An Historic Preservation Home Remodel
A 1910 house in historic downtown Lakeland, rebuilt around its own frame over two years without ever coming down.
What made this 1910 Lakeland house worth saving?
The house went up around 1910 and had been standing for 120 years by the time we walked it. It sits on South Missouri Avenue in the historic area just south of downtown Lakeland, on a block of houses from the same period. From the sidewalk it looked finished. Weathered siding, paint gone from the porch, plywood over an opening upstairs, and a yard that had grown over the front walk.
None of that meant it could come down. A home carrying a historic designation cannot simply be demolished and replaced with something new, no matter how rough it looks. Those rules are what keep a street like this one intact, and we would not want it any other way. So the question was never whether to save the house. It was how.
That is a very different brief from a normal rebuild, and it changes the plan from the first day. This became our flagship home, the project we point to when someone asks what we can do on a house with real constraints attached to it. If you are considering remodeling in Lakeland on an older property, this is the work sitting behind that conversation.
How do you rebuild a house that cannot be torn down?
In pieces, and slowly. The work ran about two years start to finish. Rather than demolish the house and start over, we replaced it surgically, section by section, while the original structure stayed standing on its own footprint the whole time.
That approach lives or dies on shoring. Look through the gallery and you can see new framing rising tight against the old walls, and the support beams outside the home holding sections of it in place while the structure underneath was rebuilt. There is no way to hide that part of the job and no way to hurry it. Sequence it wrong and you lose the exact thing you were hired to protect, which on a designated home is not a mistake you get to fix later.
The original 120 year old windows and wood were preserved rather than replaced, worked back over, and returned to the finished house. Everything new went in at the top of the line. On a home this age you get one honest shot at the materials, and cheap material reads as a mistake within about five years.
What is inside the finished home?
About 2,700 square feet, laid out for how a family lives now instead of how one lived in 1910. The kitchen is the center of it, and it is genuinely state of the art. White shaker cabinetry runs the wall, a long island carries a built in beverage refrigerator, and the cooking wall pairs a wall oven with a cooktop under a vented island hood. Glass front uppers, recessed lighting, and wide plank flooring keep the room bright without making it feel new for the sake of new.
The systems are the part nobody photographs. The house runs on dual climate control, so the second floor and the ground floor are conditioned separately rather than fighting each other through one thermostat. In a two story Florida home, that is the difference between a usable upstairs in August and a room nobody sleeps in. The electrical service runs underground, which keeps the front elevation clean and takes the drop line off a facade designed decades before overhead wire existed.
You can see more of our kitchen remodeling work across the site. This one is the benchmark we measure the rest against.
Why did this home win a preservation award?
Historic Lakeland, Inc. and the City of Lakeland's Historic Preservation Board recognized the project with a 2026 Residential Historic Preservation Award for Outstanding Rehabilitation. The certificate names the house the way the city knows it, as the William and Ida Warren House, circa 1910.
Awards are not the reason to take a job like this one. They are useful, though, because a preservation board looks at the work the way a neighbor does. Did the house keep its character? Does it still belong on the street? Was the original fabric respected, or quietly thrown out and rebuilt to look old? That is a harder test than a building inspection, and on a designated block it is the test that counts.
If you own an older Lakeland home and someone has told you it is too far gone, get a second opinion before you accept that. Start a free estimate and we will walk the house with you. The board gave us a second preservation award for the Butler House, a few doors down the same avenue.
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Before
After
Every photo from this project
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