The way it’s supposed to work is that the amount of improvements to the property is added to market valuation of the property. Normally DOF is limited in how much they can jump your property taxes, but when you do substantial improvements that is the one time they’re allowed to bump the taxes up substantially – but only by the amount of improvements to the property.

If I understand things correctly they threw out the PW3 Cost Affidavit that we submitted to the Department of Buildings and instead used the number $1.46M which their appraiser appears to pulled out of thin air since it’s nothing close to the actual cost. Mind you, “cost” is one of those things that’s a bit flexible and open to interpretation since what you report to DOB is “hard costs” which don’t include everything you spend money on. But it’s not like we’re arguing over small amounts that might be due to the interpretation of “hard costs”. There is just no reality in which we could have spent $1.46M – we simply didn’t have access to that kind of money.

The reason why I’m asking in the title of this post whether people know of other people who completed their jobs in 2012 (and possibly even late 2011) is because I suspect there’s a problem assessor covering Central Harlem. 104 West 120th had an assessment last year of $262K. Their PW3 cost affidavit was for $315K and the assessor gave them a market valuation of $1.5M – so she’s in the same boat we are – it’s just the change isn’t quite as drastic as ours.

If a bunch of us can all band together and go to DOF together, then I think our individual cases will be strengthened and it will seem like the problem is with the assessor. If you know of anyone who might be in the same situation, please have them contact me – jay@beatingupwind.com. I’ll be happy to look up their particulars if they don’t know how to find them. And if you just know the address for buildings that had completed projects last year, please put them in the comments below and I’ll look them up and contact the owners if appropriate.

Update (Jan 21st):

In researching the situation – looking for other places that completed their work in 2012 – I discovered that it’s also affecting some of the folks who haven’t gotten their jobs signed off yet..

There’s a place on 136 that filed a preliminary cost estimate of $50,000, but they’ve had about $650K added to their market value by DOF before the renovations are actually completed. Their taxes will just about triple because of that – not as bad as our case, but they’re probably going to have more added next year when they complete their renovations.

But that’s nothing compared to what’s happening to 241 Lenox (which has also not completed their renovations yet)… They filed cost estimates totaling about $850K. The assessor has raised the market value on that place by $650K which doesn’t seem like a horrible thing on the face of it, but the problem is the tax class was not changed. So their tax bill is going from about $13K/year to a whopping $56K/year. I think they’re doing 2 family plus commercial. I don’t know if that qualifies for tax class 1. If it does, then keeping them at tax class 2 is just spiteful. It’s adding $40K to the cost of their renovations.

Problem was, the architect wasn’t too enthusiastic about the idea, and his mechanical engineer told me air in buildings didn’t work that way – that the hot air wouldn’t rise. That contradicted everything I had been taught in grade school. He said hot air only rises when there’s moving air. The air in a well-sealed house with the windows shut doesn’t move.

I didn’t believe him and when we got to the end of the project the recirculating duct was one of a short list of things I felt like I would have done differently if I could do it all over again.

Well, who’d have guessed – but the mechanical engineer was right. It’s winter and the top floor is at least 5 degrees cooler than the lower floors. It’s not because of poor insulation – we’ve got an R62 roof and R22 walls and great windows. At first I thought it might be just be that the room where I was when it struck me had had the door closed. But then I moved into the stairwell and it was the same there.

In the summer the area up in the bulkhead would get incredibly hot, but apparently that was because of solar heat gain from the large bulkhead windows (and glass door). But in the winter there’s less solar heat gain even – though the bulkhead is designed to capture winter light and discourage solar heat gain in the summer.

Now I’m perfectly happy the recirculating duct wasn’t put it. The air is cold up in the bulkhead – there’s no point of pulling cold air down into the living space in the winter. And likewise with the summer – we don’t need the bulkhead air conditioned.

The moral of the story is engineers know what they’re talking about. Who’ve guessed? lol

Summer Average (’07-’09): 29.0 kWh/day
Winter Average (’07-’09): 18.3 kWh/day

Summer I defined as the June 20ish reading through the August 20ish reading. Winter I defined as the September 20ish reading through the May 20ish reading. Actually, winter is a bad term – “non-summer” would be better. So what you see above is the  average of three summers (6 total months), and 2 winters (16 total months)

I should also mention that we work from home – so everything you see includes air conditioning during the day – but typically just for the rooms we were occupying, though Dan has a bad habit in the house of opening doors into unairconditioned spaces and cooling more of the house than is necessary. We also have at least one computer on 24 hours a day – since it acts as a server.

