Home Remodeling in Mount Dora, FL

Home remodeling in Mount Dora

In most places a whole-house remodel is about making a house better. In the older parts of Mount Dora it is about making a house better without removing the reason somebody paid what they paid for it.

That is a real constraint and it is not sentimentality. The character of these houses is a substantial part of what they are worth, and a renovation that strips it out produces a house that cost a great deal and is worth less than the one that went in.

We have watched it happen. Original trim taken out because it was easier than working around it. Wood floors covered rather than restored. A hundred year old porch replaced with something square and unremarkable.

None of that was malicious. It was a crew doing what is fast, on a house where fast and right are not the same thing. So this page is mostly about where the line sits, and about the one decision people get wrong most often, which is the windows.

What to keep and what to change

The useful distinction is between what makes the house good and what makes it dated, and they are not the same list even though they arrived in the same decade.

Keep: the floors, the trim and casings, the doors and their hardware, the stair, the porch, the windows in most cases, the proportions of the rooms and anything visible from the street.

Change without hesitation: the kitchen, the bathrooms, the electrical, the plumbing, the insulation, the mechanical system and the lighting. None of those are what anybody values about the house, and all of them are what makes it hard to live in.

The genuinely difficult category is layout, because opening up an old house is what most people want and it is where the character lives. A hundred year old house has small defined rooms because that is what it is, and removing all the walls produces a large space that no longer reads as an old house at all.

Our position is that one considered opening usually gets most of what people want. Kitchen to dining, or dining to living, with a proper cased opening rather than a raw hole. Three walls gone gets you a different building.

The windows, which people get wrong

Replacing original windows is one of the first things proposed on a house like this and it is frequently the wrong decision on three separate grounds.

The first is that in the historic district it may not be permitted, because windows are among the most visible original features and they are exactly what district review exists to protect. That is worth establishing before anybody is sold anything.

The second is that the original windows are often better made than what would replace them. Old growth wood, individually repairable, with a sash that can be rebuilt piece by piece. A modern replacement unit is a sealed assembly with a service life, and when it fails it is replaced rather than repaired.

The third is that the energy argument is weaker than the sales pitch. Most of the loss in an old house is air leakage and an uninsulated roof, not the glass. A restored original window, properly weatherstripped, with a well-fitted storm window over it, performs far closer to a replacement unit than anyone expects and costs less.

Where a window is genuinely beyond repair, replacing that one is reasonable. Replacing all of them because a salesman produced a payback calculation is how a house loses a great deal of what made it worth buying.

What actually makes an old house comfortable

If the goal is a house that is pleasant in August and cheap to run, the money goes in a specific order and it is not the order people expect.

Air sealing first. Old houses leak, and they leak in a small number of large places: the attic hatch, around the chimney, where pipes and wires pass through the ceiling, and at the top of interior walls. Sealing those is inexpensive and it is the single highest return item available.

Attic insulation second. Heat comes into a Florida house through the roof more than through anything else, and an old house frequently has very little up there. This is cheap, fast and transformative.

Ductwork third. A system leaking into a hot attic is losing conditioned air into the one place that does not need it, and in old houses the ducts were often added long after the house and run wherever there was room.

Wall insulation fourth, and only where walls are open anyway. Filling a closed wall in an old house is possible and is not always advisable, because a wall assembly that was designed to dry out in both directions behaves differently once it is full.

Windows last, which is where the industry puts them first.

What is under the floor

Houses of this age sit on piers over a crawl space, and that space is where a whole-house project either finds its surprises or does not.

The framing under a bathroom or a kitchen is frequently notched or drilled from decades of plumbing added after the fact, and a floor that has always been springy in one place is usually telling you exactly that.

Moisture is the other item. A crawl space with poor drainage or no vapour barrier puts humidity into the floor structure continuously, and in this climate that is a slow problem that eventually becomes an expensive one.

Both are fixable and both are far cheaper addressed during a whole-house project than as their own job, because access is already paid for.

