Historic Oakwood Renovation: Before and After Photos

See the stunning shots of the Heck Pool Parker home before, during and after its painstaking renovation.
Written by Ayn-Monique Klahre | Current photography by Keith Isaacs

Heather and Randy Scott bought this signature home in Historic Oakwood with an eye toward returning the space that was being used as an apartment building into a single-family home. Read about their journey here, and see room-by-room before and after photos below.

Over the years, surprisingly few changes were made to the exterior home. At some point, the front porch was rounded off, but these photos don’t know bathrooms that were added on to the porches on the side and back of the house to accommodate the apartments. The restoration included stripping and repainting the entire home, removing and refitting all the windows, replacing the roof tiles and having custom finials made to replace ones that had rotted away.

The front staircase was largely preserved. When the Scotts bought the house, it led to various apartments; now it leads to the parkour at left and the kitchen beyond. Years of paint and stain were stripped away to refinish the area.

To get the parlour back to its original form, the Scotts removed dropped ceilings that hid plumbing and electrical work and removed a bathroom that had been built on the porch. They had a window made to fit the doorway and use glass reclaimed from an old church to match the other windows.

The sitting room served as a communal living area when the Scotts bought the house. They widened a doorway and removed a mantel to make it more spacious.

This space had originally served as the dining room, but had been turned into an apartment. As part of the restoration, the Scotts removed a window and moved a doorway that leads to the kitchen. They closed a door that led to a bathroom on the porch; that room was transformed into a pantry that you access from the kitchen. The also removed a decorative fireplace mantel from one wall.

The kitchen might be the biggest transformation, and it’s one of the few rooms that the Scotts chose to update in modern versus historic tastes. The area originally served as an outdoor cooking space, was later closed in, then served as an apartment (the one that had most recently been lived in when they bought the home). The Scotts moved the door to the dining room to accommodate a large cooking area, and opened up the space for a large kitchen island.

One bedroom as it was when the Scotts bought it—note the dropped ceilings and kitchen built into the wall—the during and after the renovation.

To refurbish the crow’s nest at the highest point of the home, the Scotts stripped away decades of paint and stain and replaced all the windows.