From 5/21 to 6/12 we used an average of 36.3 kWh/day (98% over winter average)
From 6/12 to 7/31 we used an average of 37.2 kWh/day (28% over summer average)
From 7/31 to 8/20 we used an average of 54.1 kWh/day (87% over summer average)
From 8/20 to 9/20 we used an average of 41.0 kWh/day
From 9/20 to 10/23 we used an average of 31.4 kWh/day (72% over winter average)

Now, mind you, the house is a lot bigger has more things going on. Instead of 1,350 sq. ft., it’s about 3,200 sq. ft. There’s 180 watts of light bulbs that are on from dusk to dawn (roughly 2 kWh/day). There’s a dehumidifier running the cellar 24/7 – it’s Energy Star certified, but it still uses a fair amount of power. The server we have running is more power hungry. There’s also a booster pump for water pressure, etc. All in all there’s just more electrical demand than there was in the apartment.

The average from 6/12 to 8/20 was 42.1 kWh/day. Since the period started a little earlier than it should have and there were some days we wished we had A/C before July 3 (when it actually got up and running), let’s call the summer average 45 kWh/day – that would be “just” 55% more than at the coop. I’m pretty happy with that, all things considered.

The average up to 6/12 and after 9/20 is 33.4 kWh/day. So once again we see power going up roughly 11 kWh/day for A/C during the summer. That’s great since we’re cooling more space than we did at the apartment with about the same amount of energy. In fact for about 6 weeks during that time Dan had the A/C on 24/7 up in the studio because he was making stuff out of fiberglass and needed to control the temperature. But our building is more efficient and the A/Cs are more efficient.

But the “winter” (non-summer) power is considerably higher. So far, the townhouse seems to consistently use 15 kWh/day more than our old apartment – that’s 80% more power. Electricity seems to be costing about 25 cents per kWh, so that’s less then $4/day, or about $115/month additional. But when you look at the list of stuff (above) that we didn’t have in the old apartment, it sorta makes sense that it costs more to run a townhouse that’s over twice the size of the apartment.

We also have data for our tenant. That’s a roughly 1,050 sq. ft. duplex apartment (basement & half of the cellar):

From 7/31 to 8/20 he used an average of 24.5 kWh/day (15% under summer average)
From 8/20 to 9/20 he used an average of 35.2 kWh/day
From 9/20 to 10/23 he used an average of 20.9 kWh/day (14% over winter average)

Our tenant also works from home. Theoretically his energy usage should be less than our old apartment – the square footage is less, the insulation is better and the A/C is more efficient. Plus, a third of the space is the cellar which almost never needs cooling. But he does have a dehumidifier running 24/7… His usage was 15% below our usage from late July to late August, but then the following month his electricity usage went up considerably for some reason. And then he was 14% over our winter usage in the past month.

After “beating upwind” (sailing into the wind) with home renovations, the next phase of “beating upwind” for us became improving the neighborhood. It’s not like we came to Harlem with the intention of changing Harlem, but when you see heroin dealing and heroin addicts on a daily basis, when people repeatedly call you faggot, when they’re beligerant and threaten you physically, when people repeatedly rob your house, steal your iPad, when they tear the DOB permits off your construction fence, etc. – all in the course of a few short months – you don’t just rollover and be passive – at least Dan and I don’t.

So we started working with our block association and with MMPCIA. And as a result, the two of us are now in charge of MMPCIA’s Safety & Security Committee. That puts us in contact with people all over the Mount Morris Park Historic District and what we’re seeing is similar problems in other parts of the neighborhood. In addition to drug dealing, there are reports of crack houses, illegal gambling, even whore houses. Some residents say they’ve even received death threats. We’ve started working pretty actively with the 28 Precinct and the District Attorney’s office to clean up stuff like that from the neighborhood.

