Home Remodeling in Atglen, PA
Remodeling for the older houses near the tracks and the newer neighborhoods of Atglen borough.
Atglen began in the 1720s beside the mills on the Octoraro and Valley creeks, where settlers came for the water power, and then it moved. When the Philadelphia and Columbia Railroad was finished in 1834, the settlement shifted north across Valley Creek toward the tracks. By 1840 people called it Penningtonville, and the post office took that name on March 15, 1842. A boom in the 1850s added three churches, general stores and several warehouses along the line. On January 3, 1876, the court in West Chester incorporated the village out of West Sadsbury Township as the Borough of Atglen. The next boom came with the Pennsylvania Railroad's Atglen and Susquehanna Branch, a low-grade freight line west to the Susquehanna River that opened in July 1906 and brought new businesses and new houses to town. Its last freight ran in 1988.
So Atglen's older houses stand close to the tracks and date from its two railroad eras, while its newer ones are in neighborhoods such as Penningtonville Meadows and Creekside Knoll. Dawson's serves the whole borough, a little over an hour from Middletown.
Permits at Borough Hall
Atglen covers less than a square mile, 0.88 of one, but it is its own borough with its own permits. Applications go in at Borough Hall on the borough's combined building and zoning permit form, and plan review and inspections are done by the outside firm the borough appoints as both its building code official and its zoning officer. The borough also seats its own planning commission and zoning hearing board, so a project that needs relief from the ordinance, such as an addition that would sit closer to a side lot line than the rules allow, is heard in Atglen, not by a township.
Houses from the railroad years
Some of the older houses near the line came with the Low Grade boom after 1906, and some are older still. They tend to have plaster walls, a narrow hall, a kitchen at the rear and one bathroom upstairs. The work that pays off: a kitchen rebuilt with the sink and range on the outside wall and the old pantry folded into the room, a bathroom that finally gets a tiled shower on a solid, level floor, and a cellar checked for water before anyone plans a laundry or storage down there. Windows are often the first exterior job, sized to the original openings so the trim still reads right from the sidewalk.
The newer neighborhoods
Penningtonville Meadows, Creekside Knoll and the other newer streets hold the borough's recent houses, and Penningtonville Meadows has its own homeowners association. The projects there are the ones a house gets once its original finishes wear: more counter and an island in the kitchen where the plan allows, a primary bath rebuilt around a walk-in shower, a basement finished into a family room, and a deck or screened porch off the back. Exterior changes in an association go to its board as well as to the borough.
Dawson's serves Atglen for kitchens, bathrooms, basements, additions, windows, siding, decks and carpentry.
Nearby, Dawson's also serves Parkesburg, Coatesville, Lincoln University and Oxford.
Atglen is part of the Chester County, PA service area.
Ready to plan a remodel in Atglen?
Call Dom with the address and the project, or send the details through the form. The walkthrough is free and the estimate comes in writing.