Home Additions & Renovations in Ridgewood, NJ

Ridgewood has some of the best housing stock in Bergen County. It also has some of the oldest. A 1925 Tudor up in The Heights and a 1950 Cape in The Lawns are both good houses, and they fail in completely different ways once you open a wall. Knowing which one you are standing in before you write a number down is most of the job.

Modern Building Group is a licensed general contractor working in Ridgewood and the towns around it — Glen Rock, Fair Lawn, Ho-Ho-Kus, Midland Park, Wyckoff and Paramus. We build additions, second stories, kitchens, bathrooms and whole-home renovations. We are not the cheapest bid you will get, and we will tell you why on the first call rather than after the contract is signed.

What we build in Ridgewood

• Home additions — rear and side additions, family room bump-outs, primary suite additions, and the tie-in work that makes them look original rather than bolted on.
• Second story additions and dormers — the single most common Ridgewood project, because so much of the town is one-and-a-half-story Cape Cod stock with unusable knee-wall space upstairs.
• Kitchen renovations — including the structural and mechanical work behind taking down a wall in a house framed in 1910.
• Bathroom renovations — primary suites, hall baths, and the waste-line and venting problems that come with cast iron.
• Whole-home renovations — gut-level work on houses that are worth the investment, which in Ridgewood is most of them.

Ridgewood houses have Ridgewood problems

Ridgewood was not built all at once. It went up in distinct waves across roughly sixty years, and each wave left behind a different set of things a contractor has to solve. Here is what we plan for, by neighborhood.

The Lawns and Glen Acres — 1938 to 1950, Cape Cod

Glen Acres put about eighty one-and-a-half-story Capes on fourteen acres in 1938. The Lawns followed in 1950 with 429 more, at around $10,000 each — one of the largest developments in Bergen County at the time. Well built, and undersized for how people live now. The upstairs is knee-wall space with low headroom, the kitchen is closed off from everything, and the electrical service has usually been upgraded once and pushed hard since. The project here is almost always a dormer or a full second story to get real bedrooms and a real bath upstairs, and it is a structural job before it is a finish job — you are adding load to a foundation and framing that were sized for a story and a half.

The Heights and Old Country Club — 1892 to 1930

The most architecturally varied part of town: Tudor and Colonial Revival alongside Arts and Crafts, Swiss Chalet and Mediterranean Revival, plus Queen Anne and Grand Tudor west of Lincoln. Beautiful houses. Also plaster and lath over full-dimension lumber, chimneys and masonry that need real evaluation, remnant knob-and-tube in places nobody looked, and original floor plans with no primary suite and a bathroom the size of a closet. Opening these houses up is worth doing and it is not a weekend job — the framing does not behave like modern lumber, and what looks like a partition is often carrying something.

Floral Park and Brookside — 1890 to 1910

American Foursquare, Craftsman and Prairie-style homes around Lotus and Laurel Roads, and Shingle-style and Colonial Revival over in Brookside, which goes back to 1890. The original millwork in these houses is usually worth saving, and saving it costs more than replacing it. That is a conversation we would rather have with you at the estimate than at the framing inspection.

Permits, zoning and the Village of Ridgewood

Ridgewood is a Village, with its own Building Department and its own Zoning Board of Adjustment — it does not run on the same schedule as Glen Rock or Fair Lawn, and pretending every Bergen County town is the same is how projects slip a season.

Structural work, electrical, plumbing and mechanical work all require permits. The part that catches Ridgewood homeowners is not the building permit — it is zoning. A lot of the town sits on tight lots laid out well before current setback and lot-coverage rules, so an addition that seems obvious on paper can trip a variance and land you in front of the Zoning Board. That is not a reason not to build. It is a reason to find out in week one instead of month four.

We handle permitting and we walk the zoning question before anybody draws anything. If your addition needs a variance, you will hear it from us early, with a realistic read on what that adds to the schedule.

What a Ridgewood project actually costs

Most contractors dodge this question. Here is where our numbers land, drawn from what we actually bid in Bergen, Essex, Morris and Passaic — not a national average off a calculator site.

The spread is wide because four things move it: permit and zoning complexity, which is town by town; what is actually holding the house up once it is open; how far the mechanical tie-ins have to run back to existing systems; and finish level, which is the one part you control.

And here is the part nobody puts in an ad: the smaller the addition, the higher the cost per foot. A 300 square foot bump-out needs its own foundation, its own roof and its own tie-in — the same work as a 1,200 square foot addition, spread over a quarter of the space.

Recent work in and around Ridgewood

We work throughout northern Bergen County. Recent and current projects near Ridgewood include:

• Glen Rock — bathroom renovation, directly bordering Ridgewood.
• Fair Lawn — six projects, including a basement renovation, two-bathroom renovations, a kitchen renovation, a deck and roof replacement, and a load-bearing wall repair.
• Franklin Lakes — a completed basement renovation and ongoing work on a second property.
• Hawthorne — a ground-up new home build and a full pre-move-in renovation.
• Ramsey, River Edge, Park Ridge and Saddle River — kitchen renovation, home addition, primary bathroom, and a custom build-out.

How we work

Every project starts with a conversation, not a drive-by estimate. We talk through what you want, what your house will allow, and what you are prepared to spend — in that order, because getting them out of order is how projects go sideways.

From there, larger projects move into design and budget development before anyone signs a construction contract. You get a real scope and a real number based on drawings, instead of a napkin figure that grows every month. It costs something up front. It costs far less than finding out in month three that the number was never real.

We use written contracts, written change orders, and lien waivers at every draw. If a contractor will not give you those three things, walk away — from us or from anyone.

Ridgewood renovation FAQs

Planning an addition or renovation in Ridgewood?

We have built projects like yours across northern Bergen County, and we will give it to you straight — what it will cost, how long it will take, and whether it is worth doing. Call (201) 940-1111 or visit mbgllc.net to start the conversation.
Modern Building Group, LLC · Licensed & Insured · NJ Lic #13VH12856400 · Serving Bergen, Essex, Morris & Passaic