Whole-Home Remodeling, Additions, and Restoring Older Homes
Host:
This is the Home Remodeling Show, brought to you by Edge Construction. You can find them online at EdgeConstructionCompany.com. That is all one word, Edge Construction Company dot com.
It is a great website. If you have not been there recently, what are you doing? Get on over there now. They have some great recent projects, plus links to Pinterest, Facebook, and the one you really want to check out: Houzz.
You can access all of that right from EdgeConstructionCompany.com. Look for the little green “H” that looks a bit like a stylized house.
The telephone number for Edge Construction is 608-636-3343. That number is easy to remember: 636-EDGE.
Joining us in studio this morning is the owner of Edge Construction, Mike Twohig. Mike, how are you doing this morning?
Mike:
Good to see you.
Host:
We are talking bigger projects this week. At Edge Construction, we talk a lot about kitchen remodels, bathroom remodels, basement remodels, and those types of projects. You do those, and I do not think there is anything truly small, especially if you are the homeowner. Every project is a big thing.
But you also do whole-home remodels, from-scratch remodels, additions, and larger projects. You do a lot of that work as well, don’t you?
Mike:
Yeah. Obviously, you cannot do as many of those. We do quite a few kitchens, baths, and basements. That inside work has been our bread and butter for a while.
But we have a lot of horsepower. We can do two, three, or sometimes four larger remodels in a year, depending on the type of projects they are. A lot of times, those are additions or whole-house remodels.
We just finished a really nice, big whole-house remodel downtown off Dayton Street. It was a very interesting remodel. Two sisters bought this house and turned it from a two-flat rental back into a house. It feels really cool in there. It is a big old house.
Now it has a couple of really nice bathrooms, and the kitchen is updated. We did as much as the budget allowed. We were in there for several months, but it was a very nice bigger remodel.
Host:
Knowing you, I have to guess that project was probably near and dear to your heart.
I think of some of the rental properties around Madison. I do not know what this place looked like before, but I do know what some rentals look like, and I know your standards. That has to be a great feeling, going from a rental property to restoring this house to its glory.
Mike:
Yeah. Rentals get abused. Everybody knows it. College rentals especially.
My kids did this too. We would joke when they found a new place. They would say, “Oh, it is great.” I would ask, “Can you tell what color the carpet is?” And they would say, “Not really.” It was probably because it was dirty and had never been cleaned.
One thing that does not really surprise us, but would be great if we did not run into it, is the old smoking residue.
Remember the days when people smoked everywhere? A lot of rentals seem to have years and years of smoking inside. It leaves this film that gets everywhere.
You are making a face right now, but this used to be the norm in dorms. We would not have thought much of it 30 years ago.
When you are going to refurbish woodwork that has been exposed to that, the first big job is cleaning it up. That is not very fun for carpenters to do, by the way.
Host:
You think about the history these places have seen. If it was student housing, who knows what all happened there?
We talk sometimes about remodeling surprises. Are those older rental properties the kinds of places where you find surprises during demo?
Mike:
Very much so.
Even now, we get calls to do maintenance on rentals, and I usually do not want to get involved. The people who own those properties often do not seem to want a real remodel. It is more like, “How cheaply can we get this done?”
I understand that they may not get the money back in rent unless they are going very high-end. But it can be hard to get that money back out of rentals, especially student rentals.
So you see a lot of things that should not have happened mechanically.
In this house, when we pulled it apart, we expected not to find insulation in the walls. We found old horsehair and straw insulation. That was probably the height of technology in 1920 or so.
We got that out of there, sprayed foam in, and got it as tight as we could. You are not going to take a 100-plus-year-old house that has been abused or not treated very well and bring it all the way up to a new-house level. But if I can get it 80 percent of the way there, that feels like a real victory.
Host:
With a 100-year-old home, the work is obviously going to be extensive.
But even with comparatively newer homes — houses built in the 1970s, 1980s, or even 1990s — you get brought in for whole-home remodels. The materials and craftsmanship available now have gotten so much better over the last 30 years.
You get a lot of whole-home remodels for houses that are not “old,” but are older and need updating, don’t you?
Mike:
Right. But with those, you are not always having to redo whole systems.
If your house was built in the modern era, let’s say the 1950s or newer, it probably has insulation. You have nominal-size lumber.
In the really old houses, a lot of them were balloon-framed. This house downtown was balloon-framed. Instead of building a wall and setting the next floor on top of that wall, the framing goes up the outside of the house as far as the studs went. Then another one gets added, and it keeps going up. The floors are mounted more or less on the side of those walls.
