What home restoration means for an older Charlotte house
Home restoration repairs an older house and brings back what made it good: solid floors, straight walls, original trim and doors that close. Where a renovation would replace those things, a restoration keeps as much as can be saved and rebuilds the rest to match.
Charlotte and the towns around it have plenty of houses old enough to need this, from early twentieth-century homes near the city center to mill houses in Kannapolis and Concord. Each comes with its own mix of original materials and later fixes, some better than others.
What we look at first
A restoration starts with a careful walk through the house. Older houses hide their problems behind paint, carpet and paneling, so the first job is finding out what is really there.
- Floors: soft spots, sagging and bounce, which point to joists or the subfloor.
- Walls and ceilings: cracks, stains and patches, and whether they are plaster or drywall.
- Doors and windows: frames that have racked, so doors stick or gaps open.
- Trim and woodwork: what is original, what is missing and what was replaced badly.
- Signs of old water: stains, rot at sills and around tubs, and past repairs.
Some of this cannot be known until a wall or floor is opened. When that happens, we show you what we found before deciding what to do about it.
Save it or replace it
| Material | Usually worth saving when | Usually replaced when |
|---|---|---|
| Hardwood floors | Boards are solid and thick enough to sand | Boards are rotted, split or sanded too thin |
| Trim and casings | Profiles are intact under the paint | Pieces are missing and a run is short |
| Plaster walls | The plaster is still keyed to the lath | Large areas are loose or crumbling |
| Interior doors | Solid wood doors that only need refitting | Doors are split or have warped badly |
Old-growth lumber in older houses is often denser than what a lumberyard sells today, which is one more reason to keep it when it is sound.
Matching trim, floors and walls
The hard part of restoration is the patch nobody notices. A new piece of baseboard has to match a profile that may not be made anymore. A floor repair has to blend with boards that have had a century to change color.
Some profiles can be matched from stock, some can be built up from several pieces, and some can be borrowed from a closet where nobody will miss them. We look at what your house has at the estimate and talk through how close a match is realistic.
Lead paint and other old materials
Lead-based paint was banned for homes in 1978, so a house built before then may have it under later coats. Older houses can also contain asbestos in materials such as some floor tiles, pipe insulation and textured ceilings.
The house can still be restored. Test first, before anyone sands, scrapes or demolishes old finishes. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency publishes guidance for homeowners on both.
Treating the house as if it were our own
When a long-time customer thanked us on HomeAdvisor, our reply was that we "simply believe in fairness and treating the house as if it were our own." Restoration is where that counts most, because the materials cannot be reordered.
In a restoration that should mean floors protected before work starts, removed trim labelled so it goes back where it came from, and a word with you before anything original comes out.
What moves the price of a restoration
Restoration is harder to price from a photo than any other kind of job, because so much depends on what is behind the surface. You get a price at a free estimate, and it is confirmed before work starts. These drive it:
- Structural repairs to joists, sills or framing.
- How much original material can be saved, and how much has to be made to match.
- Plaster repair versus replacing walls with drywall.
- Refinishing floors versus replacing sections of them.
- Testing or abatement of lead paint or asbestos, where needed.
