Home Remodeling in Avondale, PA
Kitchen, bath and exterior work for the old houses and the newer townhomes of Avondale borough.
Avondale is a borough of half a square mile, set up by court decree in 1894 out of land that had belonged to New Garden and London Grove townships. It took its name from Avondale Farms, part of William Miller's holding, and it sits in the middle of the county's mushroom country, with more than 30 growers in the area and the American Mushroom Institute headquartered in town. The East Branch of the White Clay Creek runs through the borough from north to south, and the East Penn rail line crosses Pennsylvania Avenue and State Street beside the downtown. When the borough wrote its 2019 comprehensive plan, it counted about 400 occupied homes, and 37 percent of them dated from 1939 or earlier.
The rest came in waves: houses from the 1940s and 1950s, a thinner layer from the 1960s through the 1990s, and then the Carillon townhomes, which account for most of the jump in the borough's housing count in the 2010s. So an Avondale project is usually an old detached house or twin near Pennsylvania Avenue that needs its rooms and systems brought up to date, or a townhome due for its first real update. Dawson's serves the borough from Middletown, about forty minutes away.
The borough runs its own permits
Avondale is its own municipality, so a permit here comes from the borough office and not from London Grove or New Garden next door. The borough adopted the state's Uniform Construction Code as its building code and uses an outside code firm to run it: a building official keeps office hours at the borough on Tuesdays, and a separate code official answers zoning questions. The borough also inspects houses when they are rented and when they change hands, which is worth knowing for anyone remodeling a house to sell or to rent out.
Old houses on and off Pennsylvania Avenue
The borough's plan calls many of the houses on Pennsylvania Avenue quite old and worth protecting. A survey of an Avondale Historic District went to the state in 1999, and the district was found eligible for the National Register in 2001 but never formally nominated, so there is no review board today. Houses of that age have plaster walls, a small kitchen at the back and one bathroom added long after they were built. The work that pays off is a kitchen laid out again with new circuits and a hood vented outside, a bath stripped to the framing and rebuilt around a waterproofed shower, and windows and siding picked to keep the street's look even with no board asking for it.
Townhomes, and the creek
The Carillon townhomes, on the far side of the creek from Pennsylvania Avenue, are young enough that the jobs there are finishes: a kitchen with better storage and counters, a tiled shower in place of a tub, a deck off the back. Near the East Branch, the floodplain sets the limits. The borough's plan records repeated first-floor flooding in the apartments beside the creek and a mitigation project the borough built to reduce it, and a regional flood study of the White Clay Creek is due in early 2027. Any addition or finished lower level on a lot near the water starts with the flood map.
Dawson's serves Avondale for kitchens, bathrooms, basements, additions, windows, siding, decks and carpentry.
Nearby, Dawson's also serves Toughkenamon, West Grove, Landenberg and Kennett Square.
Avondale is part of the Chester County, PA service area.
Ready to plan a remodel in Avondale?
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.