“While we’re at it…”

t all started with a call to the painter,” says Derek Rubinoff, of his initial plan to simply scrape and repaint the worn, peeling siding on his family’s 1894 house in the West Roxbury neighborhood of Boston. But the contractor took one look and saw that it wasn’t just the paint that was failing: The decades-old cedar clapboards had started to rot, allowing water to deteriorate the rosin paper underneath. It would all have to go. Since the house would be stripped to the sheathing, it made sense to replace the drafty single-pane windows, too. Soon Derek, an architect who has