Those houses are in no danger of falling over. There are actually ways to do that now and still meet code, though I would not recommend it, and we probably would not do it.
On that project, we had to upsize beams and upgrade the electrical system. We dealt with plumbing and other systems.
On the modern side of things, I am embarrassed to say that houses we built 15 years ago were done without enough lighting. So it is common for us to go back into a house from the 1990s and hear homeowners say, “Why aren’t there more lights in here? Why do I have to rely on lamps?”
They want lights in the ceiling. They want layers of lighting. That is easier to do than in a very old house because you are not starting from scratch.
Host:
Speaking of older houses, with two-by-fours, am I right that in older homes the lumber was often locally milled and not always the same size as today’s lumber?
Mike:
You are right.
Some of that old wood was much harder. Old-growth Douglas fir from way up north can feel like you are working with oak. It is super hard, dense wood. I do not think it shrinks as much as a modern two-by-four.
A two-by-four now theoretically starts off at two inches by four inches, but by the time they smooth the sides, round the corners, and dry it down, it ends up being an inch and a half by three and a half inches.
Now when we buy two-by-fours, they are all the same size. That makes construction much easier.
In old houses, one stud might be four inches deep, the next might be three and three-quarter inches, and so on. But those houses had plaster, and plaster kind of goes on like concrete. You trowel it on, and it makes up for all that variation. It hides a lot of those sins.
When we build something new, we try very hard to create a flat surface to mount drywall to. If the wall dives in even a quarter inch, you can see it.
Host:
I was going to ask you about tying into old two-by-fours, but now I want to ask about tying into plaster.
Going from plaster to drywall and making those transitions seamless has to take a lot of skill.
Mike:
It is not easy. But the guys who do it for me make it look easy. I watch them and think, “I could do this,” but it is not really that way.
The challenge is that you are taking two different substrates and mixing them. How do you get through heating seasons and humidity changes without having a crack where those two materials meet?
In the heating season, a house might be down to 25 percent humidity. Right now, we might be pushing 60 percent or more depending on the day. That is a huge swing. Temperature changes do the same thing, and materials expand and contract at different rates.
There are great products that help. You may have seen rolls of mesh that you can kind of see through. We can apply that and then drywall mud over it. Drywall mud is much more flexible than plaster, so that gives you some leeway.
There are a lot of tricks to making that work.
Host:
Is there also a time when you say, “Let’s just get rid of the plaster”? Some of these older houses have cracks from settling and repairs over the years. At some point, is it better to just start over?
Mike:
There are times when we say, “We are going to try to keep the plaster in this room, and just the wall we are taking out will be drywalled. We will make them work together.”
To be honest, there are times halfway through when we think, “This is not worth it. We should have just torn that plaster off.”
But every homeowner has constraints. If pennies fell from heaven and you could say, “We are just going to tear everything out and start over,” that would be the best thing. You would update insulation and a lot of other things.
But remodeling always comes down to where you stop.
Think about your own house. You want to do your kitchen. Well, that kitchen might lead into other areas. Maybe you want to take this wall out. Now you are affecting the room on the other side of the wall. Are you replacing flooring in there? Are you retrimming that room? You are probably at least repainting everything.
A homeowner may think, “No, I just want to take the wall out.” But it does not really work that way.
Host:
For people who have not been to EdgeConstructionCompany.com recently, I would urge you to go there. One of the things that is most impressive to me is how spaces tie together.
That is something I would not have noticed before doing the show with you. You mentioned the kitchen and taking out a wall. Now you have a different area. How do you tie all of that together and make it look right?
With a whole-home remodel, maybe that is easier because more spaces are being updated. But you still want to do right by the house. You want it to fit the house. Even in a whole-home remodel, there are probably spaces that are not going to get completely renovated. You still do not want someone to walk in and say, “That is the room they did not do.”
There is a lot of design conversation that goes into that.
Mike:
There is.
It is okay for a homeowner to say, “It is obvious we did all this, and we have plans to get to this other area later. For now, this is working for us.”
Let me ask you a question. What leads to remodeling? We talk about flooring a lot. Sometimes it is flooring. Sometimes it is mechanicals.
But if you had to guess, what is the hardest paint color to match?
Host:
I am going to go with red.
Mike:
Actually, it is white.
If you think about paint colors, guess how many versions of white there are. In every color family, there is a white. In the red color family, there may be a white with a little red in it. Same with blue and all the primary colors.
When we are remodeling a house and doing a kitchen, maybe we widen a doorway and have to rebuild a drywall corner. That affects the ceiling.
