Home Improvement Services in Dunbar, WV

A Glass-Town Past and the Houses It Left Behind

Drive through Dunbar today and you see a quiet residential city, but the bones of the place were set a century ago when it was an industrial and factory town. Glass manufacturing was the defining industry here, and Fostoria Glass operated in Dunbar for years, employing much of the town. The workers who filled those factories needed houses, and the result is a town built around modest, practical homes, the kind of mid-century and early-ranch construction that was meant for working families rather than show. Those houses are solid, often built with good framing and full foundations, but they are now decades past their original roof, their original kitchen, and their original layout.

That matters for a contractor because the typical Dunbar project is an update of a fundamentally sound house. The roof on a 1950s ranch is on its second or third layer and overdue. The kitchen is still the original galley with worn cabinets and a layout that no longer fits how the family actually cooks. The bathroom has had one too many patch jobs over the decades. The good news is that the structure underneath is usually worth investing in, which is exactly what we help homeowners decide how to phase.

The Work We Do in Dunbar

• Roof repair and replacement, with an eye toward the older shingle layers common on Dunbar’s postwar homes
• Kitchen remodeling that reworks the galley layouts typical of the era into something functional
• Bathroom remodeling, including addressing the moisture and subfloor issues that build up over decades
• Flooring installation, whether that is replacing worn carpet and vinyl with durable luxury vinyl plank or refinishing the original hardwood that is hiding underneath
• Drywall repair and replacement, including the ceiling repairs that often follow an older roof leak
• Deck building and porch repair for the back decks and side entries common on these lots
• Door installation and cabinet replacement
• Fencing for the modest city-sized lots throughout town

Aging in Place in a Town That Stays Put

People in Dunbar tend to stay. These are houses that get handed down or held onto, which means we frequently work with homeowners who are in their sixties and seventies and planning to live out the rest of their lives here rather than move. That is where accessibility becomes part of the remodeling conversation rather than an afterthought.

For the many two-story homes and homes with basement entries in Dunbar, a stair lift is often what makes it possible to keep using the whole house. As an authorized AmeriGlide dealer, we install straight stair lifts for standard staircases and custom curved lifts for the turns and landings that older floor plans throw at you, and we service and replace existing lifts as well. We measure the stairs, talk through who is using the lift and how, and give a straight installed price. It comes up more in Dunbar than in the newer subdivisions elsewhere in the valley.

Close to Home, Close to the Rest of the Valley

Dunbar is right next door to us in South Charleston, so we are on these streets regularly. If your roof is leaking, your kitchen is past its prime, or you are trying to figure out how to keep the house working for you for another twenty years, call (304) 590-1163 to set up a free estimate. We will come take a look, tell you honestly what the house needs, and lay out the work in an order that makes sense.