Remodeling contractor in Berwyn, IL

Berwyn is a city, and building permits come from the City of Berwyn, not the county. We confirm the city's current permit, contractor and bond requirements at the start of each job and handle the permit and inspections from there.

Stormwater is where Berwyn's rules are moving. The city's stormwater regulations sit in Chapter 1250 of its 2017 Zoning Ordinance, and its 2018 Stormwater Management Plan recommended routing any permit that disturbs 50 square feet or more of ground to Engineering for review, and requiring backflow preventers or overhead sewers for major home additions. We check which of those recommendations have become requirements before we draw.

The Central Berwyn Bungalow Historic District, listed on the National Register in 2015, covers 236 acres and 56 blocks between Cermak Road, Home Avenue, 26th Street and Ridgeland Avenue. Of its 1,507 principal buildings, 1,109 are brick Chicago bungalows, with 105 two flats and 56 gable front cottages. Most went up between the 1910s and the 1940s, with the busiest years in the mid 1920s.

Many of the first owners were Czech families moving west from Chicago, financed by Czech run banks and building and loans. The blocks are a tight grid with alleys behind, up to 34 houses a block, and nearly every house has a detached one or two car garage at the back of the lot.

The Chicago bungalow plan puts the living room and kitchen down one side of the house and the bedrooms and bathroom down the other. That layout decides most kitchen jobs. Opening the kitchen to the living spaces on its side of the house means dealing with the wall between them and whatever runs through it.

There is usually one bathroom on the main floor, tucked between the bedrooms. A second bathroom almost always goes in the basement or the attic, which brings drains, venting and sometimes an ejector pump into the conversation. The outside walls are solid masonry, so new plumbing and wiring are usually planned through interior walls and floors.

Bungalows here sit on full raised basements, half below grade and half above, so there is real daylight and decent height to work with. The catch is water. Berwyn was built on a combined sewer, and the city's own plan names basement flooding as its most common and most troublesome flood problem, with significant storms in 2010, 2011, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017.

Homes that drain to alley sewers carry more risk, because those sewers are shallow and small. In some areas poor drainage out of the alleys also adds to high groundwater and seepage. As of the 2018 plan the city ran a Flood Mitigation Shared Cost Program that helps homeowners pay for overhead sewers, backflow preventers and downspout disconnection. On a Berwyn basement finish, backup protection comes before drywall, every time.

With 4,000 to 5,500 square feet of lot, a house in front and a garage at the alley, there is not much room to build out. The usual way to gain space is up. Side and rear dormers are the common answer, and the National Register nomination notes plenty of them already in the district.

The same nomination counted bungalows whose second floor additions break well above the original roof ridge as non contributing, because they lose the low horizontal look that defines the type. That is a judgement about the district, not a permit rule, but it is worth knowing when you choose between a rear dormer and a full second storey. Garages count too: of 1,374 documented garages, most had already been refaced or replaced.

We will be straight about this one. On a typical central Berwyn lot, once the house and a garage on the alley are in place, the yard left over is small. The city's stormwater plan itself notes that its rules can be difficult to meet on small lots, and a pool and deck add hard surface on top of that.

Some lots are bigger. The nomination notes larger lots and yards along Riverside Drive, for example. If yours is one of them, we will check the city's current pool, fence and stormwater rules against your survey before suggesting a design. If it does not fit, we will tell you, and a finished basement or a dormer is usually the better use of the space.