Home Remodeling in Kenton, DE
Remodeling for the 19th-century houses of Kenton, Delaware, and the farm roads around the town.
Kenton is a crossroads town. In the late 1700s Phillip Lewis began selling lots where the road from Dover to Maryland's upper Eastern Shore crossed the road from Smyrna to the lower shore. The place was Lewistown at first and Kenton by 1806, and it grew into a small trading center for the farms around it. It incorporated in 1887 and took its current charter in 1991. What sets it apart is how much of the old village still stands. The Kenton Historic District, listed on the National Register in 1983, takes in 28 buildings on about nine acres along Commerce Street, and more than a dozen houses and farms in and around town were listed on their own that same year.
Most of the district went up in the 1870s and 1880s, Queen Anne houses among them, but the oldest, the Wilds-Cooper House, dates to about 1780. That range is what remodeling in Kenton is like. You might be living in a house with two centuries behind it, or in one built for a farm family a hundred years later. Dawson's serves Kenton and the roads around it from Middletown, about twenty miles north.
Town approval, then a 45-day clock
Kenton handles the first step itself. You file the town's building permit application with a plot plan, and for an addition or a new house the town also wants floor plans and elevations, on top of whatever Kent County asks for. The county then issues the building permit and sends its inspectors. The detail that catches people is the clock: the town's approval lapses 45 days after it is granted if the county permit has not been pulled by then. Having the county submission ready before the town signs off keeps an addition from going back through the town a second time. Addresses with a Kenton mailing address but outside the town line skip the town step and deal with the county alone.
Houses from the 1870s and 1880s
A Kenton house from the town's busy decades has tall first-floor rooms, trim milled for it, and in the Queen Anne houses a porch with turned posts and spindlework. The kitchens were never laid out for modern appliances, so a kitchen remodel starts with the plan and with the wiring and plumbing that have to reach it. Bathrooms often need their floor joists looked at before any tile goes down, and old plaster walls take patience when a new fixture needs blocking behind them.
National Register listing by itself does not put a review step on a private owner's remodel, so the exterior choices are yours. Most owners on Commerce Street still want the house to look the way it did: wood siding repaired where it can be, windows replaced with units that keep the same divided lights, and porch parts rebuilt to the old pattern. Additions look right set back behind the original house, where they read as later growth instead of competing with the front.
Ready to plan a remodel in Kenton?
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.