Whole House Remodeling in Lakewood, OH
Custom Whole House Remodeling for Lakewood Homes
Ask a Lakewood homeowner what separates a real renovation from a repaint and the answer arrives in one phrase: completely redone including electric and plumbing. That is the first question buyers here put to a listing, and it is the standard this city grades against. Whole house remodeling in Lakewood is the decision to meet that standard in a single pass instead of over a decade.
Most owners reach that decision the long way around. A century home gets renovated one trade at a time, in whatever order the failures arrive. One owner laid the sequence out plainly: electric and insulating, roof and gutters. Siding, furnace, chimney repair next on the list. Every stage is reasonable by itself. Stacked up, they cost more than the single project would have, because the plaster gets opened, closed, and opened again, and finish work paid for in year two comes back out in year five to reach the wiring behind it.
The transacting market rewards the other approach. Lakewood homes sold at a median of $348,791 over the three months ending May 2026, up 7.5% year over year, with 167 homes sold in May 2026 and a median 27 days on market. Houses that can answer the electric-and-plumbing question with a yes are the ones moving at that pace, and the ones that cannot are the ones sitting through the second price cut.
Hurst Design Build Remodel has designed and built across Greater Cleveland since 1997, from an office on Center Ridge Road in Westlake. Designers, project managers, and carpenters all draw a paycheck from the same company, so the house you approve on paper is the house our crews frame. If you want the wider view of full-home work first, our whole house remodeling overview explains the approach outside of any one city.
Why Choose Hurst for Your Lakewood Whole House Remodeling
Because Lakewood researches a contractor before it calls one, and we hold up to the research. This is a design-literate city out of proportion to its median income: 55.3% of adults hold a bachelor’s degree or higher and 58.5% of employed residents work in management, business, science and arts occupations. Local threads about remodeling resolve into named referrals almost every time, and the highest praise handed out in them goes to firms that stayed honest when honesty cost them the job.
That audience is also a compact one. Homeownership here runs 44.4%, or 11,927 owner-occupied of 26,876 occupied units, so the addressable market is the owner-occupied minority and word travels fast inside it. Pat and Dan Hurst founded this firm in 1997. Roughly 45 people work in house today, designers and project managers and carpenters, and completed work carries a 5-year workmanship warranty plus a 1-year anniversary inspection.
The housing varies far more than the street grid suggests. Clifton Park is roughly 250 homes, largely late-19th-century Victorian mansions, laid out on winding streets that break from the citywide pattern. Victorian Village on the east end takes its name from the large homes on Grace, Clarence and Cohassett Avenues, built in the early 1900s as residences for executives of the National Carbon Company. The West End runs along the Rocky River Reservation of the Cleveland Metroparks. Those three neighborhoods hold most of the large-footprint houses where a full reinvention pencils out, and 4,707 households citywide earn $150,000 or more.
What we will not do is solve an old house by replacing it in pieces. Lakewood owners warn each other about being pushed toward window replacement, spray-in insulation and plastic siding, and they are right to. Original wood windows, plaster, and interior trim are most of the reason these houses are worth the investment in the first place. We restore and repair that layer wherever it is sound, then bring everything behind it into this century. The Beck Center for the Arts, the largest theater and arts center on Cleveland’s West Shore, anchors a city that has spent a hundred years taking its own architecture seriously. We build for that audience.
You can also verify us before we ever arrive. Contractors register with the City of Lakewood annually on a January 1 to December 31 cycle, and the city publishes a public Find A Registered Contractor directory, filterable by trade, so registration and insurance are a matter of record rather than a claim on a website.
Lakewood Whole House Remodeling Portfolio
We publish work from this city, and none of it is labeled a whole-home remodel yet. That is worth stating plainly rather than dressing up work from the next suburb over as local.
What we do have here sits inside exactly the housing stock this page is about. The Lakewood Historic Home Renovation documents a full renovation of a historic house on these streets. Lakewood Historic Charm Kitchen and Lakewood Historic Kitchen Reinvented are both kitchens carved out of century-home floor plans, which is the hardest single room in any whole-home scope in this city. The 1920s kitchen was drawn as a service room at the back of the plan, so fixing it moves walls, appliances, venting, and usually the stair.
For full-scope work we point next door and say so. A brick colonial addition on Stratford Ave in Rocky River sits across the Rocky River valley from the West End, in the same era and idiom of construction. A contemporary project on West 5th Street in Tremont ran in a comparably dense, comparably old street grid, where lot width and neighbor access shaped the build as much as the drawings did. Both are honest analogues. Neither is a Lakewood address, and we will not pretend otherwise.
The mix matters to any portfolio claim here. Only 35.3% of local housing units are single-family detached, 10,275 of 29,105 units, and two-unit structures account for 4,895 of 29,105 units. A whole-home project in this city is nearly as likely to be the owner’s half of a Lakewood double as a detached colonial, and those are genuinely different jobs: one of them has a tenant, a shared wall, and a separate set of mechanicals in the equation from the first drawing.
Our Whole House Remodeling Process
Four phases, and in a pre-war house the first one decides how the other three go.
Phase 1
Discover
We walk the house and open what needs opening. In a Lakewood home that means locating knob and tube, original supply lines, and obsolete panels before anyone signs a construction contract, rather than finding them in week two of demolition. Conditions become line items in a plan instead of change orders in month four. This is the phase that answers the question every owner here is actually asking.
Phase 2
Design
Drawings, selections, structural coordination, and a number that reflects what the Discover phase turned up. The estimate is developed here, with the scope written down in enough detail that both sides can see it. If something changes later, you hear about it the day it comes up, not at closeout.
