Remodeling contractor in Mount Greenwood, Chicago

Mount Greenwood has been part of Chicago since residents voted to annex in 1927, so permits come from the City of Chicago Department of Buildings, not a village hall. Chicago requires a licensed general contractor for work that needs a building permit. We pull the permit and handle the inspections.

No Chicago Landmark district reaches into Mount Greenwood, so exterior work here does not go through landmark review. That makes additions simpler to schedule than a few blocks east in Beverly.

CMAP's community snapshot counts 84.1 percent of Mount Greenwood's homes as detached single family houses, and 67.1 percent were built between 1940 and 1969. The median year built is 1955. Just over half the houses have three bedrooms, and 84.6 percent are owner occupied. The area is known as home to many Chicago firefighters, police officers and union workers.

That is a narrower spread than most of the city, so many owners face the same questions. Does the original kitchen layout still work? Is one bathroom enough for three bedrooms? What should the basement become?

Houses from the 1940s to the 1960s tend to be simpler to open up than prewar ones, with compact plans and fewer layers of past alterations. A common kitchen request here is taking out a wall between the kitchen and the dining or living room. We confirm whether that wall carries the floor or roof above before we plan around it.

For bathrooms, the common request is a second full bath or a bigger main one. In a three bedroom house with one bath, a second bath often fits in the basement or in space taken from a bedroom closet. We look at where the main stack runs, because that decides what is easy and what is not.

Mount Greenwood waited for its sewers. Annexation in 1927 promised them, and the Works Progress Administration put them in during 1936. Today the risk to a finished basement here is mostly the sewer, not a river. FEMA's flood map shows only a few small Zone A patches in the southwest part of the community area, together less than one percent of it.

Chicago's Department of Water Management says intense storms fill the sewer mains and push water into basements through private drains, and that older city code had downspouts connected to the house drain. Before we finish a basement here we check where the downspouts go, test the floor drains and look at backflow protection. Then we choose flooring and wall finishes that can take a wet day.

Most of Mount Greenwood is zoned RS2 on the city zoning map. Under the Chicago Zoning Ordinance, RS2 means a minimum of 5,000 square feet of lot area per dwelling unit and a floor area ratio of 0.65. On a 5,000 square foot lot that works out to 3,250 square feet of floor area, counted the way the code measures it. Side setbacks must add up to 30 percent of lot width, with neither side under 4 feet or 10 percent of the width. The rear setback for a detached house is 28 percent of lot depth or 50 feet, whichever is less, and height tops out at 30 feet.

In practice a second story or a rear addition is often possible on a one story house, but a house that has already been added on to may be near its limit. We work out the numbers for your lot before you pay for drawings.

Mount Greenwood is community area 74, and the city's ZIP code boundaries put all of it in 60655. It takes in Mount Greenwood, Mount Greenwood Heights and Talley's Corner, with Beverly and Morgan Park to the east and Evergreen Park, Oak Lawn, Merrionette Park and Alsip around the rest. The cemeteries along its edges are why it was once called the Seven Holy Tombs.