By the way – if you’re thinking of buying in Harlem – don’t let all of this scare you off. Most of the blocks in Mount Morris dealt with their problems long ago. Thing is, our block used to be the roughest block in the neighborhood – it was a literal drug emporium (e.g. our house was a full-on crack house). With three methadone clinics one block up on 124th Street, there continues to be a constant demand for drugs, so getting rid of the last bit of drug dealing on our block has taken more time than it has elsewhere.

Plus, when you do encounter a drug dealer chances are they’ll leave you alone – they don’t want you calling the police – it’s not good for their business. There are people who’ve lived here for years who never encountered what we’ve encountered despite walking past the same things we walk past. In fact they often don’t even understand what’s going on – they just see a bunch of guys hanging out. Other people know what’s going on but for one reason or another (the most common being the safety of their kids), they put up with it.

I’ve always heard neighborhoods change when gay men move in. I thought it was just because we made things pretty. Now I realize another big component is that the straight folks with kids let gay men do their crime prevention for them. I find it sort of amusing since gay men are often portrayed in the media as being weak. The media clearly doesn’t see us through the lens of Stonewall – when drag queens stood up to the NYPD and won.

Anyway… The outing… At last week’s MMPCIA meeting the sergeant who I’ve been working with very closely got up to talk. He’s been great. MMPCIA gave him a 3 page list of problem areas a month ago and since then he’s down the list hitting each area – often more than once. All in all we love the work he’s been doing in the area – he made something like 25 to 28 arrests just at locations mentioned on the list – and apparently his arrest outside the bar Paris Blues yielded a significant quantity of narcotics (and to be clear the owners of the bar were not involved in the dealing). He’s sort of a breath of fresh air since other people at the 28 seem to think we’re whiners since there are parts of the precinct that have far more crime. (All in all crime in the 28 is double to triple what you’d see in Washington Heights, but crime in the historic district is half what it is in the rest of the precinct). But the arrests he’s been able to make (especially the one at Paris Blues) show that there is real crime going on – even in our part of the precinct.

The problem was the sergeant we love so much repeatedly mentioned me and the MMPCIA president by name and then went into detail about exactly how we’ve been working closely with him. That wouldn’t have been a huge problem except there was someone in attendance who’s quite friendly with the drug dealers on our block (I don’t think he’s involved in dealing, but some of the dealers are his friends). He made a beeline to the front of the room at the end of the meeting and tried to get the 3 page list we gave the sergeant. Luckily he didn’t get to see it.

Going to bed that night my mind was racing – wondering what we should do now that the information was out. It felt a lot like being outed – only this time the consequence could be physical violence against me if the people we’re fighting are so inclined. By the morning my mind was made up – double down, don’t fold. If gay history has taught us anything it’s to stand up and be counted. Luckily the MMPCIA president felt the same way (after a period of thinking we should lay low).

Three days after the meeting, narcotics (not the sergeant I’ve been working with) did a major action on our block. They first arrested the drug dealer’s customers and got them to say who sold them the drugs, and then arrested the dealer (who deals out of his SUV). Actually, I don’t know for sure that he was arrested – he (and his wife) weren’t in cuffs when they left with the police. But that was early Friday evening and we haven’t seen him since (knock wood).

There still plenty more to be done in the neighborhood. We’ll be working closely with residents, NYPD and the DA’s office to identify and resolve the problem spots in the historic district. I can’t mention details that aren’t public, but there’s plenty to work on and we’ll continue to “beat upwind” to make our neighborhood better…

Before I end this topic – I’d like to ask you to support NYPD on Stop & Frisk. When you see a stop & frisk action it may look suspicious to you, but realize that often it’s based on information from credible witnesses the officers can’t reveal because it would put the witness at risk. Case and point, a homeless man was sitting next to a playground in the area stroking himself through his pants while looking at the children. He was clearly a pedophile and when confronted by a MMPCIA community member he refused to stop – in fact he was rather belligerent. The police were called and the bystanders didn’t understand what was going on – it looked like the police were just hassling a homeless guy. The police wound up having to be pretty rough with him and he charged police abuse which just fueled the suspicions of the bystanders. It looked bad, but the police were just doing their job – and stopping pedophiles from jacking off to children playing in a playground is a job I think we all want them to do. If you want to see Harlem improve, don’t take stop & frisk away from them – it’s a vital tool they need to do their jobs. That said, I do believe stop & frisk has to be done intelligently, and with “courtesy, professionalism and respect” – there are limits.

