Less than a month ago, Keith Green Construction came out to our house to do us yet another solid. In times past, we’ve had them repair all kinds of deficiencies and make all kinds of upgrades in our 1910 farmhouse – they’ve done roof-work, reframed and installed a fine new front door, bathroom construction, installed attic pulldowns and internal doors, and completed a massive project to bring the entire southern facing of our home up to modern code and give us a sharp new back deck. This time, the job was to turn a window into a door and give us internal access to our garage at long last.
Our house has a lot of quirks, including a general lack of straight lines that might intimidate lesser contractors. You can’t just measure carefully and proceed, you have to be ready to find all sorts of strange jerry-rigs and odd, unexpected spaces and structures as you go, do away with them or adapt to them as the situation calls for, and move on. Working out here is not for the faint of heart, or for the unimaginative.
In the middle of our quirky house, there used to be an internal bedroom which sported a single window. The downside to that window was that it looked out onto the interior of our neglected lean-to style garage, a jumbled cobwebby mess. Our solution for the past 23 years was to avoid going in there unless we absolutely had to, and to put a piece of laminate board up in front of the window so that we didn’t get the creeps every time we went into the room.
The solution to quite a few of the problems in our very-compact house turned out to be blasting that window out, installing a door, and building a short, wrap-around wooden stair to land on the concrete pad of the garage. Before construction, we called in exterminators and largely rat-proofed the house, then carefully disposed of their leavings and cleared out the garage enough so that we didn’t feel bad turning the space over to KGC to build in. It was still pretty tight in there though, with all our mounded junk pushed aside and, on one day, even a second contractor on-site - KGC was working in the back, and a garage door company was removing the old rollup garage door and installing a new one in the front.
This project was actually one of the simpler ones for KGC, and more straightforward than most – but it still required flexibility and adaptability in addition to planning and carpentry skill. And when it was done, we could see that our new access was almost immediately paying off.
The garage is now accessible not only through the front rollup garage door, but now internally from the house. The next time we have to attend to our fuse-box, no going outside in the weather for us. And the garage is experiencing a renaissance, now that we can easily reach it from inside the house. It's clean and orderly for the first time in two decades. And we can find and make use of all of our tools at last.
I have always appreciated how reliable and capable Keith Green Construction is. We’re on a first-name basis with a number of the professionals working there, because we keep coming back when we need advanced levels of skill, and people who are thoughtful and adaptive to changing circumstances. We are accustomed to receiving regular briefings on the progress of any given project, and we have never been blindsided by unexpected expenses – these sorts of things have a way of telegraphing themselves as a project unfolds, and the regular briefings and accounting summaries that we get keep us apprised of the scope at all times.
If you want a contractor that is knowledgeable, personable, is upfront about risks and downsides, is engaged in every step of the project from sketching out what you hope to achieve to the final cleanup, and who respects your space and your privacy, there’s simply nobody else out there who’s going to give you that to the extent that KGC does. Keith’s philosophy of positive engagement with his clients and his integrity are reflected in every person who works for him. We will keep coming back for every new project that our quirky old house demands.