Plaza Midwood · 1920s bungalows and 1940s–1950s ranch, often on the same street

Two housing stocks thirty years apart sharing a street, and they fail in completely different ways.

Bungalow kitchens taken into the rear porch, ranch houses opened up between kitchen and living room, and the enclosed-porch bodge rebuilt properly.

The thing to know first

Out of plumb is normal here, and it costs money at cabinet stage

A 1926 bungalow that has settled an inch across a wall is structurally fine and will still wreck a run of tall cabinets built to a half-inch scribe. It isn't visible through plaster, so no survey finds it before demolition. We price a scribe allowance into every bungalow kitchen here and we tell you it's there. If we don't need it, it comes off the final number — that's what week twelve of the Build Ledger is.

An interior corner during demolition: a stud wall opened up beside a pale green plastered wall, an electrical box hacked out of the plaster, a taped no-smoking sign, and a date pencilled on the wall. — Week six on somebody's job. The pencil date on the plaster is how a site actually records itself — and it's the same information we put in your ledger, just legible.

What is behind the walls in Plaza Midwood

On the bungalows: shiplap sheathing, balloon framing, and walls that are rarely plumb by more than an inch over eight feet
On the post-war ranches: 2x4 exterior walls with no insulation, slab or shallow crawlspace, and low ceilings that constrain everything
Cast-iron drain stacks at the end of their life in both
Rear porches enclosed in the 1970s with no foundation worth the name

Plaza Midwood is a local historic district. Exterior work needs a Certificate of Appropriateness from the Charlotte Historic District Commission before Mecklenburg County Code Enforcement (LUESA) will issue a permit.

What it costs around here

Same ranges as everywhere else. Where you land in them is what Plaza Midwood decides.

Kitchen: $58k — $135k
Bathroom: $28k — $72k
Whole-home renovation: $180k — $650k

The age of the housing stock here is one of the biggest single levers on those numbers. Finding out which way it moves yours is what the design agreement does — $3,500 for a room, credited in full against construction.

Request the design agreement

Licensed: DEMO-GC-78412; North Carolina Licensing Board for General Contractors
Insured and bonded: General liability, $2,000,000 aggregate; Certificates come to you from the carrier, not from us
Building since: 2014; 12 years in Charlotte