Ultimately I think stop & frisk is a problem because good people do nothing about the crime around them. I’ve seen a lot of this in Harlem – too often long time residents just feel powerless to change their community or they rationalize it by saying “it was here before I got here, it will be here after I’m gone”. They’ve stopped beating upwind and are letting the wind blow them and their community onto the rocks. I won’t judge whether that was a valid survival strategy in the past, but from what I’ve seen Harlem has changed a lot and the power is on our side now – we just need to utilize the power we already have. Most of the long-time residents want the community to improve, even if they feel powerless to bring the change about; and the vast majority of homeowners want things to change, even if they do nothing for fear something will happen to their kids. Even many of the renters want change – though they don’t typically have “skin in the game” the same way property owners do.

I really think block associations & neighborhood watches, working in concert with NYPD, can make a huge difference. We’ll never get rid of all the problems, but if we take back our streets, and stop at least the obvious problems, I think everyone’s lives will improve.

So as odd as it sounds I’ve really been looking forward to washing my own car. But parking is such that it’s hard to find a time get the spot directly in front of the house. So Friday I queued up during alternate side parking and got the spot in front of the house and spent the rest of the morning washing the car.

Turns out I was missing wax – so that didn’t get done, but the car looked much better after I was done…

Most people have no clue what kind of car I have. Most think it’s a VW GTI, which is close, but not right. It’s a 2008 VW R32 which I picked up from the dealer almost exactly 5 years ago (I special ordered and it was one of the first to arrive for that model year – got to the dealer in late July ’07 and I picked it up the first week of August). It’s only got 28,400 miles on it which is pretty low for a 5 year old car – less than 6,000 miles/year…

The one person who did recognize it as an R32 was the UPS guy. He didn’t even need to see the R32 badge – he could tell from the tailpipes. Like most people who are car guys – he stood around and asked a bunch of questions for a while…

So while I got all wet and sweaty washing and vacuuming the car, it was fun – a bit of downwind sailing after a lot of beating upwind…

Old style water heaters just sat there. Their exhaust was hot, so it rose up the chimney without any effort. New water heaters aren’t anything like that. Hot air going up the chimney isn’t efficient – the heat should be going into the water, not the atmosphere. So they use fans to push the exhaust up the chimney. If you see fan motor sitting on top of your water heater you have one of the new, more efficient, water heaters…

Sometimes the fan is concealed a bit behind a plastic cover…

Because the exhaust gases are more condensed and not as hot, instead of using a tin chimney, you’re supposed to use PVC or CPVC or stainless. In fact you’re not allowed to use tin for the chimney  – I think the gasses can corrode tin.

Anyway, the air the fans push up the chimney has to come from somewhere. There are two types of modern water heaters – Power Vent and Direct Power Vent. The term “Power Vent” means, they have a fan that pushes the exhaust up the chimney. Direct Power Vent means the air intake is piped from outside – air inside the boiler room is not used.

I wanted Direct Power Vent, but we were venting through the roof and the total length of piping for venting was a problem. You have to count the air intake into the total length of ducting allowed. In our case, since we have a 5 story townhouse, the intake pipe would have put us over the allowed ducting or dangerously close to being over.

Because the air on a Direct Vent water heater comes from the boiler room, not outside as the repair guy put it – “you’ve got a big vacuum cleaner” sitting in your boiler room. It sucks in air at the bottom, spirals it around the tank and pushes it out the top. So any loose dirt that’s sitting on your floor will get sucked into the water tank. If it’s not light enough to make it to the top of your chimney it will wind up falling back down into the fan when the fan turns off. Eventually it builds up and clogs the sensors that are there to make sure everything is working properly.

When the repair guy took off the chimney and started the fan a huge cloud of dust and dirt went into the air. Not good – and the cause of our problems. Luckily no parts had gotten fried, so as soon as he had cleaned things up everything was working again.