Phase 3
Build
Permits run through the City of Lakewood Division of Housing and Building, and the Division inspects all structures in the city either by mandatory inspection or on request. We assemble the set, file it, and meet the inspector. Lots here are narrow enough that the city maintains a formal procedure for entering adjoining properties, so neighbor access is a scheduled step rather than a favor asked mid-project. Late-season exterior concrete can require the city’s Concrete Cold Weather Waiver, and freeze-thaw cycling off Lake Erie sets when masonry and porch work belong on the calendar. Most families stay in the house, so we phase by floor or by wing, keep a working kitchen in the plan, and hold the line on dust control and daily cleanup.
Phase 4
Sustain
The 5-year workmanship warranty starts at completion, and we come back a year later for an anniversary inspection. On a whole house remodeling project that visit matters more than it does on a single room, because a century home that has just had every system replaced deserves a second look after it has been through one full Cleveland winter.
Start to finish, whole house remodeling with Hurst is one team, one plan, and one point of accountability.
What Does Whole House Remodeling Cost in Lakewood?
A whole house remodel here is priced by how much of the house you touch at once, and in a pre-1940 Lakewood colonial that usually means all of it. Doing everything in one pass changes what drives the number: the systems behind the plaster carry more of it than the finishes in front of the plaster do.
The table below shows where each scope sits in the range and what it typically covers in this city.
| Scope | Where it sits in the range | Typical Lakewood house |
|---|---|---|
| Systems and main floor inside the original footprint |
The lower end | A smaller colonial, or the owner’s half of a double, with the rewire and plumbing replacement included |
| Kitchen, baths and the main-floor plan reworked |
The middle | A complete rewire and plumbing replacement behind a reorganized ground floor |
| The above plus an attic or third-floor conversion |
The upper middle | Envelope work added, and living space gained inside the existing roof |
| Period-correct restoration at full scale |
Well above the rest | Clifton Park and Victorian Village houses, with matched millwork and restored original detail |
The loudest complaint in this market is that nobody will talk about money at all, and homeowners say outright they would accept a high number if it let them sequence a multi-year plan. So we talk about it. Scope and where a project is likely to sit get discussed openly at the design consultation, and the estimate itself is developed during the design phase, once we know what is actually behind your plaster. That order is what makes a figure durable rather than decorative, and it is why we will not put arithmetic on a house we have not opened.
There is a ceiling worth naming out loud. Against a median sale price of $348,791, a top-of-table reinvention outruns the citywide market. It works where the houses and the buyers support it, which in Lakewood means Clifton Park, Victorian Village and the lakefront. Everywhere else, the honest move is a tighter scope that finishes the systems and the main floor completely and leaves the third floor for a later year. We would rather say that in the first meeting than discover it with you at appraisal.
Schedule Your Design Consultation
Homeowners here say the missing piece is a straight conversation early enough to sequence around. Ask for a design consultation on (440) 234-5656. Every floor gets read, from the panel to the roof deck, and you leave knowing the scope a decade-long plan would actually need.
Frequently Asked Questions: Whole House Remodeling in Lakewood
We have been renovating this house one project at a time. Does doing it all at once actually save money?
Usually yes, though the saving shows up mostly in what you never pay for twice. Sequenced work re-opens the same plaster, re-mobilizes the same trades, and buries finishes that later have to come back out to reach wiring or supply lines. A single whole house remodeling project touches each wall once. It also concentrates the disruption into one defined window instead of spreading it across a decade of weekends, which for most families turns out to matter more than the arithmetic does.
How do you find knob and tube and original plumbing before we sign a construction contract?
We open selective areas during design, not during demolition. In a Lakewood house that means pulling access at the panel, in the basement, and at a handful of points behind plaster where the original runs are predictable from the floor plan. Whatever we find goes into the drawings and into the number. The complaint we hear constantly in this city is that conditions surface as change orders at the end of a job. Running the Discover phase before commitment is the fix, and it is the reason design-build exists.
Can you modernize the systems without stripping the original character out of the house?
Yes, and that is the entire discipline here. Original wood windows can usually be restored, weatherstripped, and paired with storm units rather than replaced outright. Plaster can be repaired. Interior trim can be matched and extended where a wall has to move. Rewiring, replumbing, insulation, and mechanicals all happen behind that layer, which is precisely where a hundred years of upgrades belong. The house should look like itself when we leave and perform like it was finished last year.
How much of the house can we keep living in while the work runs?
Most of it, most of the time, provided we phase it that way from the start. We typically work floor by floor or wing by wing, keep a functioning or temporary kitchen in the plan, and protect the routes your family uses every day. Tell us early that you intend to stay. It changes the sequence, the temporary utility plan, and the schedule, and it is far cheaper to design around than to improvise around once the walls are open.
Is there a point where a full remodel over-improves a Lakewood house?
There is, and the line moves by neighborhood. Against a citywide median sale price near $348,791, a top-of-range reinvention only makes sense where the houses and the buyers support it, which in practice means Clifton Park, Victorian Village and the lakefront. Across the rest of the city the stronger plan is often a tighter whole house remodeling scope that finishes the systems and the main floor completely and holds the third floor for later. We will tell you which side of that line your house sits on.
Start Your Lakewood Whole House Remodeling Project
Start with a design consultation at the house. Call Hurst Design Build Remodel at (440) 234-5656, or request a consultation and we will get a designer and a project manager to the house together.
Bring the list, including the parts you have been putting off. The point of a single whole house remodeling project is that the list stops being a ten-year queue and becomes one plan, on one schedule, with one accountable team standing behind it.
Every century home in Lakewood eventually poses the same question. Is there a better way to do this? There always is. That is The Fine Art of Reinventing Home.