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.

When we were in the design phase we looked at a lot of pictures of white oak floors. What we both agreed looked best (to us) were whitish floors. Not too white, but just a bit more white than a natural finish. Dan did a some research and found that Rubio Monocoat had a 5% option that should do the trick.

So we started with that and then the question was what varnish should we use. Monocoat, as the name implies, is a one step floor finish, but we were concerned that wouldn’t be enough. We wanted an oil-based varnish put on top, but the contractor and his floor guy talked us into a water-based varnish.

Dan did some more research and found that Bona had a really good reputation. We figured their two part, high traffic version (Bona Traffic HD) would be a good choice and would wear the best. The floor guy liked Bona, so that’s what we went with.

Dan also called and checked and Bona said there would be no problem putting it over Monocoat, but as it turned out – that was just wrong. What we’ve found is the two products are completely incompatible. Once we started looking more closely the Bona was already coming up in a variety of places and just a light abrasion would make it come up just about anywhere.

Unfortunately, by the time we figured it out there were already two coats of Bona on all the floors and nearly all the stairs. So we had about 4,000 sq. ft. of floors that had to be fixed. The floor guy suggested sanding everything down and starting over, but we asked the contractor to test by “screening” the floors (basically a light abrasion pad on a buffing machine). Remarkably that took up about 95% of the Bona – so that’s how we proceeded.

When all the Bona is off, the floors are beautiful – they’re exactly what we were hoping for – a strong hint of white… The photos don’t quite do it justice, but I think you get at least a hint of what it’s like…

What’s really cool is that Monocoat leaves the floors looking unfinished when they’re actually quite well sealed. Some people on forums say the floors look “hungry”, but as we saw with the Bona – things don’t stick to it.

The other thing that’s cool about Monocoat is that it can be spot fixed. If there’s a problem you just give the area a light sanding and then put some more Monocoat in that area. You can’t over stain a floor with Monocoat because Monocoat won’t stick to itself.

So unfortunately, we had the floors just how we needed them when we put Monocoat on, and then we managed to mess them up with Bona. Taking all the Bona off is taking time. We were supposed to move in today, but this has delayed that. After 6 days trying to fix the problem they’ve gotten the stairs all fixed and 3 of the 4 floors in our unit. Fixing the floor in the rental will happen after we move in.

Dan starts spring break at the end of the week. We’re hoping we can sorta move in middle of next week, with a proper move-all-our-stuff around the middle of the month. Fingers crossed nothing else comes up as a major issue…

Blog posts will be a little sparse until we’re ready to move in. I’m starting to see why all the make over shows have a bit of a blackout right before it’s all done – there are certain things that just don’t show well in pictures at the end because they’re covered with paper, or dusty. As soon as things are uncovered and cleaned up I’ll take pictures do more posts…

Our townhouse got its first (and hopefully only) mechanics lien last month. Our contractor decided to not have his stair subcontractor (and “friend” – Adam Wedrychoski of ABC Stairs Builders Corp – aka “Traditional Stairs Corp”) complete the stairs because he was too expensive and the budgets had gotten tight. Adam got disgruntled and is now going after us for $9,600.

We’ve gone through this before when the contractor for our apartment remodel (Bill Angelov of ABS Construction) went after us a few years ago (a blog post is pending on that one). We were amused that Adam Wedrychoski / ABC Stairs Builders even used the same lien service Bill Angelov / ABS Construction had used – Speedy Lien. Unfortunately the New York court system, and companies like Speedy Lien, make it so disgruntled workmen/contractors/subcontractors can put liens on your property without any proof that they have a legitimate claim.

This isn’t a horrible thing… Liens are good in that they alert purchasers of a property that there may be claims on a property. They also insure that people who add value to a property are compensated when the owner sells the property. But ultimately, they’re just a first step and the workman / contractor / sub-contractor needs to prove their claim in court.

In this case Adam Wedrychoski / Traditional Stairs Corp has no basis for putting a lien on our property. He has no contract with us, nor was there an implied contract with us (e.g. we never paid him directly). He was a subcontractor working for our contractor. If he had talked to a lawyer, he would know that all he is legally entitled to do is sue our contractor. We do have a contract with our contractor, but every time he gets a payment from us he signs a lien waiver stating that all of his subcontractors have been fully paid.

The amount of the lien doesn’t even make sense – which seems typical of liens by Speedy Lien… He took the total amount he would have been paid if he had completed the job, subtracted what he had been paid, and then put a lien on us for the difference. So he’s essentially asking for money for work he didn’t do. Thankfully our court system doesn’t think the same way Adam does.

When we contacted Wells Fargo (the lending bank for our mortgage), what they said worried us – they stop all payments of any kind if there is a lien in place. They wanted us to “settle” with Adam Wedrychoski / ABC Stairs Builders Corp and they erroneously told us that they don’t accept bonds.

Thing is, bonding the lien is the correct way to deal with the situation. It’s actually sort of cool how bonds work… You contact a surety agent (ours is Elmer Hyde Agency), and give them 110% of the lien amount plus a few hundred in fees. They bond the lien, and you file that paperwork along with some other affidavits with a clerk at the court building (harder than it sounds) and the lien is discharged. Once the lien is discharged, it no longer exists. That means your title is clean and your bank will be happy.

If the workman/contractor/subcontractor sues you and the court finds in his/her favor, the bond is used to pay the judgement and you get whatever is left over. Liens are for one year and they can be renewed once – so they can only exist for two years total. If the workman/contractor/subcontractor doesn’t sue you during that time, then you get the bond amount back with interest. However, the workman/contractor/subcontractor can sue you for up to 6 years (in NY), but after the bond expires, s/he just has to hope that you can still pay.

