Help with top floor layout (and q about floors)

Hello, I?ve acquired an 1895 brick townhouse that, while in decent shape, cosmetically needs a lot of work inside. I was hoping to solicit some ideas and suggestions on specifically layout and flooring for one of the apartments. The house was a one family house a million years ago, and was plaster-walled around the stairs on the first floor to turn it into a two family long ago. The top floor apartment is the one I want to focus on for budget purposes, with the goal of renting it out. The top floor is about 750 sf (including the staircase), and is configured in a typical way, with a tiny bedroom / den right above the entryway to the building (front door), a kitchen to the right of that, with a bedroom and bath to the rear of the building. The floor is pitched at a crazy angle towards the middle of the house throughout this apartment (and the apartments below it), due to settling. I?d like to do, in order of priority given cash limitations: * Fix floor so it?s straight (and they used some sort of laminate for the rear bedroom so make that wood). I hate pitched floors. And laminate. *Change layout so make it a proper two bedroom. Challenges: * The front, like I mentioned has the tiny den and the kitchen. Well if I move that wall, I block one of the windows. And yet I still only reclaim a foot or two of space, and have to worry about all the plumbing and wiring on that other side of the wall (kitchen). * I don?t know (please educate me) on how to tell whether a wall is supporting or not vis a vis the floor above (i.e. roof) * The apt below has a completely different layout (kitchen is not in front). Questions: Since this is a typical layout, how do people normally do this? Move the two bedrooms to the back, and the bathroom to the front? My contractor says he can do floors for under 10K, including shimming – is that reasonable? Do I need to rip out all walls before doing the flooring correctly? (I suspect yes) I mean, it seems like I should pick a layout one way or another before thinking about floors. Attempt at floor plan (looking top down):

W – Window D – Den BA – Bath Bd – Bed
Front
—W—W—W—
|D|**Kitchen***|
|*|************|
Stairs*|*******|
********——–
|*BA***|*Bd****|
|******|*******|
—————-

Thanks

soundhoner

in Renovation 9 years and 11 months ago

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chemosphere | 9 years and 11 months ago

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Is this 17×45 or so? In order to make a 2 bedroom you need to move the bathroom to be in the middle of the house, opposite the stairs. Then you’ll have two unevenly sized bedrooms in the back of the house, depending on how the windows are laid out. Usually that’s an expensive alteration.

soundhoner | 9 years and 11 months ago

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Carmenf, Re: have I had a structural engineer examine the sloping is due to settling. Well prior to contract signing I had an inspector / structural engineer and he seemed OK with that piece (there were other things that concerned him). Re: rendering of the floor plan – no floor plan here, this was a more budget-ish listing agency, but I had made an edit to the ‘floorplan’ I made in the message, I just think the front page of brownstoner forum that shows the first message never updated after my edit. Let’s try again:

W – Window D – Den BA – Bath
Front
—W—W—W—
|D| Kitchen |
| | |
Stairs | |
Stairs ——–
| BA |Bedroom|
| | |
—————-

carmenf | 9 years and 11 months ago

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I’m trying to understand the floorplan, but it doesn’t render so well in my browser. Do you have the actual floorplan from the listing? From what I can see… basically the apartment in our house had the bathroom where your den is (the narrow long space actually works OK for it,) and then had a kitchen/dining area in the same spot, then a large bedroom where your two bedrooms are. The primary issue with the layout we have is that you have to go through the hallway to get to the bathroom, which is probably why yours is laid out the way it is. Ours was a “step-mother’s suite” kind of thing with the same family living in the house, so it wasn’t a big deal for us (also all the plumbing runs off one stack since the bathrooms and kitchens are all in the same places on 3 floors.) Regarding your walls- the wall running parallel to the stairs is almost certainly a load-baring wall. The one splitting the kitchen from the bedrooms running left-right in this picture is probably a stiffening wall which could potentially be moved, but not eliminated without adding structural posts. Have you had a structural engineer through the place yet? How do you know that the sloping floors are due to “settling” and not due to issues in the joists or in one of the load-baring walls, or in the foundation footings?