The Yarmouth business RennDuPrat is holding a public open house at its show home on Saturday, Aug. 12, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
For more than a year this home has been a side project for RennDuPrat, located in south Yarmouth, which has been busy with other client construction and renovation work. The business says when they’ve been able to, craftsmen and craftswomen have worked hard on the transformation of this property.
“We have restored the beauty of this old home, while giving it the modern day amenities and upgrades,” the business says on its Facebook page.
Operations manager Kelly DuPrat says the home has undergone a major overhaul.
“It’s been completely gutted down to the studs and all new electrical, all new plumbing, all new mechanical. It’s got central heating and air now, which not many places have that. New insulation,” she says. “Basically it’s a completely new home, but we've restored all of the character.”
Because a lot of the trim was missing when RennDuPrat purchased the house, their shop copied the profiles and milled all of the crown trim and fixed all of the casings and baseboards.
“Although we completely demolished the walls, when we rebuilt them we added that character back in,” she says. “So the house really does have all of its original character and grandeur, but yet it was a completely gut job.”
The house includes a custom kitchen. There are two bathrooms with full walk in showers. A soaker tub upstairs. Laundry room, etc.
“We’ve got all the modern day amenities of a new home in an old home,” DuPrat says. The home was built in the 1870s or 1880s.
“It’s definitely seen some great history,” says DuPrat.
“We kept the doors that were in the front, we just kind of stripped them. We wanted to keep them as original as we could. But there’s a piece of glass that was an etched piece, a sailboat, that is now in the Collins Street museum from that house.”
The original intention was not to have the renovation and restoration of the Cumberland property take as long as it has, but DuPrat says they’ve been booked for months in advance for other work with their business.
“We’ve had to put it on the backburner a lot, just to keep up with our client work, which we deem more important,” she says. “But we’re now at that final stage and Aug. 12 is the big reveal.”
The house is being put on the market for sale, so RennDuPrat is making private appointments to take place Aug. 13 for people who want to come through and discuss details about the house.
Whether someone purchases the house, or just comes to take a peek during the open house, RennDuPrat’s goal of opening up the home to the public is to show how you can take any canvas and turn it into something special.
“It’s our show house so it exhibits a little bit of everything we do,” DuPrat says. “We’ve refinished the existing floors so it shows how we can bring new floors back to life. It shows our mill work and trim capabilities. It shows what our construction crew can do. It shows design capabilities, even with curb appeal.”
Not everyone, however, will have the budget for the work that’s taken place with this show home. But RennDuPrat says even though people maybe can’t afford to do with a home what the Yarmouth business has done, no one should be discouraged from tackling a renovation project.
You can still make great changes with a modest budget, she says.
“We went all out with every aspect of the house, because it’s the company’s. We could, we had fun with it. Budget was not a key point, but obviously for people doing renovations that’s a very important point,” DuPrat says. “Not everybody is going to tackle a renovation to this scale, either.”
People may tackle one room at a time, she says, will makes things more manageable as well.
