Kitchen Renovations in Coombs & Errington

Building on the acreages

What is different about renovating a farmhouse?

Out on the acreages you can read a building by looking at it, and we do that first. Farmhouses have been added to more than once, so a wall that looks like a partition often turns out to be carrying a roof load, and we get an engineer to confirm the load path before anything comes out. Post-and-beam framing and wider spans give us room for a longer island than a suburban footprint allows, but they also mean a beam and posts have to be sized properly. Almost every property out here is on a well and a septic field, so any change to the plumbing gets checked against what the system can take. Permits for rural properties go through a different office than they do in town, and we handle that side of it for you.

How does a longer span change the framing?

The wider we open a wall, the more the beam above it has to carry. As the span grows, the beam has to get deeper or change material, and the load it collects has to be carried down through posts to a footing that can take it. In an older house that's the part we watch hardest. If a post lands on a joist instead of a bearing point, the load goes into something that was never built to hold it, and you find out later when the floor moves. So we trace the load path all the way down, and sometimes that means opening the floor to add blocking or a pad beneath the post. Post-and-beam construction gives us more freedom than platform framing because the structure is already carrying load in defined places, but it also means the members we can see are doing real work and cannot be notched or drilled casually to run a drain or a duct. An engineer specifies the beam, the posts, the connections and the bearing, and the inspector checks it before anything is covered.

What does a fixed written quote actually cover?

We can only hold a fixed price if we've written down exactly what's in it. Ours lists the cabinetry by box and finish, the counter material and edge profile, the appliance model numbers, the flooring, the lighting, the trades, the permit and the disposal. That's how we can hold the price. We cannot hold a price against a vague cabinet spec. It also means you can see what a change costs. If you decide part way through that you want a different counter, we can tell you exactly what that costs because we know exactly what it replaces. A fixed quote cannot cover what is hidden inside a wall or under a floor. We handle that by naming the likely unknowns up front, agreeing in writing what we will do if each one appears, and showing you the condition before we carry on.

A recent Coombs & Errington project

What does a finished Coombs & Errington kitchen look like?

A farmhouse kitchen felt cramped for a family that cooks daily. A chimney chase and a bearing wall limited how far the layout could open. We kept the chase as a feature, borrowed about 2 feet from the hall next to it, and handed back a warmer, more usable kitchen 6 weeks on site.

Common questions

What Coombs & Errington homeowners ask us most.