Remodeling in Catonsville, MD

Catonsville houses by the decade they were built

Catonsville grew in waves, and each wave left a different kind of house to work on.

• Before 1940. Wealthy Baltimore merchants built large Victorian and colonial summer homes here in the 19th century, and the streetcar era along Frederick Road added freestanding houses and duplexes. In Old Catonsville, between Frederick Road and Edmondson Avenue, the largest and earliest lots are on Melvin, North Beaumont and North Beechwood Avenues.
• Winters Lane. A historically African American neighborhood of vernacular wood-frame singles and duplexes, built from 1867 into the 1940s and now a National Register district of 155 properties.
• Post-war. Westview Park’s roughly 1,800 homes were built from 1955 to 1967 by the Joseph Meyerhoff Company and Monumental Properties.
• 1970s and ’80s. Woodbridge Valley’s townhouses and condos and the later subdivisions, with kitchens and baths now 40 to 50 years old unless someone has redone them.

Remodeling a pre-1940 Catonsville house

Old houses bring plaster walls, framing that doesn’t match modern lumber sizes and layers of earlier repairs. Bathrooms and kitchens are where all of that shows up at once.

For bathroom remodeling in Catonsville or kitchen remodeling in Catonsville in these homes, we plan for opening plaster walls, leveling floors that have moved over a century, and rerouting old plumbing and wiring under county trade permits. At the first visit we look at the panel and any visible piping, because in a house this age they often set the scope. Cracked plaster or water-damaged walls in other rooms can be handled in the same project; see our drywall repair page.

Outside, a Catonsville deck has to suit a house with real architectural character, and near the Patapsco valley it may need a floodplain check before design. Two details help most when you first call: roughly when the house was built, and whether it sits near a stream.

Do Catonsville’s National Register districts limit what I can do?

The listing alone doesn’t limit your project. Old Catonsville, Central Catonsville and Summit Park, and Winters Lane are National Register districts, and that listing is largely honorary as far as county review goes. The Landmarks Preservation Commission reviews exterior work only in Baltimore County historic districts and on Landmarks List properties. In Catonsville, the two county districts are individual houses, the Ahearn-Braid House and the Rest-Melby House.

What National Register status can offer is a tax break. Contributing homes may be eligible for a county property tax credit of 20% of qualified rehabilitation costs, with at least $1,000 of eligible work, for repairs like roofs, masonry, window restoration, plaster, basement waterproofing and building systems. New kitchens and baths are excluded, and approval has to come before any work starts. If you plan to apply, ask us to list repair items separately from remodeling items in the estimate.