So in hindsight, if you can, I’d recommend a Direct Power Vent instead of a Power Vent. Your outside air is likely to be cleaner than the air in your boiler room. But whichever you have, be careful about the cleanliness of the air going being sucked in. With a Power Vent keep your boiler room clean. During construction that can be hard – so just turn the water heater off until the boiler room can be clean. Even with a Direct Power Vent you should worry if there’s dust in the air where the air intake is – for example, if they’re doing construction next door, etc.

One other thing the repair guy said was that PVC can be a problem for the vent stacks. Apparently the temperature can get high enough to crack the PVC. CPVC or stainless is better. We’ll keep the water temperature down to try to avoid that problem. If you do put in PVC, keep a close eye on it for problems.

Here are the class C4 & C5 buildings that sold for less then $900K in the past 6 months south of 125…

• 319 West 112 – $875K, 2/10/12
  
• 53 West 119 – $250K, 2/13/12 – Too low to be a real sale – probably a partial interest
• 254 West 121 – $895K, 4/2/12
• 326 West 113 – $720K, 4/24/12 – This seems to have gone through a recent foreclosure. A shell a few doors down is listed at $1.4M and has multiple offers, so I think this sale is a bit out of the ordinary and not a true comp either.
• 133 West 119 – $830K, 4/27/12
• 164 West 123 – $618,400, 6/25/12 – Two doors down from me. The owner knew it was worth more. Last I knew he either wanted to bring in someone to help fund the development or he wanted to sell it. I suspect the new LLC is a combination of the old owner and a new investor who’s funding redevelopment – so it’s not a true sale either.

So none of the “real sales” were less than $830K, and take into consideration that those deals were probably all negotiated late last year. The market is much hotter now, so prices are even higher now.

Bottom line you’re probably looking at $850K or more for a shell south of 125 these days. And realistically, if you want to renovate it well you need to buy all cash. A pretty typical Harlem townhouse is about 3600 sq. ft. (18′ x 50′ x 4 stories). You should budget $250/sq. ft. for a decent renovation – so that will cost you $900K which is pretty much the max amount you get on a 203(k) to rehab a building to 2 family.

If you’re wondering what you get for $800K+, here are pics from one of the places listed above…

I know it’s harsh to say you need $900K in cash to buy a shell south of 125, but it just is what it is… The good part is that you’re not over-investing. Things that are well renovated are selling for $2.5M+ (but that’s another blog post).

A couple weeks after we moved in we went to a couple nurseries trying to find wisteria plants to buy. The second place we went was Sam Bridge Nursery in Old Greenwich, CT. As we were approaching I knew it was going to be incredible. I had figured it would be on the outskirts of Greenwich, but no – it’s smack dab in the center of one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the country. The mansions around the nursery were humbling.

Needless to say service was incredible. There was always someone close at hand to give advice – they even insisted on loading the stuff we bought into the car, but I’m getting ahead of myself…

They had a few different types of wisteria to choose from. Cell service was pretty bad, but we were able to validate what was on the tags by looking things up online. We had a few criteria – it needed to grow to 25+ feet since the top of our pergola is about 20 feet off the ground. “Fast growing” was a big plus, as was “blooms quickly” (since wisteria can take years to actually bloom after being planted). “Texas Purple” Japanese Wisteria was available and seemed to fit all those criteria.

The web sites said that Texas Purple could grow “up to 10 feet a year”. WRONG. It grew 10 feet the first month after we planted it and one of the plants has actually reached the top of the pergola – which means it’s grown about 15-16 feet in two months! (They were about 4-5 feet tall when we bought them). The other plant is just a couple feet behind it. The faster growing plant actually has three shoots coming up, the slower growing plant has just one (so far). They’ve probably got another month and a half of growing this year – so they may very well grow 25 feet this year alone – which is absolutely stunning.

We got two different types of mulch from Sam Bridge plus top soil that looked incredibly rich. I’m sure they have helped by giving the wisteria lots of nutrients. We should probably go back for more mulch – it seems to do wonders for the plants.

