House of the Day: 238 Lafayette Avenue
$1,050,000 isn’t a lot of dough for a house in central Clinton Hill, but 238 Lafayette Avenue is in rougher shape than your average house in the area. The four-story house is chopped up into three apartments and has plenty of value-destroying touches like 1970’s-era kitchens, dropped ceilings and non-period wood paneling. Then again, there…
$1,050,000 isn’t a lot of dough for a house in central Clinton Hill, but 238 Lafayette Avenue is in rougher shape than your average house in the area. The four-story house is chopped up into three apartments and has plenty of value-destroying touches like 1970’s-era kitchens, dropped ceilings and non-period wood paneling. Then again, there are some original elements still in place, including fireplaces and some crown moldings in the entryway. The big question is how much it’ll cost the new owner to bring this place back up to snuff. Thoughts on that?
238 Lafayette Avenue [Project 17] GMAP P*Shark
maly – i guess you’ve done it before, but our experience with wood panels, dropped ceilings, linoleum, inter alia, was not as breezy as yours! i think the problem is that you have to take the damage you see and multiply it by, like, 5x, to imagine what mess lies beneath. i would estimate at least 1/4 of our not-cheap reno was spent removing junk like this and bringing back what was underneath to a neutral standard. and often, there isn’t anything usable left underneath, or masks a structural defect, like joists with giant notches cut out of them, or dealing with whatever it is leads to a chain reaction that results in losing some of the little detail that remains…
can you tell i’ve been traumatized?? just thinking about trying to remove all those layers of brown, glossy paint would keep me up at night!
There is something very satisfying about walking over at 7:30 in the morning, finding 12 guys waiting outside with a dumpster, and by 3PM it’s all gone and done.
Yes, Maly. Good points. As usual….
But dropped ceilings make me feel ill too. Physical reaction. I am delicate.
Blayze, better dropped ceilings, fake paneling and wall-to-wall than an 80’s remuddling. All of this can be gone in a day, and you get to work with the maybe slightly damaged original materials.
By ch renter on April 19, 2011 2:13 PM
I thought the big question was: how much money can the two rentals bring in?
…
The answer to that, for any property in NYC (and especially Brooklyn + Manhattan), is not enough.
There is just no way to make 16x to 22x rent work. NYC is the most upside down rent vs. buy area in the country. You can find multi-families properties in other regions that will yield a positive cash flow in 6-10 years. It takes satisfaction of the a 30 year note to see it around here. Ridonkulus.
I was only kidding Minard. Most American rustbelt cities suffer from these formerly posh 70’s touches. Sometimes I like wood paneling… it’s kitsch if done right.
Dropped ceilings however make me feel ill.
I love posters who think this look is “jersey” instead of “brooklyn”.
This is the real deal Brooklyn. Dropped ceilings, fake wood paneling, the woiks!!
Youngsters who are scared by these reminders of “olden times” will run away I suppose. More savvy types understand that all that stuff is surface mounted and easy to get rid of. In fact most lah-dee-dah brownstones in Fort Greene and Clinton Hill went through a masonite and fake wood paneling phase.
I thought the big question was: how much money can the two rentals bring in?
“non-period wood paneling”
Heehee, euphemism….