Home Remodeling in North Wilmington, DE
Remodeling for the postwar neighborhoods of Brandywine Hundred, north of the city line.
North Wilmington is the name on the map for Brandywine Hundred, the unincorporated suburbs between the city line and the Pennsylvania border. It was built in one generation. The population of Brandywine Hundred grew 142 percent during the 1950s as people moved out of the city and commuted back in. Graylyn Crest went up between 1955 and 1957; the Woodlawn Trustees, the area's largest landowner, laid out Sharpley and Woodbrook in the middle of that decade and kept subdividing into the 1970s; Chalfonte, Brandywood and Fairfax filled the ground between Concord Pike, Marsh Road and Silverside Road with split-levels and ranchers on modest lots.
Those houses are now sixty to seventy years old, and the plans that felt modern in 1957 are what homeowners here want to change: a galley kitchen closed off from the dining room, a lower-level family room with a low ceiling, one full bath and a powder room for a house with four bedrooms. Dawson's serves all of Brandywine Hundred, and the split-level is the house that defines it.
Working in a split-level
A Brandywine Hundred split-level has three or four short flights of stairs and a lower level half below grade. The kitchen sits on the main floor with the living and dining rooms, and opening it into the dining room is the change that makes the house feel current, because the wall between them almost never carries load. The lower level is the other opportunity: with a proper moisture check, insulation on the block walls and a ceiling plan that works around the ductwork, it becomes a family room with a real bathroom instead of a paneled den.
Bathrooms in these houses are small, and the good plans borrow from a hall closet or shift a door rather than push walls out. The postwar houses in Graylyn Crest and Chalfonte were built with three or four bedrooms and one and a half baths, so adding a full bath on the bedroom level is a common wish and usually possible within the existing footprint.
Permits through New Castle County
Brandywine Hundred is unincorporated, so every permit goes to the Licensing Division of New Castle County's Department of Land Use rather than to the City of Wilmington. That is a different form, fee schedule and inspection routine from the city ten minutes south, and it applies to the whole area from Edgemoor up to the state line, the small incorporated towns of Bellefonte and the Ardens included, where the town's zoning review or the Arden Trustees' letter comes first. Most of the 1950s neighborhoods have civic associations rather than covenanted homeowners associations, so exterior changes are usually a permit question, not an approval question.
Windows and siding on sixty-year-old houses
Many houses here have had one round of replacement windows and one of siding, decades ago. The split-level's large front picture window and its bank of bedroom windows are where energy loss shows, and replacing them with double-hung or casement units sized to the original openings is straightforward work. Siding replacement on these houses often turns up the original sheathing and gives a chance to add house wrap and insulation the 1957 builder never used.
Ready to plan a remodel in North Wilmington?
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.