2 family layout
I’m in contract on a 2 family brick row house in Flatbush. It’s 2 floor through apartments and a mostly below grade cellar. Both apartments have galley kitchens in the back, windows in the front and the back only, and 4 large rooms, railroad style. We plan on living on the 1st floor, with the cellar and the yard. I’m looking for tips or pics from people who have renovated apartments like this, and its peculiar layout. I know that the common practice is to move the kitchens to the middle, thus gaining an open kitchen and two side-by-side bedrooms in the back. We are considering this. Everyone says it’s expensive, but we have to gut the existing kitchen anyway, and we do have complete access via the cellar to existing mechanicals, so maybe it won’t be so bad? Can anyone tell me what the price difference would be? Has anyone chosen to keep the kitchen in the back and make the adjacent room their bedroom? or anyone who sleeps in the front bedroom, just off the street? Also looking for people who have separated the windowless interior rooms with glass doors or opaque partitions of some sort.
chemosphere
in Brownstoner Renovation 10 years and 8 months ago
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15 replies
cate | 10 years and 8 months ago
Well, that all sounds very do-able. (It’s even possible to re-create missing pocket doors.) Good luck to you and enjoy the renovation!
chemosphere | 10 years and 8 months ago
The back two rooms, labelled home office and bedroom, are connected by an archway. It probably was originally pocket doors but is now louvered doors. We’re going to remove them and hopefully put in french doors. Yes, the office is connected to the dining room or back parlor with an internal door. We want to remove this wall altogether, so the only wall separating the front from the back is a wall with french doors closing off the back bedroom. As for the rental, I think we will leave the kitchen in the back and just tell renters they can set up as they please, with bedroom in the back, front, middle or side. The rental middle room has a skylight. thanks for your advice!
cate | 10 years and 8 months ago
Looking again at the layout, it strikes me that moving the common rooms to the middle and making the big rooms at each end bedrooms works well for investors who want to rent to roommates and get the max rent per person. It wouldn’t work as well for me, personally, or for a family, I would think. I spend most of my time in the common rooms, not my bedroom, and I would feel claustrophobic and very upset to be in a kitchen or living room with no windows. I just couldn’t deal with it at all. I wouldn’t even want to go in the space! Whereas it doesn’t bother me a bit if the bedroom (or dining room for that matter) has no windows. Something to consider is whether you feel the same. But to each his own. Also, I think investors and others typically leave the kitchen alone because of the cost of moving the plumbing AND creating legal venting for the stove — they simply move the living room to the center.
cate | 10 years and 8 months ago
Chemosphere, regarding the layout you show, these are very typical circa-1900 apartments in multifamily buildings. The use of the rooms is flexible. The rear room next to the kitchen is meant to be a dining room but I wouldn’t be surprised if it often ended up as the master bedroom even back then. The front two rooms are a “double parlor” — apparently necessary for the sake of maintaining the facade of middle class decency — with the second one ideally kitted out as a music room (with a piano). But of course, it, too, can be a bedroom even though it is only separated from the front parlor by a screen. (And ours has a closet just for this purpose!) The middle rooms are, of course, bedrooms (though to be legal bedrooms they must have either a window or a skylight and closet). The one question I have is whether your internal bedrooms originally had doors of some kind between the main rooms, not just out into the hall. They should. They are really necessary for ventilation. Especially back then.
cate | 10 years and 8 months ago
Chemosphere, our bedrooms are currently in the rear of the house because that is where they were originally, but in past homes I slept in windowless rooms in the center of the unit. One in particular was blissfully quiet and dark. I absolutely loved it and have never slept better in my life. Truly fantastic! We’ve never had A/C in the bedroom (can’t sleep with it). If you leave the original pocket doors and other doors rather than walling off these rooms, it brings temperatures way down. A fan or central air works fine. You can also put fans in the windows of the exterior rooms, which makes the apartment cool and breezy. Sometimes these rooms have a skylight instead of windows (on the top floor).
chemosphere | 10 years and 8 months ago
This is not my house, but this is a very similar layout. Ours doesn’t have windows on the side of the top floor.
chemosphere | 10 years and 8 months ago
Cate, are you saying that you use the middle, windowless room as a bedroom? What do you do about air conditioning? Is it completely walled off from the back dining room or connected with french doors, pocket doors or something similar?
cate | 10 years and 8 months ago
Of course you can move the plumbing stack (and electrical) to the center of the house without gutting the entire house. Where are you going to put it? In a closet or a bump out somewhere? You just put a hole in the floor/ceiling and run it up through the roof, then cover it up. No gutting. It costs about $12,000 to entirely replace an existing plumbing stack. Obviously it will be slightly more to put in a new one, since you have to make a course for it, cover it, penetrate the roof, etc. (in our case, through a skylight). Another thing you should consider is that you will need to hire an architect and file plans with the city, which will also add considerably to your overall costs both in time and money. As for the questions about bedrooms front and back, people do this all the time (in Bushwick, for example) — even when they don’t move the wet rooms (they flip the parlors and bedrooms). Personally I prefer everything the way it was originally, enjoy quiet and dark center bedrooms, and hate cheap and ill-considered bump-outs (though hopefully with an architect this won’t be an issue). But that’s just me.
