Monday, February 24, 2014

Our Starting Point - Before Photos of the Garden Level

Yesterday I finally took a whole stack of "before" photos. I think it's important to have a record of where we started and hopefully one day we will look back on these and realise  how far we've come.


Obviously, I took many more than you would want to see so I have tried to narrow it down to just a one or two of each room to give a good idea of where we are starting. Remember we have been living in the apartment for a little over a year whilst we finalised all the plans. I could show you the really gruesome "before we moved in" pics, complete with spider webs, filthy floors, mouldy grout and crumbling paint but maybe I'll save those for another time!




Garden Level:

Entryway:
Dark and dingy with a stone floor that is uneven and tricky to clean up all the grit, snow and dirt that gets traipsed in. Pretty darn boring an entryway.


 Downstairs Bathroom:
Does it really need a description? Dark, grungy and all shades of beige, in need of serious love and updating. It had a large shower but really pathetic water pressure that meant you had to sort of crouch under the shower head, right up against the wall. It's only redeeming feature that it has it's own window, somewhat of a rarity in Brooklyn townhouses, although I'll save you from a close up with this scary looking specimen, with its rotten, mouldy frame.


Living/Dining Room:
It's pretty dark down here as the only light source comes from the 2 french doors at the end which are each covered by an iron gate. Yes that is an A/C unit that you spy bang smack in the middle of the wall between the doors - just the thing you want to look at whilst relaxing by the fire. Speaking of the fire, it's a real wood burning fireplace, all be it with a rather dodgy looking raised brick hearth covered in slate tiles. One of 2 fireplaces in the apartment and a big draw for us when we were originally looking around.



Kitchen:
More beige. This dark and dated galley kitchen actually had a surprising amount of storage space and a couple of redeeming features like the small Viking range and nice deep sink. However, the plan is to move the kitchen to the opposite end of this floor so it's all got to go.



 Unfortunately the cute little kitchen window, doesn't let much light in:


Large Spare Bedroom:
This bedroom gets great eastern light in the mornings despite being on the street level. It is a large room and we really felt that it was wasted space to have such a large spare bedroom. It's also not idea as you can see right in at eye level from the street so, private, it is not.



Small Spare Bedroom/Office:
This little room is just over 6 feet wide and for the year we lived here pre-reno, we used it as an office space. Again, it gets great eastern light all morning and it actually has a second small north facing window that helps make it feel a little larger and brighter.






Friday, February 21, 2014

Handing Over the Keys

It's a very odd thing to hand over the keys to your home to a group of virtual strangers. After more than a year of planning I am suddenly not sure if I want to do this anymore, it feels too scary, too expensive and like something that surely only grown ups do?! Having met with the GC this morning to hand over keys and go over a few bit of admin, I left the apartment feeling more nervous and anxious than excited but I'm hoping it will pass, this must be normal right?

To give you some idea of what we are working with, here is a rudimentary floor plan of the "before", from when we purchased it a year ago.


Saturday, February 1, 2014

Introduction

In late 2012 we purchased an apartment that was the first 2 floors of a Brooklyn Heights town house. This is the first property that we have owned as a couple and we share the building with one other family who live on the upper floors.  We run it together with the other family like a somewhat unconventional co-op. Through the years the building has had a rich history seeing many changes of occupants and layouts, everything from a single family home to as many as 8 different apartments. In the 60's (those golden years before Landmarks restrictions) a floor was added to make it a 5 story building. It is located on a corner plot which has both advantages (like extra windows) and as we later discovered, disadvantages (like way more exterior brickwork to maintain). It is not a typical town home layout with the entrance on the front, but instead the main entrance is on the long side of the building which therefore influences greatly the layout of the rooms inside. 

As most people looking to buy a property do, we had viewed MANY apartments. And like most recently married couples looking for a home they can start a family in, we wanted space, preferably outdoors as well as in. We knew that we were unlikely to find what we wanted for our budget by staying in Manhattan and so, like many before us, we began to look at what was across the East River.  We did not know Brooklyn Heights that well before buying this apartment and though we were 99% sure we would enjoy living here, we were unprepared for how much we would fall in love with the area. 

When we saw this apartment, it had (unusually) been on the market for some time. Perhaps this should have been a warning sign but we were blinded by it's location, it's potential, the  small private garden, beautiful parlour floor high ceilings and wood burning fireplaces.... Naively, we thought we could transform it into our dream home with some minor internal work and a bit of a paint job. However, I am truly grateful that we have actually lived in the apartment before attempting to renovate it. This is because we have learned so much about how we want to use the space and about the renovation process in general that we couldn't have known had we just begun knocking things about straight away. We've looked at hundreds of different layouts, and changed our minds too many times to count. In short, we have driven our architects, parents, friends and each other mad, extended the budget by scary amounts and taken the best part of 14 months to get to the point of actually beginning!

Now that we are finally there, this blog will attempt to document our journey through this process of renovation as we take our (half of a) house and turn it into our home.