Home Remodeling in Chester County, PA

Chester County is 73 municipalities, and the housing sorts itself by which one you are in. The boroughs are old: Kennett Square and Oxford are late-19th-century grids, West Chester's downtown is brick rowhouses and twins under the eye of a review board, and Coatesville, the county's only city, is rowhouses and duplexes built for the steel mill. The townships around them were farmland into the 1970s, so the typical township house is a 1980s or 1990s colonial on a former field, and since 2000 the pattern has been 55-and-over communities in the southern townships and townhomes around the boroughs.

Remodeling here means knowing two kinds of house well. A borough house has plaster walls, a narrow lot, a shared wall or a three-foot side yard, and often a historic commission with a say over the windows. A township house is a 1985 to 2005 colonial with a builder-grade kitchen, an unfinished basement and a homeowners association with an architectural committee.

Pennsylvania has no unincorporated land, and Chester County issues no building permits. Every borough and township administers the statewide Uniform Construction Code itself, and many hire a certified third-party agency for plan review and inspections. So the permit desk changes at every municipal line. Kennett Square Borough and Kennett Township are two offices. West Chester Borough and West Goshen Township are two more. A Chadds Ford address can be in either of two townships in two different counties. Dawson's serves the county from Middletown, Delaware, about forty minutes to Kennett Square and an hour to Downingtown.