3rd Avenue NW
Seattle, WA

After

This 1930 Seattle craftsman was in rough shape. It had a closed off floor plan and a large unfinished basement.  One of the great features of this property was the alley access in the back, a single car garage, and plenty of off street parking.  These are all things to think about when looking at an in-city property.  In addition, this house sits across the street from an elementary school making it a great location for a young family.  Finishing the basement and adding a bath on the third floor added valuable square footage.  Other design changes included combining two small bedrooms on the main floor to make a large master suite and opening up the wall between the kitchen and main floor living space to improve flow.  Remodeling a house of this age presents unique challenges. A substantial remodel requires it be brought up to current code which is nearly impossible.  Working closely with the City is critical. The City will allow minor variances if current code compliance is unachievable.  Of course, life safety will never be  compromised.  In this project, we had two major hurdles.  First, the two bedrooms upstairs had sloped ceilings which caused them to have a ceiling height lower than 7' through 50% of the room.  Second, the staircase leading upstairs had only 6' 6" of headroom. The City said we needed to raise the ceiling heights in the bedrooms in order to continue calling them bedrooms and we needed to raise the headroom in the stairwell in order to maintain access to the upstairs. It was not financially feasible to take the whole roof off to raise all of the ceilings so we decided to compromise.  We raised the portion of the roof over the staircase 6" to maintain access but we left the bedroom ceilings as they were.  We had to list the house as a 3 bedroom, 2 bonus room house instead of 5 bedrooms. A lot of tough lessons were learned through this project but ultimately a classic Seattle craftsman was brought back to life and that is a good thing.

Before