A plain post-war ranch,taken back to bare studsand rebuilt as a Craftsman.
An Arvada whole-home remodel: everything but the shell removed, a new foundation and structure underneath, and an elevation the street does not recognise.
At some point a remodel stops being a remodel and becomes a rebuild.
This Arvada house started as a low, plain ranch. What came off it was almost everything: interior finishes, interior walls, sections of exterior wall, and finally most of the roof. What went back was a new foundation, new structure, a new floor plan under vaulted ceilings, and a Craftsman front elevation with a full-width porch.
Down-to-the-studs is a phrase used loosely. Here it is literal — there are frames on this page where the only thing standing is the shell, propped on temporary posts, with steel beams and screw jacks carrying the load while new concrete goes in underneath.
That is the honest reason a whole-home remodel of this depth is priced closer to new construction than to a kitchen. You are paying to hold a house up while you replace what was holding it up.
The finished fireplace · Arvada
First you find out what is actually there.
The house as found: low, white-sided, unremarkable from the garden. Then the finishes come off and the building tells you the truth about itself — where it was altered, what was carrying load, and what somebody in 1955 did that nobody wrote down. Temporary posts go in as walls come out.
Steel and screw jacks, holding the house up.
New footings and stem walls went in under and beside the original structure, with steel beams on adjustable jacks carrying the building while the concrete cured. This is the stage that decides whether the finished floor is flat and whether the doors still shut in ten years, and it is the stage a homeowner never sees on anybody’s website.
A new plan, and ceilings the old house could not have carried.
With the structure sorted, the new floor plan went up as framing rather than as a drawing: an open living space, and vaulted ceilings where there had been a flat 1950s lid. Vaults are not a finish decision. They change how the roof carries, which is why they are settled at this stage and not chosen later from a catalogue.
A 1950s house does not have anywhere to put a duct.
This is the quiet advantage of going back to studs. Heating, water, waste and wiring all get designed into the framing instead of being threaded through whatever gaps a previous era left behind — new air handler, new duct runs sized for the new plan, PEX supply, and services brought in from the street in a trench cut through frozen ground.
The porch is what changes the whole street view.
Wrapped, re-roofed, re-clad — and then the piece that does the real work: a full-width gabled porch framed in timber, carried on tapered columns. Post-war ranches in Arvada were built without any front-facing depth at all. Adding four feet of covered porch is the cheapest architectural change available and the one people actually notice.
The same footprint, and a different house.
Deep blue-grey lap siding, white trim, tapered columns on stone bases, a covered patio at the back and a kitchen with a dark slate mosaic behind it. Compare it with frame 01 of the Before section — the lot, the footprint and the address never changed.
Slate, stone and a long uninterrupted run.
A dark slate mosaic set behind the worktop, tall pantry cabinetry taken to the ceiling rather than stopping short, and a stacked-stone fireplace with a black surround. All of it possible because the walls behind them were built to suit, rather than worked around.
Down-to-the-studs is where surprises live.
Every whole-home remodel of this depth uncovers something the drawings did not predict. That is not a failure of planning; it is what happens when you open up a house built seventy years ago by people who did not document anything. The only question that matters is what happens in the hour after you find it.
Who decides, and how fast
When the designer, the engineer and the builder work for three companies, an unexpected find becomes a three-way conversation, a change order and a fortnight. On a design-build contract it is a decision made on site by the people who priced the job. The discovery is the same; the cost of it is not.
Structure first, selections later
Vaulted ceilings, the open plan and the porch are all structural decisions dressed as aesthetic ones. Settling them before framing — rather than after, when a homeowner sees the space and asks — is the difference between a change that costs nothing and one that costs a fortnight of rework.
Rebuilding the services is most of the value
What a buyer sees is siding, columns and a kitchen. What they are actually paying for is a house whose heating, plumbing and wiring were designed for the plan they are standing in, rather than inherited from 1955 and patched four times since. It is invisible, it is most of the budget, and it is the part that determines what the house is like to own.
The elevation is the cheapest part of the transformation
Siding, trim, columns and a porch gable are a small fraction of a project like this — and they are the entire difference in how the house is perceived from the street. Doing the structural work without spending that last small percentage is the most common way a large remodel ends up under-selling itself.
If you are weighing a whole-home remodel in the Denver Front Range, ask any contractor to show you their foundation and shoring photographs before you look at a single finished kitchen. You can also see a second-storey pop-top in Lakewood, an underpinned addition in Englewood and a ground-level addition in Denver.
Bring us the house that is nearly right.
We will look at what is standing, what it can carry and what your lot allows — then tell you honestly whether it is a remodel or a rebuild. It starts with a short phone consult, not a sales visit — and if it looks like a fit, we come out and look properly.
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