They needed a big change

Eight years ago, Jenna and John Conley moved into their six-bedroom Mount Airy house, built in 1812.

The 4,000-square-foot Federal-style dwelling was adorned with Palladian-style windows and leaded glass.

It also had some monumental problems, such as a tiny kitchen and a badly located mudroom.

John, a sales representative for a firm that manufactures solar panels, and Jenna, a health-care marketer, had a 2-year-old at the time. (Their second came later.) They were far too busy to spend much time worrying about the fact that their mudroom occupied the space between their small kitchen and their yard, and that the entrance to the kitchen from the driveway went through their laundry room.

Then, about a year ago, they found that they could ignore the problems no longer.

"The mudroom floorboards were giving way under people's feet," Jenna says. "We were afraid that someone would fall into the basement."

She called Brian Osborne, who owns a construction company known for using recycled lumber, such as redwood, that has been salvaged from dismantled projects. Because of conservation regulations, redwood and other lumber in its category can no longer be cut and sold.

Osborne contacted architect Jim Cassidy, and the two, along with the Conleys, worked out a design plan.

"Our firm is based on collaboration between clients, contractors, everyone," Cassidy says.

The conclusion: install a 610-square-foot addition to the rear of two-century-old house. Discussions began in January, and the work was completed in June.

The renovation plan called for the mudroom wall to be removed and the kitchen almost doubled in size.

The laundry room, which had been an entrance to the house from the east side, would become the mudroom, with a new interior door through which the dining room could be entered.

The elephant in the room was a thick stone wall, the original rear wall of the house - a former owner had added the mudroom behind it - that held up half the structure. A 24-inch-thick supporting wall that would have to be removed to combine the two rooms.

To shore up the house after the stone wall was eliminated, Osborne says, he installed two 800-pound steel beams, about a ton of steel.

These days, the Conley house features a bright blue-and-white kitchen with natural-wood accents. A large, rectangular vent in the ceiling above the stove is covered with reclaimed redwood that Osborne bought from salvaged water tanks.

"The reclaimed wood actually has better grain as it gets older and looks better than new materials," he says.

Salvaged heart pine covers the kitchen floor. Tiles originally from a Manhattan subway station form the floor of the new mudroom. The dining room, which opens from the kitchen, now has a new floor of white oak.

Behind the kitchen, the space opened up behind the old mudroom has become a terrace.

"We think the terrace provides an additional room to the house in much of the year," Jenna says.

The kitchen has become the "warm family center" that she says she always wanted - a point of the rehabilitation project.

A black-and-white portrait of Rita, the family's black Labrador retriever, hangs on the wall and overlooks the new space.

Jenna says she particularly likes the fact that a new window over the sink "allows me to look out at the garden when I am doing something boring, like washing dishes."

The whole family now uses the kitchen as they never could before, she says.

"My husband works at home in the kitchen sometimes, and the kids do their homework here and I love to cook," she says.

At the rear of the house, Jenna can watch her children, now 10 and 6 years old, at play - especially when they climb up to the red steel treehouse that Jenna's father, Charly Smail, built for his grandchildren.

"The house now seems to have something for all of us," she says.