North Star has done two jobs on our house, which was built in 1952 — first, a few years back, putting in windows, re-doing our master bedroom and bath; this last time, putting on a big front addition.

They moved the front of the house out and added a second floor on one part of the house, about 900 additional square feet. They moved one room out eight feet and another room six feet. Before this, our house had a flat roof, which was hideously ugly and had started to leak; now we have a pitched roof. Rather than put another flat roof on, we thought we’d put on a pitched roof and as long as we were doing that we thought we’d add a room.

Upstairs now is women’s world. My wife teaches at a local college, and she’s got a lot of books. Downstairs, we basically revised the whole living area and took my wife’s old office and by moving it out six feet turned it into a music room. It’s a pretty dramatic difference. While we started out with a house that looked like a double-wide trailer, we now have a pretty attractive house.

We live on Lake Johanna, where there are a lot of really expensive homes. We had a little house before, but all of a sudden we don’t anymore. Neighbors left us thank you notes in our mailbox.

I heard of North Star first from a neighbor, who’d hired them for some work. They’re great! I wouldn’t even consider this job with anybody else because we lived in the house, and everybody that came in said, “Are you still living here?” We put a staircase in the middle of the house. They ripped the whole thing open. This is a kind of job you wouldn’t do with a contractor who was showing up on a part-time basis. People would see the North Star sign and come by and say, “Well, they worked on our house. They’re wonderful, aren’t they?” There just aren’t other contractors like North Stars, not that I know of anyway.

We didn’t have an architect, just started out on a napkin, developing a rough idea, and then gave it to Jerry Okerstrom and he drew up a design. We used a lot of the principles in Sarah Susanka’s books about the small house, so now there are a lot of diagonal views in the house, a lot of views looking through three rooms. The remodel opened up everything, and we love it. We had 13 house guests for Christmas, and it didn’t feel crowded.

Before North Star did their second project, we did another project with a local architect to put a shop on the back of the house. It was a disaster because the plan would’ve covered the bedroom windows up (the architect hadn’t taken into account the height of the garage floor), and the contractor, who’d built a huge house in the neighborhood, was a disaster, with really inferior subs. It was one of those classic construction nightmares, so we vowed after that we were never going to take any chances again, and we’d go from then on with North Star.

The thing that’s really so great about North Star is that they’re very honest, very straight. If they’re not showing up, they’ll say we can’t be there tomorrow, we’ll be here Thursday instead of promising stuff they can’t deliver. I just finished a remodel job on a commercial office building I bought, and the contractor lied all the time. He’d say he was still waiting for windows to come in, and when I called the window supply company they told me they’d had ‘em in for ten days. He was just working on other stuff and didn’t want to be straight about it.

I couldn’t imagine going through that on my home job. I just wanted to be dealing with people who were ethical and honest. The North Star guys are great.