Our first question to the homeowner before we even start is, “Do you have that white? Do you have that paint card?”
We have little machines now that can scan a wall and tell us what color it is. We use Sherwin-Williams and other major manufacturers in town. The device will tell us the closest color.
With white, it just spins in circles and says, “I do not know.”
If the homeowner has the color, even if the paint itself is not usable anymore, we can get the numbers off the lid and have the color remade. Then we can patch-paint.
Otherwise, we may have to paint the whole ceiling. Some ceilings lead into stairways, which go upstairs into hallways, and it never ends.
Host:
I do not know if I am alone in this, but we have five or six gallons of paint left over from various projects. I do not know which paint is for which room.
Mike:
If you like your colors, you should figure that out. Otherwise, get rid of it. It just takes up room in the shed.
We actually have friends in Fort Atkinson who make family-friendly movies, believe it or not. We give them all of our extra paint because they are constantly changing colors on movie sets. They use it all up.
That could be a budding charity, where people could donate paint so it does not just harden in basements.
Host:
I did not realize that. That is super cool.
We are talking this morning with Mike Twohig, owner of Edge Construction. This week we are talking about whole-home remodeling and some of the bigger projects they do at Edge Construction.
Of course, it is always a great day to talk with Mike and the team if you are thinking about remodeling, whether it is a whole home, a bathroom, a kitchen, or another area.
Visit EdgeConstructionCompany.com. Their telephone number is 608-636-3343. That number again is 636-EDGE.
Edge Construction brings you the Home Remodeling Show right here on 1310 WIBA.
Host:
This is the Home Remodeling Show, brought to you by Edge Construction. You can find them online at EdgeConstructionCompany.com. That is all one word, Edge Construction Company dot com.
It is a great website and resource to learn more about Edge Construction. If you have not been there recently, check back often because they are always updating recent projects.
Also check out the links to Pinterest, Facebook, and Houzz, all available at EdgeConstructionCompany.com.
We are talking this week about some of the bigger whole-home remodeling projects Edge Construction does.
Mike, you do kitchens and bathrooms day in and day out. As you mentioned earlier, you do a few big projects a year. You have the manpower, the skills, and a great opportunity for folks.
What is the timeline like? I assume a bigger project means a bigger lead-up. You need more time because there are more details and because you want everything to flow smoothly.
What is the timeline for getting started with whole-home remodels?
Mike:
I always think our design period is similar to our construction period.
If it is a whole-home remodel, construction might take five months, plus or minus a month, depending on the level of work. That is generally about how long those take. That is also about how much time they spend in design.
We have one slot open for this fall-ish for a whole-home remodel, and we have a couple of candidates. It is not a bad time to call us for that if you are decisive and motivated, because a lot of work has to happen before we start digging in and opening things up.
If a kitchen is going to take us two and a half or three months to build, that is about how long it usually takes to figure out what to do, pick things out, write the contract, and get everything ready.
People ask about the timeline a lot. One of the first questions is usually, “When can you start?” But that jumps the gun a little if we do not yet know the level of work or where the project is going.
I went to look at a basement remodel two weeks ago. The homeowner was excited about getting going. It is an office and a small great room, maybe 500 or 600 square feet. We can design that in CAD in a day.
We got motivated fast because the homeowner was motivated, and we knew we did not have to order cabinets. We just had to match finishes in the rest of the house. It was a pretty new house, so that simplified the design side.
That project is starting fairly quickly. From walking in the door to finishing, it will be a few months. That is pretty quick in our world, and probably in anybody’s world.
But once you start adding complexity — breaking up concrete for plumbing, ordering cabinets, or making a lot of selections — things stretch out.
You do want to take your time on design when there are more parts in play. Think about the number of finishes that have to be decided in a whole-home remodel. In a kitchen alone, there are seven or eight decisions: flooring, trim, cabinet color, countertops, paint, hardware, plumbing fixtures, faucets, and more.
Then you have the master bath with the same kind of decisions.
You want a really good general plan so things flow and do not look like they came out of the flipper era. Flippers destroyed houses, in my mind. We are going to be dealing with the repercussions of people flipping houses for a long time.
There were not a lot of real fixes. It was often just facelift-type work. It is still common for us to walk into a house and see four or five different kinds of flooring on the first floor. If you are going to design thoughtfully, that is not how you do it.
Host:
What is the general trigger for people to do a whole-home remodel?
Is it that they love the neighborhood and want to stay? Is it looking at the housing market and prices and saying, “We really like it here”? Is it that they are tired of the place? Or maybe the in-laws are moving in, and they want to redesign the house and also have you build a shack out in the woods where they can hide?