Other than those two wisteria, the back yard is still a complete mess…

But hey, we’ve got two wisteria

The contractor is starting to wrap up construction, we have our big end-of-project inspection Thursday. We’re hoping to have a TCO (Temporary Certificate of Occupancy) shortly after that. They still have to finish the stoop. Dan’s fabricating the missing pieces out of fiberglass (another blog post), and after not liking the “brownstone finish” our contractor picked out, we think we’ve found one. We even had them do color matching to the original brownstone.

After yelling at the plumber for weeks we finally got him to come out and diagnose the problem. Here’s what we had for pressures – they’re probably pretty typical for what other Harlem townhouses are seeing…

In the cellar…
We have about 45 psi coming in from the street
On the sprinkler system that drops to about 40 psi after the check valve
On domestic water we drop to about 30 psi after the water meter & double check valve
The 30 psi is maintained to the bottom of the run for the toilets (in the cellar)

At roof level (up about 55 feet)…
The sprinkler system has about 24 psi
The outside hose connector has about 8 psi

What that means on a practical level is that it takes us a full minute to fill a 59 oz (<1/2 gallon) Tropicana bottle in the slop sink on the top floor. That’s BAD. Down in the cellar with 30 psi the same bottle filled in less than 5 seconds (about as quickly as we could get the valve open and then close it again).

That means the sprinkler system lost about 15 psi over about a 55 feet rise while the domestic supply for sinks, etc. lost 22 psi over the same rise – that’s because the sprinkler system uses larger diameter pipes which can preserve pressure more effectively.

The line for the toilets is bigger and separate from the one for the sinks, so pressure in it should be somewhat better (though not as good as the sprinklers). The flushometer valves can operate down to 10 psi, but the toilet bowl requires 25 psi and 18 gpm to flush properly. You can see how we just don’t have enough pressure, and probably not enough flow. We probably have the 25 psi in the rental, but on up in our unit the pressure just isn’t sufficient.

Even when we didn’t have a double check valve and we had a larger diameter water meter the toilets didn’t always flush properly. So the bottom line is if you want flushometer toilets, or you want massage shower heads to work properly in the upper floors of a Harlem townhouse you’re probably going to need a booster pump.

Booster pumps get very expensive if your sprinkler system needs more pressure. Sprinklers have incredible flow and a booster pump that can can keep up with a sprinkler system has to be pretty huge, and huge = expensive (over $12,000 just for the equipment and up to $15,000 with installation). However, boosting just the domestic water supply is far less expensive – about 1/10th the price. In fact it’s important not to over-size the booster pumps since they need a certain flow going into them.

Here’s what our new household booster pump looks like…

There’s a pump and a pressure tank. The pressure tank evens out the pressure, so when you flush a toilet and use a bunch of water all at once it can hit a reserve and won’t have to suck everything out of the incoming water supply.

Now that that’s in the toilets flush properly and Dan says the massage setting on the shower actually feels more like a massage…

Incidentally, the pressure in the ground floor rental seems just fine. We’ve put in a rain shower there – so no massage shower issues, and the toilet flushes enthusiastically. So only our unit needed help.

We were going to have a sub-contractor do the work, but one company wanted to charge $53,000 (just for the stoop), and the other one kept missing and being seriously late for meetings (not a good sign on a critical path task). So our contractor is having his guys do the work.

The process starts by taking a jack hammer to the old brownstone, removing any loose stone, and creating a rough surface…

In some cases that’s quite a bit of stone (see below) – it all depends on how much damage there was over the years…

The next step is to coat everything in a bonding agent so the concrete-based mix they put on will adhere to the brownstone – that’s the while stuff in the picture below…

Then everything has to be built back up. For the stair treads they used PVC piping to create round edges…

That was filled in with concrete to form a new edge. When they did the front they embedded wire in the concrete to reinforce the leading edge of the step.

The flourishes under each step also had to be reconstructed…

You can also see how they’ve recreated the triangular detail on the side of the stoop. It was a multi-stage process – you can see the picture below has more detail in the design than the one above.

In the picture above everything is ready for the final “brownstone” finish coat. All the concrete work has a very coarse finish to it that’s not quite visible in the picture.

You can also see that they’ve recreated the low walls that were there originally.

Simultaneously to that another worker has been grinding all the rust off the original ballusters (and the ones we bought at Demolition Depot to fill in what we were missing), but that’s the subject of another blog post.

