Home Remodeling in Thornton, PA
Careful remodeling for the historic village of Thornton and the country houses on the roads around it.
Thornton began as Yellow House, the inn and tavern George Gray opened around 1750 on the road between York and Philadelphia. Travelers stopped for the livery, the blacksmith and the wheelwright, and after the Battle of the Brandywine the village's houses sheltered soldiers of both armies. The Yellow House became the post office in 1832. The Thornton Village Historic District, listed on the National Register on November 14, 2006, covers 12 acres at Thornton and Glen Mills roads and thirteen contributing buildings from 1750 to 1855 in Colonial and Federal styles: seven houses, a store, a blacksmith shop and a barn both converted, three stables or carriage houses and two frame sheds, most of them facing Glen Mills Road.
The village spans parts of Thornbury, Concord and Middletown townships, and most of the land around it is Thornbury, which grew from 3,284 people in 1970 to 8,028 in 2010. Dawson's serves the village and the township roads around it, about fifty minutes from Middletown.
Thornbury Township's Code Department
Houses on the Thornbury side file with the township's Code Department, which takes applications through an online permit system. Its requirements call for two sets of plans carrying the original seal and signature of a Pennsylvania registered architect or engineer wherever the code calls for one, and that covers most additions and structural changes. Thornbury also has a Historical Commission that meets monthly and keeps an inventory of the township's historic resources. For a house inside the village district or on that inventory, an early conversation with the commission saves a redesign later. Addresses on the Concord or Middletown side of Thornton go to those townships instead.
Inside an 18th-century village house
A Thornton village house is stone or frame, with thick walls, a low second floor, plaster, wide board floors and a kitchen that has moved at least once in two hundred years. Remodeling one means a kitchen fitted to the room as it is, instead of a room forced around stock cabinets; plumbing routed through closets and floor cavities rather than cut through old walls; and a bathroom set on a leveled, stiffened subfloor with ventilation the house never had. Sound sash is repaired. Rotten sash is replaced in wood with the same muntin pattern. An addition goes to the back or the side, smaller than the original and plainly newer.
Country houses on the township roads
Away from the crossroads the houses are farmhouses with later wings and larger houses from the 1970s through the 2000s on wooded lots. Those later houses are ready for their first full remodel: a kitchen opened to the family room, a primary bath rebuilt, a walk-out basement finished where the lot falls away, and an aging deck replaced with one framed to the current code.
Dawson's serves Thornton for kitchens, bathrooms, basements, additions, windows, siding, decks and carpentry.
Nearby, Dawson's also serves Concordville, Cheyney, Glen Mills and Chester Heights.
Thornton is part of the Delaware County, PA service area.
Ready to plan a remodel in Thornton?
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.