April 1, 2005 is the incorporation date of AJH Renovations, LLC, the first of the AJH family of companies to be born. No foolin’; it’s been twenty years since this show had its first episode, a whole-house renovation on North Main Street in downtown Greenville. Over the past two decades, we’ve lost count of how many residential renovations we have done in and around Greenville. Along the way, we added two divisions to our family – AJH Custom Homes, LLC, and Designed for Downtown, LLC. We have also branched out into light commercial and commercial subcontract work, including a key role in the recent ballroom renovation at the Pointsett Club in downtown Greenville. Each year has brought new opportunities and new challenges, not least of which were the Great Recession of 2009, the COVID pandemic, and the current high mortgage rates and general economic uncertainty. These challenges motivated us to develop a design/build renovation system that is both creative and efficient, providing our clients with beautiful and effective revitalization of their older homes.

Soon after the incorporation of AJH Renovations, LLC, we realized the need for a design division. Our clients needed detailed drawings to properly plan and envision their upcoming renovations. Eventually we incorporated as Designed for Downtown, specializing in custom home design, renovation & addition design planning, landscape design, and interior design work. What sets us apart from other designers is our experience working in the field alongside contractors and builders from permitting to final interior painting.

AJH Renovations, LLC is one of the pioneers in the Upstate of the Design/Build renovation model combining in-house architectural design with licensed construction services. This model streamlines the process of taking the homeowners’ dreams and needs and turning them into reality while also maintaining the character and ambiance of the mature home. Our designers work with our construction management staff in order to propose renovations that ‘work’ with the house or, as we often put it, letting the house work with the renovation. Design modifications can be investigated with the cost impact immediately determined by the construction side of the business. Proposed modifications are evaluated from the aesthetic and functional aspect, but also from the perspective of ‘buildability’ and code compliance. Our clients have been overwhelmingly pleased and well-served by the Design/Build model.

We at the AJH Family – AJH Renovations, AJH Custom Homes, and Designed for Downtown, bring twenty years of residential design and construction experience to the table. Give us a call today to see how our Design/Build model can transform your house into a ‘new’ old home.

Gerard Mercator is a name you might not be able to recall from Middle School Social Studies, but he is the 16th Century Flemish mathematician and cartographer who famously figured out how to display a 3-dimensional world on a 2-dimensional map – the Mercator Projection. Mercator himself was somewhat of a rags-to-almost-riches story (it wasn’t easy to become rich making maps) and was considered the Prince of Cartographers in his own day even though he never traveled on a ship.

As Mercator gained some success at his trade, he was finally able to contemplate building a house for his growing family, and here his story is a lot like many of ours: budget for the necessities and plan for the future. He contracted for the design and construction of a ‘comfortable and grand dwelling suitable for an honest citizen of modest fortune.’

His was not an unlimited fortune, though, so the minimum requirements were set as ‘the essentials for maintaining the household…such as a kitchen, a store for food, bedrooms, cisterns…’ Mercator had reason to hope that his fortune would continue to grow, so he laid in provision for ‘entertaining, the amenities of life, ornament, and magnificence such as porticos, halls, courts, dining rooms, a third floor, pleasure gardens, and orchards could be added as time passes and opportunity and convenience arise.’ We can assume that ‘opportunity and convenience’ meant more money!

Mercator was planning ahead, and contracted that the ‘plan of the whole work be drawn up at first.’ We call this a Master Plan, and Designed for Downtown understands that budgets are today what they were in Mercator’s day – rarely able to absorb the whole picture in one view. But it is still important to plan for the future and to leave room for additions and improvements to accommodate ‘the amenities of life’ as ‘opportunity and convenience’ allow. Give Design for Downtown a call to start planning the present essentials and the future additions now for your home renovation or custom home.

My parents had a custom home built for our family back in the early 1960s (I was very, very young). The house had the latest modern conveniences, especially in the kitchen. One of those conveniences was a pantry with a two-level lazy Susan to conveniently present whatever my mom was looking for with a simple spin of the wheel (sometimes it presented me, if I was playing on the lazy Susan at the time. We younger kids thought this was fascinating - no more going down to the cellar for the flour or sugar.

It all seems so primitive now, though, as the pantry has become 'a kitchen within.’ The Pantry is a room of its own, sometimes even expanded into a Scullery Kitchen as today's kitchens are approaching truly gourmet level. For most folks today, the pantry is an overflow area to the kitchen, and is designed to look and to serve as not merely a storage area, but a mini-kitchen in itself.

If the pantry is still a cabinet, it is a bank of cabinets with roll-out shelves to make reaching the stuff in the back much easier. Sometimes it doubles as an appliance garage, with the microwave oven, toaster, blender, and mixer in place, plugged in, and ready to use. But if space allows, the pantry becomes its own domain, with open shelves, coffee bar, microwave station, and loads and loads of storage. A second sink, and even a second dishwasher, takes the load off the main kitchen.

Sometimes we announce the pantry with a frosted glass door, other times we hide it completely with faux cabinet doors - but it's there, and it has taken on an outsized importance in the modern kitchen, the 'kitchen within.’

We at Designed for Downtown, LLC strive to incorporate the latest labor-saving and user-friendly features in our renovation and custom home designs, including the most beautiful as well as most functional pantries.

Give us a call today to start the conversation about how to make your kitchen work better by adding a 'kitchen within.'

In our last blog post, we spoke of the home renovation process as a metamorphosis, the transformation of the tired caterpillar into the beautiful butterfly. To carry that analogy a little further, if you look closely at the butterfly you can still see the former caterpillar. In a similar way, we at AJH Renovations, LLC and Designed for Downtown, LLC will design the renovation of a mature home so that the shadows of the former house remain, only beautified and accented. This process is called reclamation, and it’s both a lot of fun and a lot of work.

Due to the conditions of construction fifty or more years ago, and the rigors of the modern International Building Code, we are not often able to reuse existing materials in the same use for the renovation. Hardwood flooring may have been refinished one too many times to allow it to be reused as flooring, original windows are usually single-pane and no longer meet energy standards, lighting fixtures were installed before UL ratings and are probably no longer safe enough for reuse for the same purpose. But all is not lost, and these original materials need not be sent to the landfill.

Early 20 th Century single-pane windows can be repurposed as accent cabinetry doors for a wet bar or utility zone; attic plank flooring becomes wainscot for the new second-story living space, and old wall paneling is incorporated into the custom cabinetry design as door and drawer panels. Old beams in an out-building become new mantels, and even an unused old washstand can be converted into a single-sink vanity. A new renovation, and a house full of memories at the same time.

We at Designed for Downtown, LLC and AJH Renovations, LLC frankly love old homes and, while we understand that times change and houses need to keep up with the latest technology, safety features, and styles, we still want to be able to see that caterpillar almost hidden, but not quite, by the beautiful butterfly. Give us a call today to start the conversation of mixing the old with the new in your home’s future life.