February 2019
We hired R&R Contracting (Dan Nephew , owner - https://www.rr-contracting.com) to do a major addition to our home. We could not be happier with the result or the process. Dan and his brother John are conscientious, hard-working, kind, patient, calm, levelheaded, capable and smart. They worked through difficulties one might anticipate encountering when expanding a house that is almost 150 years old. The project ended up being much larger than anyone anticipated, and the end result was amazing. Basically half of our house was redone. We are very grateful for their professionalism and heartily recommend R&R Contracting.
What follows is a lot of detail illustrating how complex a project it was that R&R completed so well.
We live in a house built in 1870 that had been expanded over the years, but it did not have a bedroom on the first floor, had too many flat roofs and had 1.5 small bathrooms, with only the half bathroom on the first floor. We wanted to expand the house to permit us to live longer in our home as we age. Specifically, the original scope of our project was to change our ½ bathroom to a full bathroom, to change the flat roof over our living room to be pitched and to add a bedroom to the back of the house. We also wanted the alterations to facilitate the installation of solar panels later and to ensure that the new addition was done in ways that would permit us ideally to stay in the house even if we were to become disabled.
In addition to R &R, we hired an architect to help us because zoning limits what can be done in small lots like ours and because we wanted to retain the basic shape of the house as faced from the front.
Our project turned out to be complicated.
* Integrating the existing stone foundation to the new addition was challenging because of the risk of collapse of the original foundation.
* Maximizing the size of the bedroom to accommodate the smaller footprint required by zoning meant using different size lumber and spray foam insulation.
* This in turn made it impossible to have a window in the attic above the new addition.
* It was impossible/impractical to integrate the original HVAC system into the new addition because of the stone foundation. That meant installing a separate, second heating and cooling system.
* Installing the new bedroom revealed that our back mudroom was inadequately supported. It needed to be torn down and rebuilt.
* Because the new addition had an attic, our upstairs bathroom lost its one window. That led us to redo much of the upstairs bathroom
* When starting to install the peaked roof above the new living room, replacing the flat roof, we learned that the living room was not properly supported below nor did the roof above it adequately support our second floor. We needed to reinforce and then repaint the living room and redo its flooring.
* We needed to upgrade our electrical service to 200 amps to accommodate the new (second) HVAC system and to position our house for solar panels
Dan and his team worked through all of these complications and because of them the end result for us was
* A full bathroom with a linear drain glass-enclosed shower with the smallest of lips permitting us to walk in easily
* A new bedroom with a walk-in closet and a barnyard door connecting to the bathroom, able to accommodate a wheel chair down the road. The walk-in closet door is actually a Murphy bookcase, an bookcase that can be opened.
* A newly painted and newly wood floored and adequately supported living room
* A new mudroom, replacing the old one
* A new deck, replacing the old one
* Refinished wooden stairs leading to the second floor
* A new wooden floor in much of the upstairs hallway
* 200 amp service
* An upstairs bathroom with a new sink, toilet, vanity, fixtures and built –in cabinet where the windows was, also newly tiled and painted and with the bathtub refinished
* An attic above the new bedroom, with a pull-down ladder
* A peaked roof above the living room and the attic and the mudroom, meaning I have much less to shovel in a bad winter
* New wired smoke detectors
* A newly surfaced drive-way
Dan did an amazing job hiring and handling subcontractors. This includes the electrical company he hired, the same one we had hired independently many years before to remove knob and tube wiring. When this one and the same company said during our project with R&R that there was knob and tube wiring to be removed, I showed Dan the company’s original certification that the knob and tube wiring had been removed; and Dan worked with the company to remove the remaining knob and tube wiring for free.
Thank you to Dan, his brother John and R&R for an outstanding job!
Michael and David
Arlington, Massachusetts
