Martie and I started out with a two-bedroom rambler, just one floor. Then in 2003 North Star added a second floor and remodeled and expanded our kitchen. Yes, it was a major project. The new second floor has three bedrooms, including our master bedroom, and two baths and a laundry area. The kitchen remodel expanded our kitchen and our dining room and added a mud room.

The project started in June and was substantially complete by December. We lived here during the whole construction process and managed to live without a kitchen for several months. Sure, it was almost like camping, and I wouldn’t necessarily recommend going without for that long, but we did all right. We had our grill and a microwave and a hotplate, and set up stuff in the basement.

How did we find North Star? Really, it was referral, word of mouth. Joe and Jill Driscoll, whose project is also on the North Star web site, are good friends. Joe and Jill reported just how good North Star is to work with, and that really played out in what we saw too. All the guys that did work for us were really nice. We have dealt with other contractors in the past, and North Star is by comparison the greatest bunch of people. We built a house previously in Maplewood, for example, and dealt with a builder who had a number of subcontractors, some of whom were better than others, but North Star’s work was very consistent across time.

Our Golden Valley rambler is in a neighborhood with a mix of homes. We love the location, and because there is quite a bit of renovation going on in the neighborhood as a whole, we felt we could get the value out of this house by putting more into it. Plus, we needed more space because we were expanding our family. We had a son and a daughter was on the way.

North Star gutted the old kitchen, knocking out the exterior wall and expanding the space by six feet. We added all new appliances, countertops, new everything. We had wood flooring throughout the first floor, so we continued that in the kitchen and in the rest of the expansion, matching it up to the existing tongue and groove.

When we approached North Star we didn’t have a design, although we had spoken with a couple of architects. When we first thought of doing the expansion, we were thinking of just adding another bedroom and expanding the kitchen into the backyard. But the way the house was laid out on the lot, it didn’t really work. One of the architects had suggested going up, and that seemed like a much more workable option. That was the idea we brought to North Star, and Jerry Okerstrom did a design for us.

There were no big or unpleasant surprises along the way, although there were issues we had to work out. For example, the cheapest and most efficient use of space was to stack the new staircase on top of the existing stairs that led to the basement. Current building codes requirements meant we didn’t have enough space in the existing hallway and getting the required landing space meant we had to take a chunk out of the two existing bedrooms on the first floor, which was something we hadn’t anticipated.

Now the downstairs bedrooms are converted to other uses: the one is our office, while the other is a playroom for the kids.