Carving a rental out of 3-family house with no separate entrance for 2nd unit?
We’ve been looking at 3-family, 3-story houses, but the problem is that to afford one, we’d need a rental, but there is no separate entrance below stoop as is the case with classic 2-family brownstones (instead, there’s a small stoop to street/garden level, and then an English basement that usually contains mechanicals so can’t, I…
We’ve been looking at 3-family, 3-story houses, but the problem is that to afford one, we’d need a rental, but there is no separate entrance below stoop as is the case with classic 2-family brownstones (instead, there’s a small stoop to street/garden level, and then an English basement that usually contains mechanicals so can’t, I believe, be a legal rental by itself). So, we were thinking we had to rent 3rd floor, which would mean leaving common stairwell throughout house (eating significantly into owner’s living space) and then creating interior stairwell in owners duplex (or triplex, if you count English basement, which many of these have). But today, a friend suggested we should instead rent the ground floor, and live in flors 2 & 3 – that way, I suppose we just close off door at top of stairs to our unit. For garden access, the friend suggested we build a deck from 2nd floor to garden, which seems kind of a steep descent. Have others done this? Any advice on how to get rental income from this kind of building, while preserving a good owner’s unit, would be appreciated. Living on one floor is not a good option for us since we already have a floor-through condo and the whole point of making such a huge investment is to get more living space.
Thanks in advance!
My house, which has a street level garden floor, was originally configured with a bottom duplex and a third floor apartment. Shared stairs, locks on the second floor bedrooms. I flipped it, creating a rental on first floor (expanding vesitbule to allow space off it for tenant door, then locked doors leading to first floor hallway and my unit), and created my unit on top two floors. despite lack of stoop, it was clear for ceiling height and details that parlors had always been on second floor. I put kitchen in second floor addition (pre-existing) with very small deck (large enough for cafe table, charis and grill), with stairs (straight shooter, not circular) going down to back yard. We use yard all the time, and in fact like second floor deck to have breakfast dinner, etc, with the sense of space and view. There is some loss of privacy for tenants, but hey, it is my house!
We looked at a place recently with that configuration and ended up passing on it for that very reason. Ultimately, it doesn’t seem to make sense to me to live on the top 2 floors, unless you want to give up access to garden. I think a deck off the 2nd floor is indeed a bit steep. You would definitely use your deck, but I just don’t think you’d realistically use your garden.
My suggestion would be to live on the bottom two floors and rent out the top, keeping the stairwell common space and adding an interior staircase. We got quotes for an interior stairwell and honestly they were not very bad (maybe around 5-10k depending on what you want, and can also be much cheaper if you’re willing to go for a spiral staircase).
If you think that you’d be able to pay down your mortgage and/or increase your income over time, you could always expand up to the 3rd floor and at that point take advantage of the internal stairs.
Good luck!
Stacey, pls share with group. I have almost same problem.
AT
We did the same thing only we rented out the top floor and took over the bottom two floors (we wanted to keep the backyard access for ourselves) Its hard to explain what we did but if you want – email me and I can send you pictures (stacey0768 at aol dot com)