About Mlstpodcast

Why We Spend So Much Time in Ranch Houses

Mlstpodcast remodels kitchens in Riverside, and we have ended up concentrating on one kind of house. The single story ranch homes built across Arlington, La Sierra and Magnolia Center in the years after the war share a floor plan logic that makes their kitchens feel smaller than they are. A closed room. An eight foot ceiling. A soffit over the uppers. A doorway into a living or family room that gets all the light.

Those houses are well built and sensibly sized, and they are worth keeping. What they need is a kitchen designed for how people use a house now, which usually means connecting the kitchen to the room beside it.

How We Approach a Job

We start above the ceiling. Before there is a drawing or a price, someone from our crew goes into the attic to see which way the joists run, whether the kitchen wall is carrying them, and what ductwork or vent pipe is sitting in the soffit. Then we look at the electrical panel, because a lot of original ranch panels do not have the capacity for the circuits a modern kitchen needs.

Only after that do we talk about cabinets and counters. It is a less exciting first visit than flipping through door samples, but it means the number you get is based on your house rather than a guess about it.

When a wall is load bearing, we bring in a licensed structural engineer to size the beam and specify the posts. We pull permits through the City of Riverside and schedule the inspections. We do not skip either step to shorten a schedule.

What We Will Tell You Straight

Not every wall should come out. Sometimes a wider opening with a header gives you most of the openness for a fraction of the cost. Sometimes the sink should stay under the window it has been under for seventy years. And sometimes your cabinet boxes are sound enough to reface rather than replace.

We would rather do a smaller job you are happy with than a bigger one you did not need.

Getting in Touch

Call (951) 430-7000, or find us at 811 Mission Inn Ave, Riverside, CA 92504. Tell us roughly when your house was built and what bothers you about the kitchen, and we will set a time to come and look.