Royal Oak second-story additions and remodeling
Almost every block in Royal Oak was built between 1920 and 1950, and almost every house sits close enough to the side lot lines that growth has one direction available. Before we draw a second-story addition, we answer a different question: what is already under the house, and will it hold. Our crews reach Oakland County from Ypsilanti, 38 miles away.
Bungalows, Tudors and small colonials, block after block
The housing runs to three or four repeating types. Front-gabled bungalows with a porch under the roofline. English cottage and Tudor revival houses with steep slate-look roofs and a rounded entry. Two-story colonials, narrow and deep, with a side stair hall. Behind them, alleys and detached garages, which is why almost no driveway runs down the side of a Royal Oak house.
These places were built well and then lived in hard for eighty years. Under carpet there is quartersawn oak in good shape. Behind a 1990s soffit there is a plaster arch. Above a dropped ceiling in the dining room there is a cove that was covered when someone ran a duct. Part of our first walkthrough is finding out what is still there.
The mechanical picture repeats too. Octopus furnaces are long gone, but the ductwork they left behind is often still in service, oversized in the basement and starved on the second floor. Electrical services have been upgraded once and stretched twice. Galvanized supply lines survive in pockets behind bathroom walls. None of that is alarming in a house of this age, and all of it belongs on the estimate rather than in a surprise.
Kitchens
Kitchens in these houses were built to be closed, with a back stair or a rear entry taking up wall the cabinets want. Most kitchen remodeling here is a negotiation between counter run and the doorway to the dining room. Plaster arches near that opening set the trim reveals, and a subway tile backsplash stays sympathetic to the age of the house without pretending to be original.
Bathrooms
The original bath sits at the top of the stairs with hex floor tile and a wall-hung sink. Where the attic gets finished, a primary bathroom remodel upstairs takes the pressure off it and lets the old one keep its tile. Any bathroom renovation in a house this age starts with what the drain stack can accept.
Basements
Ceilings are low and the joists are close together, so finishing the lower level means routing mechanicals hard against the deck and living with a soffit or two. Rooms with a purpose do better than open rec space down there. A basement brewing room with a floor drain, a hose bibb and real exhaust is a good use of a stone-cool corner.
Additions
Going up is the headline, but a rear bump gets more done per dollar on a house with a usable yard. We price additions of every size against the same structural report, because the beam that carries a new floor and the beam that carries a wider rear opening often land on the same post.
Outdoor
With the garage at the alley, the yard between is short and overlooked by two neighbors. Outdoor projects here trade square footage for privacy: a raised deck off the kitchen door, a screen of built-in planters, lighting that points down instead of across the fence line into someone’s kitchen window.
Engineering a second floor onto a 1930s frame
A second story roughly doubles what the original footing carries. So we dig. Two test pits at opposing corners tell us the footing width, whether it bears on undisturbed soil, and how the block or poured wall above it has aged. Old walls with step cracks and displaced block need foundation repair before anything gets stacked on them, and that work belongs in the budget from week one, not as a change order in month three.
Above the foundation, the load path has to reach it. Most of these houses have a center bearing wall or a beam over posts sitting on isolated pads. New bedrooms upstairs usually mean a heavier beam, larger pads poured under new posts, and blocking through the first-floor cavity so the weight travels in a straight line. All of it gets shored temporarily while the old members come out.
Then the roof comes off, which is the part everyone worries about. We sequence tear-off, deck and dry-in inside a single stretch of settled weather, with the interior tented and the oak floors covered in hardboard rather than paper. Owners who want a sense of scale before we meet can run rough numbers on a second floor and see how long an addition runs start to finish.
- Test pits at two corners, so the footing is measured instead of guessed at
- A load path drawn from the new ridge down to a pad in the basement floor
- Temporary shoring designed before demolition, not improvised on the morning of
- Tear-off and dry-in scheduled as one continuous operation with a weather contingency
- Existing plaster braced and monitored, because a frame that moves takes the ceilings with it
The detail that makes the house worth the trouble
Plaster over lath is stiff and unforgiving, and it is also the reason these rooms feel solid. Where we cut into it, we patch with veneer plaster over blueboard rather than taped drywall, because the two surfaces reflect light differently and the seam shows at eye level for years. Coved ceilings get run with a custom knife when a stock profile misses the radius.
Trim is the other tell. Base and casing profiles from this era are not on any lumberyard rack, so we pull a sample, have a knife ground, and mill the run for the new rooms to match the old. Oak flooring gets woven into the existing field rather than butted at a threshold, then the whole floor gets sanded and finished as one so the addition does not read as an addition.
Windows are where owners get talked into the wrong thing. The original double-hungs in these houses have sash weights, wavy glass and mortise-and-tenon joints that outlast any vinyl replacement sold today. Where a sash is sound, restoring it and adding a good storm gets close to replacement performance for less money. Where a unit is rotted past saving, we match the sightlines and the muntin pattern rather than dropping in whatever fits the rough opening.
Four Royal Oak projects are on our completed list, which is enough to know the stock and not enough to claim the town. Nearby, Berkley shares the same grid and much of the same building era, while Birmingham runs on a longer approval clock. The way we run a job is the same in all three: drawings first, structure verified, one contract, one schedule. Reach the office at (734) 540-0347, Monday through Friday.
Tell us what is above your ceiling and we will tell you what it takes to build there.