Mike:
I have a shack. That is why I am a happy guy. I always have a place to retreat.
There are a variety of reasons.
Let’s separate the issue of values going up from everything else. Then there are life changes, or maybe it is not a life change at all. Maybe you hate your kitchen and have hated it for 10 years. Maybe it has what I call fatal flaws: pinch points, bad layout, or something where you always ask, “Why did they do this?”
But the good thing for housing is that values have come up, so it is worth investing in these houses.
I will use downtown Madison neighborhoods as an example. When we first started working down there, depending on how far from the Capitol you were, you could buy houses for $150,000. Now fixer-uppers are sometimes three times that.
I would not want to be the first one to buy that and invest in those houses. But a lot of people have been down there a long time, and now there is more value in the house. That makes it worth investing.
That has been a good driver for this business, but it is also good for doing right by the house. If the value is low and you want to temporarily solve a problem, I get it. It is harder to do a real, legitimate remodel with good products.
If the values are up, now you have options.
Host:
I know I should not just say “good for business,” but you do a lot of work on the isthmus. With the values of those homes and people wanting quality remodels, that has been good for Edge Construction.
You spend a lot of time on those houses because people are saying, “We want this done right. We want it done well.”
Mike:
We enjoy working down there. But if that were the only place we could work, I would be in an insane asylum.
It is not the houses or the people. It is that there is no room to maneuver down there. Parking, work vans, trailers, dumpsters — all of that is harder.
The neighbors have largely been understanding and willing to work with us. I am sure they get annoyed after a while.
But I personally love old houses. I like when people are willing to invest in old houses because almost anything you do is going to help save the house.
I like thinking, “Let’s make sure this house is around for another 100 years.” That is really the goal.
Host:
It is amazing stuff.
If you go to EdgeConstructionCompany.com, you can check out the portfolio right there. There is also a link to Houzz, where you can see a bunch of their projects online and some of the great work they have done.
If you are thinking about remodeling, maybe a whole-home remodel or maybe just a kitchen, bath, or another area, they would love to talk with you at Edge Construction.
Pick up the phone and call 608-636-3343. That number again is 636-EDGE.
Edge Construction brings you the Home Remodeling Show right here on 1310 WIBA.
Host:
This is the Home Remodeling Show, brought to you by Edge Construction. You can find them online at EdgeConstructionCompany.com. That is all one word, Edge Construction Company dot com.
Their telephone number is 608-636-3343. That number is easy to remember: 636-EDGE.
We are talking this week about whole-home remodel projects with Mike. We left off talking about certain areas, with the isthmus as one example. But even in surrounding communities, there are a lot of really beautiful homes and homes with a lot of potential.
One of the cool things about what you do at Edge Construction is that you work on smaller homes on the isthmus, but you also love getting involved with a nice Victorian or other distinctive home.
A big part of that is making sure the remodel fits the type of house. You do not want to take a big Victorian and turn it into a big open concept that does not fit.
Mike:
Right.
Do you remember This Old House Magazine?
Host:
I remember the magazine.
Mike:
On the last page, they had a feature called “Remuddle.” It was usually a beautiful old house with a terrible addition or something that did not fit.
I give our designers a lot of credit because it can be a challenge to do an addition or expand a house in a way that fits.
We seem to do at least one project a year where we tear the roof off and go up. One of the best compliments comes from the neighborhood when we are finishing up.
It is hard for homeowners who do not do this every day, and especially for neighbors who do not see the plans or the endgame. They may be thinking, “I hope they do not build something stupid next to me. Let’s not paint it purple or pink.”
But on those projects, we have had several neighbors come up and say, “It is such a relief to see that it still fits the neighborhood. It is not too big.”
That is common when you have good design.
I have a friend who built a lake house and dwarfed the houses around him. It was cringey. You do not want your neighbors living in your shadow. That is not right.
Internally, we talk a lot about right-sizing things. In the early 2000s, construction was more like “turn and burn.” It was all about the move-up house. People would sell one house and move to something bigger and better.
There was an inflationary thing happening. A house would increase in value by $50,000 in a year, and that allowed someone to buy a bigger house.
Back then, we built some 1,200-square-foot master bedrooms. I remember thinking, “This is the dumbest thing. We are just going to sleep in here.”
It is not always about need, but you can make a great room too big. You can make a kitchen too big. I like when things are right-sized and feel right for the house.
