“While we're at it...

Homeowners' plans for an exterior fix-up lead to a full-scale renovation at the West Roxbury project house. The goal: Upgrade the 19th-century house to suit their modern family

It all started with a call to the painter," says Derek Rubinoff, of his initial plan to simply scrape and repaint the worn, peeling siding on his family's 1894 house in the West Roxbury neighborhood of Boston. But the contractor took one look and saw that it wasn't just the paint that was failing: The decades-old cedar clapboards had started to rot, allowing water to deteriorate the rosin paper underneath. It would all have to go. Since the house would be stripped to the sheathing, it made sense to replace the drafty single-pane windows, too. Soon Derek, an architect who has worked on dozens of single-family homes, was drawing up plans for a whole-house renovation of his own.

While the house's footprint and room layout wouldn't change significantly, Derek's plans would improve traffic flow and relieve frustrations that his family which includes his wife, Robyn Marder, and their two teenagers, Zach and Ariahas been living with for the last nine years. To bring his vision to life, he called on local builder Deliandro Dias of Alpha Smart Builders, with whom he had worked on a previous residential project. When Dias's crew began work last September, This Old House was there, following the project as part of its 43rd television season.

On the first floor, there will still be a foyer and living room at the front of the house, a kitchen and dining area in the center, and a guest bedroom in the back, but already walls have come down to eliminate awkward bottlenecks and blocked sightlines. A load-bearing wall that ran down the middle of the house, separating the hallway and dining room, is gone, replaced with a beefy laminated veneer lumber (LVL) beam for support. A second support beam, perpendicular to the first, took the place of a load-bearing wall and an old masonry chimney between the kitchen and dining room.