November 12, 2006

welcome to our world

the house
my husband (g/) and i purchased a house in crown heights last july.
it has great "bones" and is (finger's crossed) in surprisingly good shape
(especially since we bought it from owners for whom it was an investment property and it had been used basically as a dorm for the past few years).
we have some lovely wood detail, original fixtures on doors, intact plaster work, pocket shutters and 5 fireplaces
(and we aren't facing any of the really yucky demolition stuff that some of our fellow reno bloggers encountered)
but the house hasn't been upgraded in years: the boiler is over 50, there are 60 amps of electric total and easily 50% of the fixtures are leaking.
oh,
and the first thing anyone who is following the bed stuy blog might notice is that our house could be the sister to theirs
(and i am so jealous that they found their pocket doors intact when they opened up the doorways, ours were gone).

us
we are coming from 20+ years of loft living so a big challenge will be the concept of "rooms" (to say nothing of "floors")
one of the main things that attracted us to this house was its detail and while we are not attempting anything resembling an historic restoration, we want to keep its inherent grace and beauty intact.
be forewarned, we are both fairly eclectic when it comes to design and we don't always make obvious decisions.
i am a painter and g/ is a producer/mixer.
we don't have kids... but, in a way, i guess we do now...

the project
we will be using the house for both living and working.
the top floor will be our bedroom and a guest room
the living room, dining room and kitchen will be on the parlor floor.
we will split the ground floor and the (very usable basement) between us for work; g/ will have an office and edit room in the front, my studio will be in the back.
the scope of the work that we are planning entails upgrading all the mechanicals, building a painting studio extension, creating a master bedroom suite, putting in a new kitchen and a guest bathroom/laundry room.
we are hiring an architect,
however when we realized how much work needed to be done (and that the architects fee would be a % of the overall cost based on the plans drawn up) we decided to take certain things out of the loop and subcontract them ourselves.
this list includes the facade work, the roof (if we find it needs to be replaced) and the interior finishing (paint, floors, etc)
we are both fairly hands on and intend to be fully involved on a day to day basis but we don't feel we have the expertise to be our own gc.

timing
initially we had planned to be well along by now, but sh*t happens
while this has put stress on us in some ways it has also allowed us time to be in the house before having to make some very critical decisions.
two of the most important things impacted by this scheduling change are the location of my studio (resolved) and the whole HVAC solution (still being debated).
we are about to sign on with "the architect" but don't expect actual building to take place before february
(pray we have a mild winter so the digging can commence)
in the meantime we will be doing demolition and figuring out the design issues
i will post plans as soon as we have them

Posted by neene at 9:16 PM | Comments (9)
Categories: about

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