Bird Blog: Week 19

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Every other week, Jennifer Mankins, owner of the Bird boutiques, tells us about the new 2,500-square-foot store on Grand Street in Williamsburg that she’s getting ready to open. Up this week: a review of the store’s progress (including the dumbwaiter!), post-Paris trip.

After spending seven days in Paris for fashion week, I was anxious and excited to get back and see the progress on the store. Everything is moving quickly now so there was a lot to review and discuss.

Exterior front: The metal gates surrounding the store have been removed as well as every other vertical bar in front of the windows. The storefront is lighter and more open and accessible. It is beautiful. All the old grout around the glass sidewalk panels has been removed, and the metal frame has been cleaned and repainted.

Exterior back: The big antique metal gates have also been removed in the back. They are being stored onsite for now, because I think my landlords are going to salvage them and take them upstate. The small glass window has been removed and the frame measured for new glass. The plywood has been removed from the garage door opening giving a much better sense of how the finished storefront will look. We have some new graffiti back there and are trying to figure out what steps we can take to discourage this in the future. Is there a seal we can apply to the brick to make the paint come off easily? What about preventing acid etching on the glass? Will lights and cameras be enough?

Interior floor: There was a slight change in elevation between the front and back of the store, so we removed the wood and ramped the floor. It is very slight and I think it will hardly even be noticeable when the floor is reconstructed. There was some question about how exactly to handle the transition from wood to concrete. We decided adding a third material (like tile or metal) would be too much, so we are just going to turn the wood in the opposite direction for the width of the brick wall.

Interior walls: They have removed the old support beam hanging between the brick supporting walls. Having the additional height in the passage really opens the transition. They have started framing the dressing room walls, the bathroom and the office. They have removed a few layers of paint on the back brick walls. The walls are more similar in tone all over now, but it did expose a section of black paint underneath that now has to be dealt with. They have brought in salvaged bricks to patch the top of the walls. The problem is that there is a coat of concrete on the walls above the existing brick, so the new brick will not be flush with the old brick. Don’t think we came up with a solution for this yet.

Interior ceiling: They have uncovered the I-beams in the back and we have decided to leave them exposed. They have cleared out the shafts of the skylights and removed the metal bars that were covering them. They are amazing. They removed the old, giant hvac sweep that came in from the roof. I didn’t realize what a monster it was until it was gone.

Interior electrical: We finalized the locations and placements of the outlets. They will be 20 from the floor, slightly higher than usual, so they will mostly be covered by the hanging clothing displays. We opted out of having any in the concrete floor.

Dumbwaiter: The dumbwaiter has been fully exposed now and we are going to leave the exposed brick with the metal frame. I love it!

Basement: They removed the old doors leading to the sidewalk grate. I loved those old doors, and we may be able to salvage them, but they were in pretty rough shape. They have started constructing the powder room and shower/locker room. We have decided to go with the new wall mount hot water heater for the shower, so we can get rid of the old boiler and hot water heater entirely, clearing out the boiler room. This effectively gives us a lockable storage room with metal walls that will be great for securing more valuable items.