What an older Chelsea house asks for first

Step into a house on one of the streets off Main and the good news shows up inside ten feet: quartersawn casing nobody has painted over. The trouble sits behind it. Panels in these houses often run 60 or 100 amps with no open spaces left, so a kitchen remodel that adds an induction range and a dishwasher begins with the electrical service. We price that up front rather than raising it in week three.

The woodwork question comes next. Original base, casing and stair parts in these homes were run with knives no lumberyard stocks now, so when a wall moves we mill the replacement profile to match instead of splicing in something close. That same rule shapes cabinet work. New boxes get built to the openings the house actually has, which is why cabinets made to a measured opening beat stock sizes in a hundred-year-old room. Six finished projects in Chelsea so far.

Outside the city limits, the roads toward Waterloo run to farm properties with stone and rubble foundations, wells and septic fields. Those jobs open with a look at the basement walls before anything upstairs gets drawn, because foundation repair changes a budget more than any finish selection will. Our neighboring pages for remodeling in Dexter and the farmhouses around Manchester cover similar ground.

Chelsea sits at the western end of the area we cover, and the drive out M-52 is short enough that a crew is unloading by 8 a.m. Materials come from the same suppliers we use for the rest of the Washtenaw County towns we build in, so a mid-week change order does not cost you a week of waiting. Small thing on paper. Large thing when you are living in the house during the work.

The back door is where Chelsea houses give up ground

Rear entries in this town take a beating. Boots, salt, wet dogs and a storm door that has been closing against the same jamb since the Reagan administration. Most of these houses never had a real drop zone, so coats end up on a kitchen chair and the floor inside the door fails first. A mudroom addition off the back is one of the more useful small projects available in an old house.

Getting it right means reading the exterior first. Rear elevations on Chelsea houses were never meant to be seen, so they carry a century of patched siding, a stoop poured over an older stoop, and a roof line that changed when somebody enclosed the porch in 1962. A rebuilt entry has to tie into all of that and still shed water. We walk the perimeter before we sketch anything.

• Sill and rim condition at the back wall, since rot travels along the plate before it shows on the siding.
• Grade at the rear stoop, and whether roof water is being dumped against the foundation there.
• Panel capacity and whether the existing circuits are shared with the kitchen.
• Original trim profiles that need to be matched, which we handle through matching millwork and trim.
• Floor level changes between the original house and any later back addition.

How a Chelsea project runs from here

We work as a single company through design and construction, so the drawings and the price come from the same people who will swing the hammers. That is the short version of our design-build approach, and it matters more on old houses because the surprises are found by the crew, not the plan set. If your house dates to the Queen Anne era, our notes on Victorian home renovation are a good place to start reading.

Selective demolition comes early on these projects, usually a day of opening a ceiling bay and a section of plaster so we can see framing, wiring and any old plumbing runs before the number is final. What we find there decides whether the beam is flush or dropped, whether the panel gets replaced or subfed, and whether the back stair can stay where it is. Owners get told the same day, in the house, with the wall still open.