch — genuinely not visible until it was opened up. Everything else that turned up was already accounted for.
And plenty turned up. The house had been flipped a few years earlier, and the flip showed. A shower that leaked. Plumbing that wasn’t to code. Drywall fastened to furring strips that were screwed into loose plaster instead of into anything structural — you could move the whole wall with your hand.
The worst of it was a countertop that was caving in. When the cabinets came out, the floor structure underneath was rotted through and had to be reframed.
On a lot of jobs that is a phone call and a change order. Here it came out of the contingency line item that had been in the estimate from the first day.
What we kept.
It mattered to them that the house still be the house. So the original plaster was skim coated rather than torn out, and the new electric and plumbing were routed to disturb as little as possible on the way through. The original trim, the doors and the hardwood floors stayed.
The staircase and handrail were protected and preserved. In a house this old that is the one thing you cannot buy back.
We left sections of the old brick exposed where it had something to say.
And in the master suite we decided not to take out two walls. Opening it up would have been easy, and modern, and wrong — the bedroom, the bathroom and the closet were meant to be separate rooms, and they still are.
And what we added.
New electric, new plumbing, new windows throughout. Upstairs the walls were rearranged to make a large second bathroom and a laundry, and a proper master suite. Freestanding tubs, quartz counters, a curbless shower.
A house this old doesn’t need to be a museum. It needs to work.
The paint.
Two painting crews came off this job — one for schedule, one for quality.
I finished it myself, on my hands and knees, over about two weeks. It cost close to ten thousand dollars on top of my own labor. That was mine to eat, not theirs.
The owners were three thousand miles away the whole time. They saw the house for the first time in May.
“We are extremely happy with the work that Mike and his crew did at our house. We don’t live in the house, so the leaks weren’t discovered until over 10,000 gallons of water had gone from the upstairs through the first floor and into the basement. The house was built in 1844, so there were challenges for Mike. We were impressed with Mike from our first meeting. We got to see the house in May and were very pleased with the final results.”
Let’s see if this makes sense.
Fifteen minutes on the phone. You’ll have a realistic range before we hang up — and if we’re not the right people for it, I’ll tell you.