We get under the house at the walkthrough where there is access. Quoting an old house without doing that is quoting a guess.

Wiring that predates the way we live

The electrical system is where an old house is furthest from current expectations and it is not negotiable in a whole-house project.

A house of this age may have circuits without a ground, a panel that is full or of a type that no longer accepts breakers, and wiring that has been extended repeatedly by different people over decades.

Bringing it current across the house at once costs far less than doing it in four separate projects that each open walls again, and in a plaster house opening walls is the expensive part rather than the wire.

The good news is that a whole-house rewire in a house with a crawl space and an accessible attic is considerably less invasive than people fear, because much of the routing happens above and below rather than through finished walls.

Where original walls are staying, the routes get planned before anything is opened rather than found by cutting.

Plaster, and why we would rather keep it

Walls in these houses are plaster over wood lath, and the instinct of most crews is to take it out because drywall is faster.

Plaster in good condition is a better wall than what would replace it. It is harder, it deadens sound in a way drywall does not, and it is part of why the rooms feel the way they do.

Cracking is not the same as failure. Hairline cracks in plaster are normal in a house that has moved for a century, and they are repairable. Plaster that has lost its key to the lath and moves when you press it is a different matter and that section needs to come out.

Where a wall has to be opened for wiring or plumbing, opening a channel and patching is often better than removing the whole wall, and a good plasterer can make that invisible.

It is slower and it costs more in labour than sheeting the room in drywall. It is also the difference between a renovated old house and a new house inside an old shell.

The kitchen and bathrooms, where modern is fine

This is where we would spend without agonising, because nobody buys a house like this for its 1978 kitchen.

The only real constraint is that the room should not fight the house. Simple materials used plainly, cabinetry with a flat or simple profile rather than an ornate reproduction, and a floor that suits the era.

The failure mode to avoid is the full period reproduction, which is expensive, reads as a costume, and dates faster than a plain choice. A restrained modern kitchen in an old house looks intentional. A pastiche looks like a decision that was made too hard.

Behind the surfaces there is no period virtue whatsoever. Current waterproofing, current valves, a properly sized fan ducted outside, and modern electrical. Nobody will know and everybody will benefit.

Where the kitchen is in the wrong place entirely, which in these houses it sometimes is because it was the servant end of the plan, moving it is a large decision and occasionally the right one.

The historic district, practically

For a property in the district, the building permit and the design review are two separate things and they run on different clocks.

Interior work is generally outside the review entirely, which is more latitude than people expect. Kitchens, bathrooms, systems, insulation and layout inside the envelope are your business.

What is in scope is the outside. Windows and doors, the porch, roofing material, exterior colour, anything that changes the massing, and additions.

The practical consequence is scheduling rather than restriction. An exterior element needing approval belongs in the plan at week one, not discovered at the point the crew is ready to do it.

We raise it at the estimate and we would rather design something that will be approved than submit something that will not and lose two months.

Additions to a house that has a shape

Where the household needs more room, adding to an old house is achievable and the design question is harder than the construction one.

The two approaches that work are the deferential addition, which is subordinate to the original and clearly reads as later, and the frankly modern one, which does not pretend and is separated from the original by a clear junction.

What does not work is the imitation. Trying to match the original exactly in materials that are no longer made produces something that is almost right, and almost right is worse than deliberately different.

Position matters more than style. An addition off the back that leaves the street elevation untouched is a far easier proposition in every sense than one that changes what the house looks like from the road.

And on these lots, setbacks and mature trees are usually the real constraint rather than the design guidelines.

The porch, which is the face of the house

The porch on a house of this era is not a feature attached to the front. It is a substantial part of what the house is, and it is also the element most exposed to weather and therefore most likely to need real work.

The failure is almost always at the bottom rather than the top. Column bases sitting on a deck that holds water, posts where the end grain has been wicking moisture for decades, and floor framing at the outer edge where every storm for a century has landed.

