When Cynthia and Ed Timms bought their Lakewood ranch house in 1992, they knew exactly what they wanted to do with it – take the roof off.
“We bought the house with the intention of putting on a second floor,” says Cynthia, an appellate lawyer. “The house had that 1950s appearance, and it didn’t fit with the ‘20s look of the rest of the houses in the street. We wanted to take the house back in time, and make it look like it was built with the other houses.”
That effort was six-month job in 1997 that involved not only taking the roof off, but raising the first-floor ceilings from eight to nine feet, making room for a real staircase instead of the cramped one usually found in second story re-dos, and turning the bedrooms, bath and kitchen on the first floor into one living area.
Best yet, that approach allowed the Timms to use their backyard – “The only part of the house I really liked,” says Ed, a journalist – as a backyard instead of as land for an addition. In the end, the three-bedroom, two-bath house became four bedrooms and 3 1/2 baths, with a landscaped back yard some half-acre in size.
The two-story Tudor front doesn’t look all that different from the other homes on the block, fulfilling the family’s first goal. Inside, the Timms and architect Kevin Dillingham transformed what had been a dark and dreary East Dallas-style ranch with a father-in-law’s apartment into a practical, shrewdly-designed home for the Timms and their three children.
The highlight of the downstairs is the kitchen-family room. There are no walls for the length of the space, just a four-foot high counter that separates the kitchen from the rest of the room. The counter, says Cynthia, is tall enough so no one can see any dirty dishes in the sink. French doors line the back wall, allowing sunlight in and a view of the back yard and its massive pecan tree.
Upstairs, there are two interesting touches – the laundry room, which makes lugging dirty clothes up and down the stairs a thing of the past, and the fourth, unfinished bedroom. Eventually, it will be a library. Says Cynthia: “The theory, which our architect really believed in, was to finish the shell of the house the way you wanted it. Then, if you don’t have enough money, leave rooms unfinished, and get to them when you have enough.”
And for now, what the Timms’ have is more than enough – a home that looks good and is good to live in. “I was scared to do it this way at first,” says Cynthia, “but now I’m sure there wasn’t any other way to do it.”
