John Webb provides us with a complete overview of a recent Modern Home and Kitchen Remodel that he had a great time working on. John has been a modern home designer for over 30 years and this 1970’s A-Frame needed to get the John Webb upgrade.

“It was a difficult house on where to start and where to stop. Even though we were really only dealing with the inside. Even on the Third Floor we opened the loft up, which was just a storage space with ta very steep staircase. We couldn’t mess with the staircases just because we couldn’t bring them into today’s code standards. But, we put nice rails and extended pony walls so they were at code so people wouldn’t fall, so children wouldn’t fall off of them and down the stairs.

And, we got heat and cooling to all the floors. All of the floors have heating and cooling. Before, I think just the two living rooms had heating. So now we have it redesigned so it’s all zoned, each floor and all the bedrooms are on their own with heat pumps, for air and heat.

It all turned out beautifully how everything seamlessly came together. Coming back down to where do you stop snd where do you start it in a house like this. We ended up going on the outside. You know, the siding is fifty years old. And it’s cedar so most of it is good so we patched a lot of it in. We put a roof over part of it so it wouldn’t leak.

Soffits you could see different things on the bottom, we used tongue and groove so we got it looking like it always belonged there. And we touched up the house. Some day when he recovers from all of this he’ll have the whole house painted and caulked up. It looks good as it stands.

Even so, the client wanted, out on the deck where it’s open and water is always flowing though it, we created a fake ceiling on the bottom floor out of corrugated colored tin and detoured the water to a big gutter we designed in there. Then he poured concrete al the way around underneath it. For the first time this place has a porch downstairs can have furniture put on it and not get rained on. All the way around the house it’s all connected now.

Basically everything is brand new in this house. From doors to light fixtures upgraded to LED, all the electrical – not all of it, but a majority of it has been replaced. And the plumbing – all the basic lines were done but all the connections to all the new plumbing fixtures is all brand new.

So, we touched all the parts that were important. As expensive as the house was, we really did save quite a bit of money by not starting over. The clients are in a good spot, you know tax purpose wise, starting over you would be in a whole new tax basis. So you would have had a lot more taxes to pay.

They did really well. Just for the future they did really well, they bought the house at a reasonable price in the beginning. It appraised for quite a bit more – probably double – than what it cost in the first place. So, they’re at the original tax basis with some repairs done on it. So, they’ll have some savings for a lot of years because they chose to remodel.

It’s funny – we’re don with it now – every detail from the door hardware to the cabinet hardware to the handrail that goes upstairs, it’s all been custom fit and made and put together. You know we glued stuff up and made it from parts we tore out of the house. Originally if they were solid wood we reused it, we repurposed it. We made smaller pieces bigger by gluing them together. It was just part of the plan.”