Some houses ask you to start over. This one asked us to start under it.
Built in 1924, this Cullman cottage had the kind of character you cannot manufacture: a steep roofline, deep porches, and nearly a century of history in its bones. But after decades of settling, the house needed more than a refresh. It needed to come up, literally, so a real foundation could go in underneath it. Once it was lifted and set back down, the real work began.
Rather than start from scratch, we kept what made the house feel like itself. The original hardwood floors, worn soft by nearly a hundred years of use, were salvaged and now run through the entire upstairs. It is the kind of detail you cannot buy new, and it grounds the whole renovation in the home's original character.
The footprint grew where it needed to. We extended the sides of the house to add a main level laundry room and a primary closet and bathroom, the kind of everyday function older homes almost never have built in. To pick up the extra square footage for a larger primary bedroom, we cantilevered the room out over the garage, a structural solution that let the house grow up instead of out.
Our favorite part of this project might be the one thing we almost lost. A wisteria vine in the backyard had been quietly taking over the house for years, climbing further into the siding with every season. Most contractors would have cleared it out without a second thought. We could not do it. That vine had earned its place. Instead of removing it, we built a new arbor to give it something proper to hold onto, and it is thriving there now, exactly where it should be.
That is the balance we try to strike in every project: know what to change and what to leave alone. A 1924 cottage does not need to look new to feel right. It needs good bones, room to breathe, and a design that respects where it came from while giving the people living there everything they actually need.
This is the first home we are featuring in a new series on our blog: real before and after stories from projects across Cullman, North Alabama, and Smith Lake. Every home has a story like this one, somewhere between what it used to be and what it is becoming. We just get to help tell it.
