Houses settle as they age. When they settle unevenly, as they did in this older home, there are interesting challenges to remodeling efforts. Here is how we solved the problem in an older house in West Falmouth. The owner asked for a complete remodeling of the ground floor. We opened the kitchen to the living room. We moved a wall and put in a staircase to a new upstairs. We moved the front door from the middle of the living room wall to a space that is now a front hall. Of course, whereever we removed a wall there were gaps in the flooring. In some spots there was patch work to be done because some floorboards had begun to rot. And in the bedroom, the back corner of the house settled a bit more than the rest of the house. 

We refinished the old kitchen floor, but had to install new flooring in the dining area.

Where a wall existed between the kitchen and the dining area, we needed to fill in the flooring. We chose to accentuate the distinction between the two areas with a lighter new board to match the dining area.

We are putting in a stairway to an open loft upstairs. This allowed us to increase the width of a narrow corridor to the back bedroom on the ground floor. We filled the space in the flooring with a lighter board than the old flooring to create an accent.

We moved the front door from the middle of the living room to create an entryway where there had been a room. We've delineated the space by creating a "rug" in wood. The whole has an open inviting appeal, while you can see by the pattern of the grain in the floor which "room" you are in.

The back bedroom was once two tiny rooms. Now, when you enter the room you are in an area with a closet on one side and the bedroom proper on the other. You step down slightly to get into the bedroom, while the entry area becomes a "dressing room" with the closet on one wall and possibly a dresser along the wall opposite the door.

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