We had a hard time figuring out what to do with the newel posts. A building on 122 was willing to sell us their newel post and railing, but the price was high, and it didn’t give us everything we needed and it was only one newel post and one section of straight railing (plus a bunch of ballusters we didn’t need). In the end we decided to do masonry newel posts since it was less expensive, quicker, and what the National Park Service has approved (though we made a few changes to the approved design).

The first step in building up the newel posts is building up a brick core…

Then forms are built in the shape of the final design, and those are put over the brick cores…

Then concrete is put on the brick and a straight edge is drawn down guided by the templates to make the concrete into the correct shape…

That’s where we stand as of today. Tomorrow they’ll take off the forms, do the other sides and repeat the process with the other newel post.

The other thing you can see in the picture above is the brown primer for the final “brownstone” coat. They did a sample area of the finish today…

The house wall is painted, the retaining wall has the “brownstone” finish. It’s not the same quality as the $10M townhouses you see on the Upper West Side, but it’s better and hopefully more durable than a lot of what we see around Harlem. It doesn’t look like brown sandpaper. It looks better than brown stucco, but almost has a paint-like quality to it – though it has more of a texture than paint.

I think the newel posts will be painted (black), and not have a brownstone finish – that should make them look more like the cast iron originals. There are actually brownstones on 119 just east of Lenox that have all concrete railings, ballusters and newel posts. At first glance they pass for original, though when you get close you can see a concrete texture and as they age they get lichen in the crevices…

One thing I should mention is that we’re not refinishing the under side of the stoop because if water gets through the new finish on the top, it needs to be able to go through the stone and get out.

So we’re getting there… I just want them to be done though… But soon enough they will be done.

Real estate is just one of the things I do. I’ve been self-employed doing web stuff for 11 years now. I have some servers left over from when I used to have “colo” servers (now my servers are managed and owned by the hosting company). I’m repurposing those severs and the two rack mountable RAIDs I had for home use (the silver colored stuff). Then there’s the UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) that I bought a few years back that’s rack mountable (on the bottom). And new for the house is the DVR for the CCTV security system (with the round dials), and the switch for all the ethernet outlets in the house (at the very top). Since the enclosure can be locked, it means if thieves break in it’ll be harder for them to walk away with the DVR.

All in all I managed to use 9 of the 12U. The rack enclosure tucks into the closet and I’ve designed the closet with a fan at the bottom that pushes in fresh air and a vent at the top of the closet to let out hot air (conveniently next to the A/C). There’s also a metal wire shelf on top that holds all the little stuff that’s not rack mountable. So I essentially have a miniaturized network/server room.

It does create some heat and even though it’s sound insulated it creates a little background noise, but not much considering how loud the server is inside it.

A permit to do structural work had been pulled a few weeks ago, and they had started work earlier this week. First a construction fence, and then I saw the ground floor was pretty much gutted. Given what I had seen I thought for a moment about calling 311 and asking that a structural inspector check out the job to make sure everything is safe. But I didn’t call. Lesson learned on that one. Guess there are times when being a meddlesome neighbor is a good thing.

There was an empty lot to the left (east) and the block association’s community garden to the right (west). The building was sold late last September for $600,000. The last two SRO tenants had stopped living there around November, and the new owner put it on the market for $1.1M in December.

I had taken a couple clients through the house back in December/January. There were serious structural problems evident in the cellar. Here are some pictures of what the foundation looked like…

In the picture above you can see that they had put bracing in to support the structure that was failing. You can also see that a portion of the foundation had failed and was patched with cinder blocks.

In the picture below you can see another part of the foundation that failed was patched with brick…

One of the times I went through it our contractor joined us. He told us he was “scared of the building”. That it was the type of building that could collapse without warning if you messed with it. He wasn’t worried so much about the patches as he was about parts of the foundation where the mortar was missing…

All in all it was VERY spooky to be in that cellar. You could just feel trouble. It wasn’t just that it was dark and dank – I go through a lot of places like that. It was all the bracing and patching.

The problems with the building were evident even outside the building. We were in the community garden next door a few weeks ago and I snapped this photo of the corner of the building…

Stuff like that just isn’t good – especially when combined with a wonky foundation.

