Finding Value in Old Homes

My wife, Polly, and I were about to spend $45,000 on a fancy remodeling job for our Chevy Chase kitchen back in 1996 when we got a second opinion in the nick of time.

Forget the new cabinets, the granite countertops, genuine hardwood floors, shiny appliances and recessed lighting, said Julie Lucas, a project manager whom we met through friends. Too expensive, Lucas said.

Chez Heath's kitchen instead has industrial-strength linoleum flooring, new hardware on old cabinets, basic appliances and countertops that are a knockoff of a name brand. We saved $30,000 (and spent most of it on an ungodly expensive trip to Britain) thanks to the manager's "value engineering."

I have told that story with a preening grin on my face a million times. Ask my long-suffering friends.

So I loved it when Thomas Glass, president and founder of Glass Construction in Cleveland Park, riffed on the importance of value engineering.

Glass has built a profitable niche rehabilitating historic homes for the Washington area's rich and famous. His company specializes in everything from the 18th-century Federalist-style Georgetown townhouse requiring a facelift to the "cottage" off Connecticut Avenue in Cleveland Park that needs a new porch.

"I love those old houses," he says.

This is high-end stuff. In Glass's past 11 jobs, clients spent an average of $2.5 million each.

"Value engineering" might save me a few thousand bucks by reducing the ambition of the job. Glass's clients can knowingly save massive sums by clever substitutions. Changing a custom-made mosaic tile floor to standard stone can cut the cost by a third, for example. Another client who substituted high-quality drywall for plaster recently saved thousands.

Glass, 54, said the key to his profit is starting early with clients and architects.

"We try in most cases to get involved in projects in very early stages, like the cocktail-napkins sketches," Glass said.

If he can nip enough of his costs here to spend a little more there, and employ his labor and materials efficiently, Glass normally earns a net profit of 10 percent. Not bad when you are talking about a $2 million job.