Host:
Is proportionality the right word? One of the things you are able to do with these bigger projects is add square footage, but because of the design, it may not look out of place. There is thought that goes into how the addition or second story will fit in and blend with the house.
It is obviously more space, but it does not look wrong.
Mike:
Right. You want to modernize, and you want good design to be apparent. It should be attractive to the largest number of people.
But there are ways it can go wrong.
CAD has helped a lot. We can look at the footprint, which is a top-down view of the house. If we peel the roof off, we can look down into the house in CAD and rearrange things. We can try different ideas.
Then we can create renderings. They are not like 1970s cartoons. They are very good now. We can import pictures so backsplash tile, countertops, and paint colors show up. We can show the effects of natural light coming in, interior lighting, shadows, and so on.
We can do the same thing on the outside. We can create a rendering that shows the outside of the house at three o’clock on a Saturday.
If you really wanted to, you could probably import the whole neighborhood in there. That is probably the future. You will be able to do a fly-by of your house.
Host:
You mentioned adding a second story. Structurally, can any house handle a second story?
Mike:
Yes and no.
Every time we have done it, we have added structure to the house. Obviously, we do not want structural problems.
If you build a wall and there is no roof or second story on it, that wall is not very sturdy. Once you put a second floor on it, you tie the wall on one side of the house to the wall on the other side. Now those walls cannot move. Interior walls also have structure to tie into.
In a ranch house, that is happening with the roof system. The roof is engineered not just to carry snow load and shed rain, but also to hold the house together.
When you add a second floor, there are key points where weight comes down. We can figure that out with CAD and engineering.
Maybe the existing structure is not going to support everything right where we want it to. But if we add structure underneath, maybe a couple of posts, and maybe knock out a little concrete in the basement to deal with point loads, we can address it.
It is not as difficult as people think when you know how to do it.
Host:
That makes sense. I have always wondered whether any house could be a candidate for a second-story addition.
When people do second-story additions, is it often master bedrooms and things like that? What are people putting upstairs?
Mike:
The times we have done it, it has often been on ranch houses in areas where values have really come up. We have done several in Middleton, for example.
Those houses had bedrooms on the first floor. They might have had a master bedroom in quotes, but it was probably a smaller bedroom, plus one or two other small bedrooms.
A popular approach is to go up and add three normal bedrooms upstairs, maybe two more baths. Then you can combine some things on the first floor and create a better master suite down there.
That can be a good way to go, but it depends on the house. Sometimes you need to use some of that first-floor space to expand the kitchen, create a great room, or solve other issues.
Host:
For people thinking about starting a whole-home remodel, obviously the first step is giving you a call. Do you get a lot of people who know exactly what they want? Or do you get people who say, “We love the neighborhood and the house, but it is just not working”?
Mike:
It is rare to get somebody who says they know exactly what they want.
About half of those projects have been started by somebody else. It might be the homeowner, a designer, or an architect who roughed out some ideas and showed the possibilities. Then we take it from there.
Once in a while, we will work all the way through with another designer or architect, and that is perfectly fine.
From our standpoint, you want to love your designer and be comfortable with them. But there is also a lot of nuts-and-bolts work that has to happen. We have to do some of that, and they might do some of that.
It is really helpful if you have at least put thought into it. Maybe you have a couple of kids, maybe another one on the way, and your end goal is four bedrooms and three baths.
Most of the time, that is not the only thing driving it. Maybe the roof is bad. Maybe you need siding and windows. It is usually a combination of things. If you are in the right neighborhood, that can drive the project too.
Host:
Do you also update mechanicals and other systems as you add more space? Bigger or better furnace, that kind of thing?
Mike:
Yes.
On one of the last second-story projects we did, there was no way the existing furnace was going to handle everything.
When I looked at how to design that heating system, we would have had to come from two floors below and snake around to get upstairs. I felt like we were not going to be able to do a great job heating everything from down there.
So we added a furnace upstairs and created a totally separate system.
There are advantages to that. You get a separate thermostat upstairs, so you can treat that area differently. Maybe you like to sleep cooler upstairs, or maybe warmer. Either way, now you can control it.
You also have a brand-new system that should be good for a long time. You are not making excuses about not being able to heat part of the house well because the system is too far away. It worked really well.
Host:
That is the perfect place to end.
That is one of the great things about working with Mike and the team at Edge Construction: getting the right remodel done.
They would love to talk with you. Pick up the phone and call 608-636-3343. That number again is 636-EDGE.
You can also check them out online at EdgeConstructionCompany.com. That is all one word, Edge Construction Company dot com.
More of the Home Remodeling Show is next here on 1310 WIBA.