Almost all of it is repairable in place. A column with a rotten base can have that section replaced rather than the whole column. Porch decking can be replaced in kind. Balustrade can be rebuilt to match with the original as the pattern.

The instinct to replace the whole thing with something maintenance free is understandable and it is where a great deal of value gets lost, because a synthetic porch on an old house is visible from the street and reads immediately as wrong to exactly the buyers who would pay most for the house.

What genuinely helps is drainage and detailing rather than material. Getting water away from the base of the columns, keeping the deck sloped so it sheds, and making sure nothing sits in standing water is what determines whether the repair lasts thirty years or eight.

Storage in a house built before closets

Old houses are consistently short on storage, and it is one of the most common practical complaints from people who otherwise love them.

Bedrooms often have a single shallow closet or none at all, there is rarely anything at the entry, and the kitchen was built when a household owned a fraction of what one owns now.

The good answer is not to carve closets out of every room, because the room proportions are part of what makes the house good and each closet takes a bite out of them.

What works better is using the spaces that are already unused. Under the stair is usually dead volume. The area beneath a window seat, the depth in a thick wall, and the space that exists between studs for anything shallow are all storage that costs nothing in floor area.

Freestanding furniture is also a legitimate answer in a house like this rather than a compromise, because it is what these rooms were designed around, and a good wardrobe in a bedroom reads correctly where a built-in often does not.

Where a built-in is right, making it look original is a matter of matching the trim profiles and the paint rather than of buying a period-styled product, and a joiner working from the existing casings will get closer than any catalogue.

Pricing a house that has secrets

An old house cannot be quoted to the dollar before it is opened, and there are two honest ways to handle that plus one that is not.

The dishonest one is a low fixed number recovered through change orders once you have no leverage. It is common and it is why people approach this nervously.

The first honest way is a fixed price with a large contingency inside it. Safe, and you pay for uncertainty whether or not it materialises.

The second is a base price with named allowances against the unknowns. So much floor framing repair included with a stated rate beyond it. A stated assumption about the panel and what changes if it is worse. A quantity of plaster repair with a rate per additional area.

We prefer the second and write the assumptions down, which means you can see what a discovery costs before it happens, and when we open things up and everything is sound, that money stays yours.

Living in it, or not

A whole-house project on a house of this age is dustier than a modern one, because plaster demolition and crawl space work produce more of it and old houses have more paths for it to travel.

Where the household stays, containment has to be real containment with sealed openings, and the sequence has to keep a kitchen, a bathroom and somewhere to sleep working at all times.

Protecting original floors outside the work area is not optional. These boards are not replaceable in kind and damage to them is a loss rather than a repair.

Where the scope is large, moving out for a period frequently costs less than the phasing premium and produces a better result, and we will say so when we think you are past that line.

What a walkthrough covers

An old house walkthrough is a survey and it takes time.

Under the house where there is access, to look at the framing and the crawl space condition. Into the attic, for the framing direction, the insulation and the ductwork. The panel and what the circuits actually are. The plaster, wall by wall, for what is sound and what has let go.

Outside, the roof geometry, the porch structure and the condition of the windows, sash by sash, because that decides the single largest argument in the project.

Then a conversation about what you love about the house, which is not a soft question. It is the one that tells us where the line goes between what changes and what does not.

Why choose a contractor comfortable with old houses

Old houses reward patience and punish assumption. The sequence depends on what gets found, the work is slower, and the difference between a good result and an expensive one is mostly what gets discovered before it becomes a problem.

Twenty-two years on the job means enough crawl spaces and enough plaster to know what these houses do and where they hide it.

We would also rather talk you out of replacing thirty original windows and put the money into air sealing, the attic and the ductwork, which is a smaller invoice and a warmer house. That is the advice worth paying for.

If you have an older Mount Dora house and are trying to work out what should change and what must not, that is exactly the conversation to have first.