Carpenter in St. Augustine

Regulation comes first. The City of St. Augustine runs a Historic Architectural Review Board, and HARB reviews Certificates and Opinions of Appropriateness, Certificates of Demolition or Relocation, historic landmark designations and historic preservation property tax exemptions. Applications have to be filed by the city's published deadline for each monthly meeting. The city also publishes Architectural Guidelines for Historic Preservation covering work in or facing HP-1 through HP-5, and a separate set of Design Standards for Entry Corridors along Anastasia Boulevard, King Street and San Marco Avenue. In practice, that means windows, doors, porch millwork, siding, trim profiles and railings are all reviewable when they face the street.

Then there is the wood itself. Lincolnville was founded in 1866, sits on the National Register, and is a dense run of 19th and early 20th century wood-frame houses and churches in Victorian, frame vernacular and shotgun forms, with tall ceilings, heart-pine floors and milled porch posts and brackets. The Abbott Tract, the Model Land Company district and North City carry similar frame stock. Plaster walls, out-of-plumb studs and non-modular door openings are normal, and ceilings over 10 feet make stock crown and casing look undersized the moment they go up.

The colonial core adds coquina masonry and wood-frame buildings from the Spanish and territorial periods. The Flagler era of the 1880s through the 1900s layered masonry landmarks and surrounding frame housing on top of that. Across the Bridge of Lions, Davis Shores was platted in the 1920s boom with Mediterranean Revival influence, then infilled with mid-century concrete block ranches and, more recently, elevated new construction.

Past the city limits, St. Johns County subdivisions are conventional post-2000 block and stucco with 9- to 10-foot first floors. So a crew working this market can spend Monday scribing trim to a pre-1900 frame wall and Thursday hanging casing in a production house.

We match what is already in the house rather than delivering a catalog look.

If you want to see everything, the full carpentry service list and the woodworking side of the shop are both online.

The HARB filing deadline is the single biggest scheduling fact in this city. If your porch balusters are rotted and the porch faces the street in an HP district, the fix is not a next-week job. We use that wait: we take the field measurements, mill or source a matching profile, and have material acclimating while the application sits in the queue.

Getting the profile right the first time matters. Replicated trim shapes, true divided-lite sash and period-correct porch columns and balusters carry more weight with a review board than any catalog part number. Reading a detail off the existing house is cheaper than submitting twice.

You can read the board's scope and meeting schedule on the City of St. Augustine's HARB page. Interior work that is not visible from the street is a different animal, and a large part of what we do here.

The city sits low on a peninsula between the Matanzas and San Sebastian rivers, and much of the historic core is only a few feet above sea level. Salt air, high humidity and heavy seasonal rain rot exterior trim, sills, thresholds and porch framing, and they swell and shrink interior millwork through the year.

Historic frame buildings here usually have no vapor barrier and limited crawlspace control, so wood inside them moves more than wood in a modern house. We acclimate material in the room before it goes up, and we detail joints so seasonal movement lands in a reveal instead of an open miter.

Davis Shores is its own case. It took documented surge flooding from Hurricanes Matthew in 2016, Irma in 2017 and Dorian in 2019, the city publishes its own flood hazard history, and a federal flooding study is underway. On those blocks we favor elevated floors, sacrificial base trim and assemblies that can get wet, come off in sections and be replaced without wrecking the cabinetry above.

We build to the house that is actually standing, not to the one the tape measure wishes were there. Every stile, rail and return in an old frame house gets a field measurement.

We know the review calendar and quote around it instead of promising a date we cannot hold. When the exterior is governed, we do the interior work that is not, matching the millwork already in the house.

And when a profile does not exist in a catalog, we copy the one on the wall.

• Walk St. George Street, the pedestrianized colonial-era shopping and dining spine of the historic district.
• Tour Castillo de San Marcos National Monument, the coquina fort on the Matanzas Bay waterfront run by the National Park Service.
• Climb the tower at the St. Augustine Lighthouse and Maritime Museum on Anastasia Island.
• Spend a day at Anastasia State Park for beach, dunes and tidal marsh trails.
• Take the free National Park Service ferry to Fort Matanzas National Monument south of the city.

• Castillo de San Marcos, the oldest masonry fort in the continental United States, built of local coquina.
• Flagler College, the former Hotel Ponce de Leon and Henry Flagler's 1888 Spanish Renaissance Revival landmark.
• The Lightner Museum, housed in Flagler's former Hotel Alcazar.
• The Lincolnville Historic District, founded in 1866, the city's historically African American neighborhood and a center of the 1964 civil rights demonstrations.
• The Bridge of Lions, the 1927 bascule bridge that connects downtown to Anastasia Island.