It’s their first home, and Kathleen and Dennis Jacob love living in their three-bedroom brick bungalow in the Galewood neighborhood on Chicago’s West Side.
The living room is highlighted by beautiful stained glass windows and much of the brown wood trim in the 70-year-old house is original. Furthermore, say the Jacobs, this stable, racially integrated community is where they want to raise their 21-month-old daughter, Britta.
But since their daughter arrived, the couple has longed for some private living space of their own-namely, a master bedroom suite on the second floor. Their current bedroom is on the first floor and the upstairs currently houses a small bathroom, sewing room and guest bedroom.
To help the Jacobs answer many of their remodeling questions, we contacted Sam Sample, an Oak Park-based architect. In addition to inspecting the interior of the Jacobs’ home and offering suggestions, he took a walk down the block with the couple and pointed out successful remodeling projects-similar to what the Jacobs have in mind-and projects that, in his opinion, are not aesthetically pleasing.
The interior tour of the house began with a trip to the basement. There, Sample took measurements and pointed out the existence of some sturdy steel beams that helped him “determine what kind of floor load we can put upstairs.”
Once upstairs, Sample took a good look at the guest bedroom, which measures 13 by 19 feet, and at the adjacent sewing room, which measures 16 by 12. Because of the weight of the guest bedroom’s kneewalls (knee-height walls), Sample pointed out that he’d have to examine the ceiling one floor below to determine if there were any noticeable cracks.
“The ceilings do have some lateral cracks along the joists,” Dennis Jacob noted. “I think it’s because of the weight of the plaster. The previous owners of the house didn’t do a very good drywall job in the guest room.”
Sample also climbed into one of the crawl spaces in the guest room. “What I’m looking for,” he told the Jacobs, “is an exposed joist that I can measure. My guess is that they’re 2x6s in here, though hopefully they’re 2x8s. If they’re 2x6s, it would probably be best to double them.”
As Sample continued his inspection, the issue of dormers arose. In the Jacobs’ letter to Your Place, Kathleen expressed concern that if dormers were built, “`the visual integrity of my home be maintained.” “I don’t want it to look as if a siding ranch home landed on top of my bungalow,” she stressed.
“Let’s start with a dormer where the stair to the bathroom is,” Sample said. “You might be able to get away with a wide-gabled dormer. In order to keep the gable from looking like a bandage or like a house on a house, you almost have to kill it with color . . . the darker the better if you continue it at any length. And to get a master suite and bathroom up here, I think you’ll have to extend your gable.”
“I looked all over this neighborhood, drove around to see if I could find a house that had a gable that was successful in getting the width wide enough for a decent space expansion up above,” Sample continued. “And I couldn’t find one. I think if you do a wide-gabled dormer, you’re going to be the first ones who have done it successfully.”
Sample stressed the importance of using the proper materials when constructing the dormer. “If you use a nice material like a tile shingle and you use the same tile shingle going vertically or partially vertically, you can get away with using shingles,” he said. “But some people use shingles on the cross dormers and the material just looks cheap.”
Whatever decisions the Jacobs make, it is important to preserve the beauty of the stained-glass, octagon-shaped front parlor, Sample noted. “You don’t want to lose the downstairs and the gracefulness of the roof and the octagon shape by putting something on the roof that looks too bulky.”
With that in mind, Sample and the Jacobs headed out the front door to search for dormers that were successfully-and not-so-successfully-added on to neighboring residences. Sample pointed out some narrow dormers and a wider dormer on a house that “looks great from the streetside.” He stopped at another house, noting that “this siding is almost a little too light and it jumps out at you,” and contrasted that job with yet another house where “they’ve taken the siding and harmonized it with the trim, and it doesn’t look too bad.”
“You want to have the dormer fit in, making it look like the rest of the house,” Sample stressed. “Ideally, an addition should look like it was built at the same time as the house was. That’s particularly true when you’re remodeling for people who like their house as much as you do, versus someone who needs an extra bedroom and wants to add on some space and doesn’t really care what it looks like.”
The Jacobs asked about price.
“If you take new construction, a low price would be $50 a square foot,” Sample replied. “But you’re talking about remodeling, which means you can go so far, stop and think, go a little further, stop and think some more. So you have to up the figure by at least . . . $70 a square foot, which I think is a safe figure. You may have to beef up the floor, and you’re going to do major surgery on the roof; on the other hand, you don’t have to consider a foundation or anything like that.”
To hold down costs, Sample strongly suggested the Jacobs locate a contractor who does business relatively close to where they live. “`A contractor tends to work in the area where his business is,” he noted. “He may have a supplier in that area that he gets good prices from . . . It tends to up the price a little if a guy’s working out of his area because he’s got to truck all of his supplies to your house.”
