Home Remodeling in Toughkenamon, PA
Remodeling for the old village houses of Toughkenamon and the homes on the roads around it.
Before 1852 there were five buildings at the corner of Newark Road and the Baltimore Pike. That year Isaac Slack, knowing the railroad would come through the valley, began buying land and building: a brick wheel and spoke factory, a stone sawmill run by steam, and houses for the men who worked in them. Fourteen houses went up in 1860 alone. In 1863 he built a station, platform and water tower and gave them to the Philadelphia and Baltimore Central Railroad so its trains would stop, and by 1870 about 300 people lived in the village. The name became official in 1868, when a post office opened at the station.
A creamery carried the local economy from 1882, and then mushrooms did, with a basket factory, supply houses and a cannery in the village. Italian families replaced Slack's Scots-Irish workers, and later Hispanic families, many of them mushroom workers, made their homes in houses already a century old. That is still the housing: small village houses on tight lots along the Pike, with newer houses on the roads that lead away from it. Dawson's serves Toughkenamon from Middletown, about forty minutes away.
New Garden Township issues the permits
Toughkenamon is a village, not a municipality, and it has no permit desk of its own. New Garden Township's Department of Community Development and Safety handles it, enforcing the township's zoning, subdivision, property maintenance, rental inspection and fire codes, with a building inspector and codes official on the construction side. The township's rule is short: a building permit comes before anyone puts up, alters or enlarges a building, the application goes on the township's own form, and a plot plan goes with it. Since the same department runs rental inspections, a rented village house has the township looking at it twice.
The R-3 district made for the village
The village has a zoning district written for it. New Garden's R-3 Toughkenamon Residential District exists to allow higher densities and a variety of housing types in a village setting, to let neighborhood shops sit among the houses, and to help turn mushroom buildings that are out of production into uses that suit a neighborhood. Single houses and semi-detached houses are allowed by right where public water and sewer reach the lot. In 2020 the township approved a streetscape and transportation plan for the village covering traffic, sidewalks, parking and more kinds of housing. For a homeowner, an addition or a second story on a small village lot is measured against the R-3 rules, not those of the township's lower-density districts.
Remodeling a Slack-era house
Houses built for workers in the 1850s to 1880s were plain, so rooms are small and the kitchen and bath have usually been redone more than once without much of a plan. The changes that matter are a kitchen rebuilt around a sensible work triangle with new wiring, a bathroom taken down to the studs and rebuilt with proper waterproofing and an exhaust fan, and a cellar or crawl space checked for water before anything is finished or stored there. Outside, tired siding and old single-pane windows are the obvious upgrades, sized to the original openings so the house still sits right among its neighbors.
Dawson's serves Toughkenamon for kitchens, bathrooms, basements, additions, windows, siding, decks and carpentry.
Nearby, Dawson's also serves Avondale, Kennett Square, Landenberg and West Grove.
Toughkenamon is part of the Chester County, PA service area.
Ready to plan a remodel in Toughkenamon?
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.