CENTER TWP — When Jamie Sychak and his family couldn't find the new home they wanted for the right price, he decided to make it himself.

Sychak, a maintenance technician at AK Steel, spent the summer sweating over a major renovation of his Sunset Drive home, a ranch-style house built in 1940, with the help of a few friends.

“We had lived here for a while and we started to have interest in some other homes, and that's when the housing market crashed,” Sychak said.

The Sychak family — Jamie, his wife, Cari, and their twin children, Jordan and Jaimi, both 18 — used the homes they saw in their search for ideas about what they wanted.

“I just started thinking, ‘We could do that to our house.' It needed a roof anyway,” Sychak said.

He bought the house in 1997, though it was a bit uneven after three previous owners had put on three additions, all with varying slopes on the roofs. After Sychak's renovation's though, the former ranch-style home more closely resembles a Cape Cod, complete with a new attic and wide front porch.

“Everything has been planned, but that was with a year of preparation and planning,” Sychak said.

“Over the course of the planning and when we were looking at other homes, I talked to contractors and (the price quotes) just seemed to be high.”

A self-described “do-it-yourself” kind of guy, Sychak set to work formulating exactly what his family needed.

“As I figured out what I wanted to do, I drew some rough sketches,” he said.

“I talked it over with my wife. Every drawing I made, I'd call her in. We changed it several times.”

After getting a building permit from the township, Sychak began work. In addition to the new, uniform roof, porch and attic, he raised the home's ceilings from 7 feet to 8 feet, built a staircase to the new attic and is adding new siding.

“I built the garage five years ago with the intention of it being exclusively mine because I got squeezed out of the garage below the house,” he said.

Over the years, the family's accumulated items have started to infiltrate the new garage as well, so Sychak decided upon an attic to reclaim his personal space. Sychak's new attic will have one thing in common with the old roof, too. He was able to reuse much of the original fiberglass insulation.

Physically, he said the toughest job he has had during the project was digging a 27-foot long, 54-inch deep trench for the new concrete wall supporting the front porch.

“The shoveling looks a lot better on paper,” Sychak said.

Hauling 83-pound bundles of shingles to the roof was no cakewalk, either, he said, but he wasn't flying solo.

Sychak got help from a co-worker and another friend, Fran Ferry of Butler, a drywall finisher.

“He probably has done 45 percent of the work,” Sychak said of Ferry.

Additionally, Ferry built a fire pit surrounded on three sides by connected wooden benches in the home's back yard, a place to enjoy a cold beer after a long day's work, during the course of the project.

The only other unplanned part of the project was rewiring much of the house.

“If needed, my uncle and cousin both are electricians, so I can call them for technical support,” Sychak said.

Apart from the physical demands, Sychak said his family has endured quite a bit living in an active construction zone.

“That's been the biggest challenge, harder than walking up on the roof. With the roof project, every single square foot of ceiling came down,” he said.

“When it came to shutting down a bathroom or kitchen, I made sure it was the least amount of time by having all of the materials and help lined up.”

He said that, after a wet spring, the mostly sunny summer was a great stroke of luck and perfect weather for grilling when there was no roof on the kitchen.

“Sometimes (my family) calls it Camp Sychak,” he said.

It has required a lot of hard work and the right tools to construct, and Sychak has had ample help with both.

“Some women collect shoes, a lot of guys collect tools. I'm one of the tool guys,” he said.

Indispensable tools included a framing nailgun and a roofing nailgun.

“I'm kind of dangerous with a hammer to my thumb. It's kind of a running joke at work. I always have a black fingernail (from hitting it with a hammer),” he said.

Sychak said the interior floor plan of the home will remain basically the same and he hopes to be done with the exterior by winter.

He called the project a labor of love as much as a hobby.

Sychak has invested about $14,000 in the project and said every cost must be considered.

While the money invested may seem large at first glance, Sychak said it is much lower than a general contractor would have charged.

For example, he was quoted a $3,000 price by one contractor to jackhammer the former gable-style porch and dig up the supporting brick wall, a project he accomplished himself for about $600.

All of the money he has saved will be invested in something more important: his children, who graduated from Butler High School this year and are narrowing down their college choices.