Video: Inside the Gates Renovation Blog

Wow Greenpointer, that's a GREAT way of getting more reno bloggers to open up their homes on camera: criticize my "performance"! Well done. Thanks for sharing.

Anyone who knows me knows that's how I talk, (not so) funny asides and all. Like it or don't like it, I don't know you so I don't care much. But it's me. It was an extra-nervous me, but me. And for the record, many people who know me have told me that I write the blog just like I talk too. I think it was a compliment.

As for your other oh-so-clever insult, that's something I can change, but you'll always be a jerk.

My husband was the first one to bring up the idea of a home theater, but he didn't have to convince me. I took an unfair jab at him over the garden floor's future big TV. I had always wanted a big TV down there too. But I did not want a big TV in the guest room, and after months of arguing with him about it (and losing) I let my sarcasm get the best of me. I'm usually the one in the house pushing for more electronic toys.

I never used to see the desirability of a home theater, until we had kids. Before that, we saw lots of movies, on a whim, whenever, wherever. Good ones, bad ones, it was all fun. People talking in theaters has always bothered me, though. It's just rude.

After we had kids, going to the movies became a much bigger deal, and every time our experience was ruined - by someone talking on a cell phone, a crying baby, a couple who just had to discuss every plot point right there in the moment, or the idiot who had to constantly ask the woman he was with what had just happened - it pushed me closer to wanting to rent movies at home instead of seeing them in a theater, where we have no control over the experience.

Renting movies at home loses something, though. The sound isn't as good. The picture is small. The experience isn't all-encompassing - there are too many things to focus on other than the movie, and it's hard to get swept up in a story.

Besides, going to the movies has gotten to be very expensive. The babysitter (whom we have to book at least a week before, taking any kind of spontaneity out of the picture) charges $15/hr plus car fare home. Dinner and a movie will run $85-$100 just for the babysitter. I'm a non-drinking vegetarian, so I'm a pretty cheap date, meaning dinner at a moderate place will "only" be about $30-$50. We have to book the movie tickets online ahead of time - there's no way we're going to hire a sitter and then risk not getting tickets. So that's $26. Let's say for the sake of argument that we just had dinner and don't buy any refreshments at the theater (although you can see from the video that that isn't always the case :-). So now, we've spent $141-$176. If we've taken a cab to the theater or bought popcorn and drinks, you can see very easily how a casual night out costs over $200.

So now, here we are, in the theater, for the first time in six months. We've chosen our movie carefully, knowing that we won't be seeing another one for quite a while, and we don't want to waste the evening on a dud. Just as we're getting into the story, the couple next to us gets into a fight. Or starts simulating sex. A hair gets on the projector's lens and dances around for ten minutes. Somebody comes in late and walks up and down the aisle for 20 minutes trying to find his friends. And of course, someone who didn't want to pay $100 for a babysitter brought the baby, who starts crying every time someone onscreen gets shot.

That's why I want a home theater. So that I can put the kids to bed, invite over a few friends who are well mannered enough to know how to watch a movie with other people, microwave some popcorn, and relax.

I'm not sure what the suburbs have to do with it. I've been to movie theaters in the suburbs, and people are just as rude. If you're saying that we're not entitled to use our home in a way you don't think is appropriate for Brooklyn, do what you want with your own house. We're doing what we want with ours.

Our brownstone is 20' wide. The home theater would be in the back parlour, which stretches the entire width of the house. Plenty of room. Seats on one side, a projector overhead, and a screen that comes down from the ceiling. Add some speakers and blackout curtains and we're in business. But that's a long way off. The parlour floor will most likely be done last, after the other three floors, the backyard, the facade, the roof, all of the windows, and whatever else breaks between now and then.

As I've stated in the blog, we're not going to discuss the specifics of how much the house and the reno are costing us. Suffice it to say that the reno is costing about double what we had originally budgeted/naively hoped for. Our contractor is more expensive than what we wanted to pay, and we ended up doing more extensive work in some areas than we had wanted to. But after hearing all of the horror stories about what others have gone through with their deadbeat, no-show, incompetent contractors, I know we made the right choice. Not only is he a good contractor, but he's a good guy. You can't put a price on that.

Posted by: Anonymous at October 27, 2007 9:16 AM

My husband just read my long-winded response about why we want a home theater, and he says it's bs. He says the real reason is that he wants his porn to be bigger.

Amy

Posted by: Anonymous at October 28, 2007 2:18 PM

Awww! I don't know which sister that was, so if they're smart they'll both take the credit. Thanks!

To answer some questions, if anyone's still reading this:

The idea for the ceiling in the kitchen was totally Ms. Architect's. We wanted the garden floor to be one big room with no dividing walls, so she came up with a couple of ways to define the kitchen space: the lower, extremely cool ceiling, and four sheetrock "pillars" that kind of frame the space on the four corners.

Way back in the beginning, before we even bought the house, our contractor estimated that the garden floor itself would take about six months, so we figured a year for everything. But between his guys getting backed up last fall with other jobs, us taking forever to make decisions, and things being on hold right now for various reasons, we're hoping to have the garden floor done by spring and move into the whole house. I think if work had been done straight through a year for those three floors would have been about right. But I have no idea when the parlour floor is going to happen. I'm buying lottery tickets in an effort to speed it up.

Budget twice what your contractor thinks it will cost. And that's not a dig at the contractor (at least not ours). In the beginning we said things like "Oh, we don't care so much about that bathroom, we can do it cheap." That turned into "Well, we don't want to have problems, it just makes sense to pay for the good fixtures." And then you have "Well, we bought the good fixtures, now we have to buy the matching accessories - it just won't look good otherwise." (The fact those "good" accessories are largely unusable at this point deserves its own post.)

So, a bathroom that should have cost x costs 2x. Unless you're really disciplined, costs balloon in a hurry. And then there are the ceilings that fall down as they're being prepped for painting, 160-year-old pipes that disintegrate during a heavy rain, chimneys that need to be rebuilt...it's all worth it, in my opinion, to live in a brownstone. But just know what you're getting into and understand that a lot of the costs aren't controllable, no matter how disciplined you are.

Posted by: Anonymous at October 30, 2007 12:01 PM