Destruction

This posting is not going to be heavy on words - I'll let the pictures speak for themselves!  I just want to do some introductions.  Here's Jorge, the guy that made this all happen.  We are discussing what exactly they will be tearing out while the guys are waiting with their sledge hammers.

Jorge's crew for our house:

And Jorge's brother who ran the job while Jorge was out on all his other projects:

Let the destruction begin!



 Just imagine that this will become our finished ceiling...

And now we rebuild!

The Plan

Since we live in the only city in the nation where real estate prices have continuously (even through the recession) and are still, going up, Adrian and I had to be creative in order to make having a home a reality.  Our experience was that any house that was within our price range had so many people also interested in it that there was no way we could compete!  And ALL were in terrible shape, aka a fixer-upper.  Let me explain.  The irony is that fixer-uppers,  appealing to many a person not having lots of cash for fancier homes, is now, post housing crisis, nearly impossible for financing unless one is able to plunk down a 20% downpayment-hmmm.   So here, this means that for fixer uppers with a low(er) price tag, the average person is competing with flippers who are apt to pay straight cash.  In a moment of frustration, I set the search criteria to anything that had been on the market for more than a month (unheard of in DC!) and lo and behold, what became our house popped up in the very neighborhood where we were renting at the time and also close to several of our good friends!  I must say that Adrian trusted me that we could make something out of this "house", and he just kept saying, "I'm with you babe, I trust you" and I think he was also trying to convince himself if he said it enough! 


Our plan became to gut and renovate the first floor and partially gut the second floor in this first phase of construction.  We hired a contractor to do the "hard" stuff and my dear husband was going to do the rest ("I'm with you babe").  Adrian didn't know how to do most things construction, and I think he was scared of my expectations for the things that he had done before (drywall).  I hope he will say that I haven't been too unreasonable! 


The contractor was hired to do the demolition, facilitate moving the gas and electric meters outside, install some steel beams where we wanted to remove load-bearing walls, and install all new plumbing and electric.  The plan was for us (mostly Adrian) to insulate the crawlspace, frame and insulate walls, hang and mud the drywall, refinish the ceiling (I'll explain later), stain and install all new trim and baseboards, and refinish the floors. 


So, the big picture of the plan for this house is to add a new third floor.  The current roof is a true flat roof which of course means that it is prone to water problems.  Nothing is leaking so far, but who knows when my luck will run out on that one.    The second phase of construction will be to add the third floor but leave it unfinished interior space and to simultaneously gut and renovate the second floor.  The last phase will be to finish out the third floor.  If I want to make the historic board happy, I will propose taking the house from this:

To this:

Not terribly exciting but we'll paint the brick and be on our way to looking like a proper house.  What I really want to do is more modern but I am still working on the design and will post that later!


I have to give a shout out to Adrian's parents who agreed to let their beyond fledgeling son (and wife) come home for a few months and who without them, this never would have been possible for us!!  Thanks Aat and Nina!

In All Its Glory

It's ours. 

We closed on October 31, 2010.  It's a very strange little house - when we bought it it was two separate apartments - one on each floor.  But, we said, it is a strange house, on a great lot, in a great neighborhood.  We are five blocks south of the Atlas District (the home of DC's first light rail and DC's hipster bar scene), four blocks north of Lincoln Park (the center of life for baby and dog lovers in the city) and six blocks north of Eastern Market (DC's own European market)!

www.atlasdistrict.com

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_Park_(Washington,_D.C.

www.easternmarket-dc.org

There it is.  See that green sign on the corner? We are literally the last house inside the historic district although our house has no historic distinction having been built in 1950.   That little sign is going to make my job a lot harder for the next few years.  It takes four months to get an exterior building permit (with visits to various neighborhood groups and hearings) in the historic district.  This is if everything goes smoothly which I am sure it will not since I have a taste for modern architecture.

Yep, two gates, two sidewalks, two doors and confusion of friends and postal workers.

 Here are pictures of the first floor apartment.  Luckily everything is coming out.

And the second floor apartment:

Besides the house, we are also the proud owners of a Japanese Maple, a peach tree, three mulberry trees, a fire escape, a beautiful rose bush, a rotted shed, not one but two wet vacs, and three birdbaths!

Seuss loves his yard, but it won't be long before he is the bane of our neighbors' existence as he goes nuts barking at every passerby both canine and human.   I also love this yard and I have BIG plans for it.  I am pretty sure the japanese maple is going to come out because it is blocking too much sun!  This weekend, to celebrate our one year anniversary (!) we are staying at a B&B in wine country of Virginia and we plan to stop off at this nursery http://www.ediblelandscaping.com/ to purchase some edibles that do well in our region.  In the future, I hope to have a hazlenut and/or hardy almonds privacy hedge, figs, plums, blackberries, raspberries, blueberries and concord grapes.  This will be in addition to vegetables which we are trying out in a raised planter bed this year.  Chickens aren't illegal in DC, but Adrian isn't convinced yet.  I'll keep trying.

Our lives have been completely overwhelmed by this renovation for the past six months and so I will be writing the blog covering this first phase of the renovations after-the-fact.  So it begins...