The extension you see in the picture above is actually interesting. It hadn’t settled, but the rest of the building had. So at one point the floor sloped rather dramatically – probably went up 9 inches over as many feet.

The origin of the problems is that the townhouse used to be part of a row of townhouses, but over time all but this one were torn down. It was never designed to be a freestanding house. To be a freestanding house it needed a lot of reinforcement.

Our contractor said it would be best to tear the place down and start over. If it had to be salvaged you’d have to cocoon it and put walls all around it. Problem is, the garden folks didn’t want to give up land, and the party wall on the other side was already 6″ over the property line. I’m not sure there was really a way to save this building. At most, the façade could have been braced and the rest of the building demolished.

I will say it’s unusually lucky that the workers had left the site when the collapse happened and the community garden was closed and locked. Apparently no one was even walking past. While demolition was most likely what was needed – there are cheaper ways to demolish a building. The City is going to want to get paid all the overtime for their workers. NYPD, FDNY, Parks Department, etc. Apparently right now they’re taking every piece of the building out, spreading it on the street to look for body parts and anything else that can help them in their investigation – how much is that going to cost?

Inside it was a grand townhouse – 20 foot wide. There were some incredible fireplaces…

And a grand staircase…

The ceilings were really high, and on parlor there were some that had great plaster work…

In fact the ceilings were so high that the 5th floor could see over it’s neighbors to the south – all the way to midtown.

It’s sad to see buildings like this die, but alas, it happens…

Just today I found out about a place in the Mount Morris Park historic district that’s about to go on the market. It will need a total gut renovation – so it’s a similar sized project to ours. It’s a good sized place (I estimate it to be over 4,000 sq. ft.) so the asking price is a bit higher than some other shells, but it’s got the square footage to justify the price.

There is a Certificate of No Harassment in place, so financing is an option, but even so you’re looking at a total investment (purchase + renovations) of around $2M for moderately high-end finishes. While you could do the project for less, that level of finish will result in the place being worth a bit under $3M when you’re done (assuming the market doesn’t drop) – so the project should be profitable.

If you’re interested and want to know more, send me an e-mail – jay@beatingupwind.com

Clearly it’s the rustic element in the stairwell. Here’s another shot looking from the other side…

(The electrical cord wrapping around it is temporary.)

There are still curvy/organic frosted plexiglass panels that have to be installed. The architect went over proper installation with the contractor today – so they’ll be in soon.

The master bathroom is pretty much done – here’s what it looks like…

We’re not 100% convinced we picked the right color for the wall – it’s a bit purple, which wasn’t our objective. And clearly, we still need a toilet seat on the toilet.

While some people do elaborate “spa” bathrooms, our bathroom is pretty basic and functional. There are a few little things we added… There’s a handheld shower nozzle that still has to be mounted on the wall, but that’s minor. And you can just see the linear shower drain in the shower. In the shower there’s a little inset with shelves where we can put soap & shampoo…

The glass in the window is wire glass, but the window is plastic (since it’s in a shower). I’m hoping we don’t have a problem on inspection with not having a sprinkler head in front of the window (since it’s on a lot line). Our architects researched it pretty well and we were told either wire glass or a sprinkler head was what was needed, but friend just had DOB tell them they needed both. Fingers crossed on that one!

We don’t need any frosting on the window since there’s no one who can see in – just a brick wall a few feet away. But as you can see in the picture there’s still a fair amount of light that gets in despite the window being in a narrow alleyway.

Looking at the bathroom from another perspective (from inside the shower), you see this…

There’s a few things to notice. First is the green handle on the flushometer… It’s a dual-flush flushometer. If you pull up it puts out less water than if you push down. But we had to find a wall-hung toilet that could be flushed with 0.9 gal of water – that wasn’t easy.

Next is the positioning of the faucet… The sink is off-center of the cabinet, so we were a bit worried how that would look, but I think it looks OK…

Another thing to notice is the overflow on the sink… NYC requires that or else you can’t have a stopper on the drain.

So at some point we’ll change the color of the wall, but that will be after we move in. Otherwise, it’s pretty much done as soon as we get a toilet seat and the handheld shower head and some towel bars get installed.