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An attic was transformed into a master bedroom and sitting area, master bath, laundry facilities and home office in this 1936 bungalow. [Times photo: Brian Baer] Room at the top By JUDY STARK © St. Petersburg Times, published May 9, 1998 or all their historic and architectural charm, older homes often lack the features homeowners want today -- soaring spaces, luxury baths, storage. What to do? Take a look at Exhibit A, a 1936 vernacular bungalow in the Old Northeast section of St. Petersburg. The owners, a professional couple, wanted to "preserve the architectural integrity" and "respect the age of the house and its spirit." Yet they wanted a master suite, a home office and plenty of storage. They turned to remodeling contractor Don Strobel of Strobel Building Co. in St. Petersburg, and the result is 1,000 square feet of new space that looks as if it has always been there. In fact, it has. When the owners bought the house in 1996, they climbed a ladder into the attic of their story-and-a-half home, looked around and decided that some day it might yield the extra living space they knew they wanted to add to the 1,600 square feet on the first floor. A family friend, city engineer Fred Dargahi, examined the space and told them, "This is an A-frame. You can do anything up here." The owners (who asked not to be named in this story) entertain often, have frequent house guests and wanted a retreat that afforded more privacy than the original first-floor master bedroom. They gave Strobel this caveat: to create their new space "without moving the walls, raising the roof or impinging on the outdoor space." Their yard is small, and already they had turned their two-car garage into a guest house, sacrificing storage. "We inherited the original framing of the roof lines," Strobel said, "and reshaped the interior but not the exterior" in an exercise in the control of intersecting planes. "Some of the more interesting angles were almost a given, because of the way the gables are framed," Strobel said. Others came to life at the drywall stage, or when the project was finished: "You can draw it on paper, but it just doesn't show . . . to see all the interest created by those intersecting angles and lines." The project took first place in the category of residential interior remodeling in this year's Florida West Coast Remodeling Awards sponsored by the Tampa Bay Area chapter of the National Association of the Remodeling Industry. ////////////// A number of technical challenges presented themselves. First, how to make a living space above a ceiling that wasn't built for it? Strobel added 2 by 10 floor joists (sistered onto the existing 2 by 6s) that spanned the width of the house, effectively creating a new floor. The spans were engineered to bear the upstairs weight, including a clawfoot tub, a big glass-enclosed shower and a washer and dryer. Locating the stairs was another consideration. Strobel brought them down into the first floor into what was once the master bedroom. That area is now a music/sitting room, with built-in storage for books, CDs and a sound system. French doors open into the living room. Strobel created zoned air conditioning for the first and second floors, and gave the new bathroom and laundry area their own water heater. "Keeping the house in its historic vein was very important" to the homeowners, Strobel said. The bathroom centerpiece, a big clawfoot tub ordered from the Renovator's Supply catalog, set the tone they wanted. The glass enclosure makes the modern shower seem to disappear into one corner; a private toilet room in another (complete with an Eljer toilet designed to be placed in a corner) emphasized the angles of the space. The house revealed some of its history during the remodeling. A silver-handled World War I infantry swagger stick, the possession of a previous owner, Col. Grosvenor L. Townsend, turned up. (The owners offered a bounty to workers who removed nine tons of cellulose insulation if they found the stick's missing silver tip, but it never surfaced.) The joists were full of golf balls that the owners think another former owner, Jack Puryear, hit while practicing his swing in the attic. Puryear was the city's longtime director of parks and recreation who is commemorated in a park on 62nd Avenue NE in St. Petersburg. The attic project was only the most recent restoration/remodeling. Since they moved in, the owners have replaced all the aluminum windows with new double-glazed Pella wood windows. They stripped all the woodwork and had damaged sections of the hardwood floors replaced, artfully "rewoven" so the patches blend in seamlessly. They removed aluminum siding (and several layers of paint) from the original cedar siding on both the house and the garage, had the house painted and replaced the asbestos roof shingles. Next on their list is remodeling the kitchen. ///////////// Early on, while they and Strobel were still sketching and planning, the owners hung sheets in the attic to figure out exactly where the new walls might go. That's an approach Strobel endorses: "A lot of times it's a visual thing, and you can't just look at it in pencil and paper. It takes going up there and doing something like that" -- hanging sheets -- "or putting a 2 by 4 up on the wall or laying it on the floor, to understand the real size of the thing we're talking about." The sloping ceilings -- between 9 and 10 feet high -- end in knee walls, which Strobel carefully customized, moving access doors "so pieces of furniture would fit, and you wouldn't slam your head into the wall." Most of the storage space behind the knee walls is air-conditioned. "On the day of framing," Strobel recalled, "we were asking ourselves, "Should we put this here -- or here?' It's the custom nature of what we do: I know it says this on the print, but maybe we should do this or that." Surprises turned up in the process: "You build in little things to create a character spot," Strobel said -- set-in shelves, for example ("I pressed for nooks and crannies," the wife says). He made a feature out of the door from the master bedroom into the new bath: "We couldn't quite get the whole door frame in, so we cut a 5-inch section off the door," and the resulting angle echoes the planes and angles throughout the room. At the top of the stairs, the brick chimney was left exposed. Strobel painted it and placed a light where illumination "will cascade down to get the texture out of the brick," to contrast with drywall. The owners remembered a window they had loved in a former home in Massachusetts, two side lights stepping up to a taller central window, and that was the motif they used for windows in the office, on the north end, and in the bedroom, on the south. A Velux skylight provides light and access in the master bedroom. "Your house is a private space that's a reflection of your personality," the husband said. "You spend more time there than anywhere else." This couple wanted "lightness, ventilation and space." Their airy new aerie provides all that, and more. Business | Citrus | Commentary | Entertainment Hernando | Floridian | Obituaries | Pasco | Sports State | Tampa Bay | World & Nation © Copyright 1998 St. Petersburg Times. All rights reserved.