alanshconstruction | 10 years and 8 months ago
Well what you have basically said is similar enough to a gut renovation. “We are going to remove and replace the tile, cabinets and appliances. I’m assuming that, when exposing the existing plumbing, we may find problems that cause us to replace the plumbing down to the basement. The electrical is also old and needs to be updated with GFCI outlets at the very least.” If you said you are also going to do this-.- “sewer stack, water lines and gas lines are on the west side of the house and we are proposing to put a kitchen on the east side” It is a gut renovation. You will have to break through the walls and maybe even the floor. 50yr old + houses there is how do I say this… it is almost certain there will be problems. Problems that may include replacing your whole house electrical wiring. leaky plumbing, structure problem a lot of people just don’t want to find out when they break through the first wall. etc etc And it is sub par to today’s regulations. What Hotpinksharpie said if the whole place was already gutted a few extra thousand something should be fine for moving the kitchen to a different “WALL” I might have been mistaken about something before. I mistakenly thought you wanted to move your kitchen to the center of your house. Oh wells. btw if it was replacing “floor tiles” well I can’t really say that it will be easy. If you have never done heavy construction work before.
hotpinksharpie | 10 years and 8 months ago
To clarify, when I say “assuming you are gutting already” I mean gutting that kitchen area. Moving the pipes and lines will obvs require opening up the floor ,some of the walls, etc. So for my project this was already done and the extra charge was for moving those lines only. that might be a difference in your job if you need to patch walls, dig up and re-lay a mud floor, etc. But again I would imagine that cost is part of your renovation cost as a whole, not the EXTRA amount of moving lines.
hotpinksharpie | 10 years and 8 months ago
Our garden apartment has the kitchen at the back with entrance to the garden in the kitchen, then the kitchen is open to a living space and the bedroom is at front along the street. It’s only a one bedroom but a large one that could have potentially been split into two. I feel the layout worked quite well, gave all the rooms sufficient light, and it flowed easily. We live on a quiet street so noise wasn’t an issue. The front entrance opened into a hallway not the bedroom itself, if you don’t have that capability a front entrance into the bedroom may be a little awkward. As for moving your plumbing and electrical lines I just had work like this done on a different kitchen area and the cost of just moving existing lines wasn’t nearly what I thought it might be. When I decided to move lines the additional charges above what our initial project was (initial project kept lines in existing locations), were about $1500 for plumbing and $1500ish for electrics. Granted all the line moving was part of a large job so I don’t know what the base charges were. But I would think that to move lines like you are talking about, assuming you are gutting already, you are most likely to be in the thousands, not tens of thousands. Bear in mind you will prob need an architect as well tho to draw up some plans.
chemosphere | 10 years and 8 months ago
Thanks for the replies. No, this is not a gut renovation. However, the kitchen is in rough shape. We are going to remove and replace the tile, cabinets and appliances. I’m assuming that, when exposing the existing plumbing, we may find problems that cause us to replace the plumbing down to the basement. The electrical is also old and needs to be updated with GFCI outlets at the very least. My question is, if we hire a plumber to redo the plumbing in place, is that significantly different in price from hiring him to redo it in a different place. The sewer stack, water lines and gas lines are on the west side of the house and we are proposing to put a kitchen on the east side. But this is on the ground floor, over the empty, unfinished cellar. Yes, the plumber (and electrician) will need to run these lines across the width of the house (20 feet) to the east side. But is that a 10k price difference? 30k? I’m trying to figure that part out.
alanshconstruction | 10 years and 8 months ago
Woah Woah Woah, First of all I assume this is going to be a gut renovation, I am not sure if it is going to be the whole house though. But if you are MOVING the kitchen TO THE center of the house then yes it is going to be expensive. You might as well gut the whole house first. Moving The whole kitchen to the center of the is a lot of work I mean a lot. Why is this so it is because we have to Move all the plumbing and existing electrical work to the center of the house this isn’t really common for most people to do. This isn’t replacing electrical work or plumbing it is moving. Usually this involves gutting the whole house.
tjbk | 10 years and 8 months ago
Hi Chemosphere, Where in Flatbush are you? We purchased a home in Flatbush with a similar layout (Floor Plan attached). It is usually a bit more cost effctive to keep plumbing and electrical in place. You should factor the street noise from the front of the house as well as your desired usage of the back yard in advance of moving the kitchen to the middle of the house. We sometimes wish the kitchen was located in the rear of the house when we host family and friends in our back yard or sit out back and have morning coffee. The open concept kitchen in the middle has worked well for us. A few points to consider: 1\. Access to back yard? 2\. Water supply to back yard? 3\. Electricaal supply to the back yard? 4\. Open concept kitchens tend to lack storage, factor in building a pantry or island for additional functionality. 5\. Run ports for coax as well as Cat 5 if you have the walls open during construction. If you would like to see our fu
rastermon | 10 years and 8 months ago
If you’re gutting the existing kitchens & bathrooms, you’re going to be replacing the plumbing anyway. In that case you might as well move the plumbing to where you want it to be. I don’t think there would be a big difference in the actual cost of the work. Might be a greater cost for the permitting compared to leaving things in their current location.