While it may seem odd to welcome a lawsuit, we’ve been through the process before and our attitude is “bring it on”. Adam Wedrychoski / Traditional Stairs Corp is in an impossibly difficult position. Because he is a corporation he is not allowed to show up in court without a lawyer. Because lawyers typically take a percentage of the settlement, they won’t take the case on unless they think they’ll get paid. They would typically get 1/3rd – and 1/3rd of $9,600 ($3,200) isn’t enough for them to bother with the case. And that assumes they’ll get the full amount – which they know they won’t. That means the only  way Adam Wedrychoski / ABC Stairs Builders Corp can get a lawyer, and hence the only way he can sue us, is if he pays his lawyer hourly. Bottom line – he will lose a substantial amount of money if he tries to sue us.

While Adam Wedrychoski / Traditional Stairs Corp has to have a lawyer, we’re individuals, so we can represent ourselves (this is one of the advantages of not putting our building in an LLC). The courts are very lenient with pro se defendants – there are actually judges that only hear cases with pro se defendants. Plus pro se defendants can go in and get free help with filing paperwork, etc. So while it can be time consuming to show up at all the hearings, it doesn’t actually cost us much of anything. Meanwhile he’s paying his lawyer hourly, so if you do the math its in our best interest to drag things out and have as many hearings and motions as possible.

If Adam Wedrychoski / ABC Stairs Builders Corp sues us, the first thing we’ll do is a show cause motion – making him prove that he has standing to sue us. He will fail because he can’t produce a contract with us. No contract = no enforceable terms.

Incidentally, people often think that the loser pays the winners attorney fees, but that’s not the case at all (at least not in New York). That only happens if you have a written contract saying that’s what you agreed to – and of course Adam Wedrychoski / Traditional Stairs / ABC Stairs Builders has no contract with us. That is why we’re confident Adam will lose money if he pursues this, but it gets better…

If he does survive the show cause motion, our next step will be a counter suit. The stairs in the rental are not according to plan – they’re too narrow (the stringers are not flush with the sheetrock), and they’re made of red oak, not white oak. On top of that, the stairs in our unit are not square and the contractor had to correct a number of things that Adam / Traditional Stairs didn’t quite get right. In fact things are so bad our architect suggested either we or our contractor sue him for everything he’s received – about $20,000. At one point we detailed a whole list of things that we wanted him to fix and he never came back to fix them – instead the contractor had to take care of it.

In case you’re wondering, Adam’s / ABC Stairs Builders Corp’s lien is an attempt to get paid for having to fabricate and install the flight of stairs from the parlor to the 2nd floor three times. When this was all going down we insisted that he do shop drawings, he refused and promised to fix any problems that resulted from not having shop drawings. I even mentioned that understanding up in a blog post. He even started before our architect gave him the green light. If he had just waited for approval to start we could have avoided at least one of those fabrication/installs. Plus, we’ll have our contractor, and our architects testifying that that we did in fact insist on shop drawings and that he agreed to fix anything that was a problem.

There is simply no way he can win his case, but I’m pretty sure we can win a fair amount of money on our counter suit. That means if he sues us, between lawyers fees and our counter suit, it will be a lose-lose proposition for him. Which is why our attitude is “bring it on”…

Thing is, all of this affects our contractor more than it affect us. The contractor is liable for the actions of his sub-contractors – including any liens they put on us. So the bond money is coming out of what he would have gotten at the end of the project. All Adam has accomplished with the lien is hurting someone who used to consider him a friend.

The bottom line is, be careful in dealing with contractors and subcontractors. Lien waivers and receipts of “final payment” are always a good idea. And summarize important conversations in writing/email after they occur so there’s documentation. Then when you get a mechanics lien, just bond it and put the ball back in the workman/contractor/subcontractor’s court.

Honestly, I think a lot of (sub)contractors don’t understand the process and have never heard of a bond. They just hear that liens scare some homeowners into settling. They don’t understand that they may actually have to sue the homeowner to get any money. They definitely don’t seem to understand that filing a lien starts a process which could result in them losing a considerable amount of money…

As a homeowner just realize you don’t have to settle with someone who is putting a lien on your property to harass and intimidate you – you can bond the lien and regain the upper hand in the situation.

There was a bluish slab with wavy veins…

And a gray marble with a golden vein running through it…

And then there was this light colored marble with golden veins – very pretty!

And then there was this light colored slab with a big dramatic gray vein running through it…

And sometimes it’s not about linear veins at all – you get big round patterns in the marble…

By comparison, our Carrara slabs are rather humble. But they’re perfect for our purposes.

Picking a counter material was tough. Black counters look really good against the gray cabinets, but the stairs and the range hood we picked are all about white – black would have just been wrong. A color would have complicated the design, and a busy grain would have been distracting. So we settled on Carrara since we’re using it as a reoccurring material throughout the house.

The problem with Carrara is that most of the Carrara these days is really gray. And gray Carrara next to gray cabinets would just look muddled. At the same time it doesn’t make sense to spend the big bucks on primo Carrara to go along with Ikea cabinets. Ikea kitchens are decent these days, but not that good. So the challenge was to find Carrara that was at a reasonable price point but still pretty white. Luckily we found some at the second stone yard we went to – but just barely. A new shipment had come in and we picked it while it was still in the shipping container – there was just one block that looked right and we only saw about 18″ of it, but when we saw it two days later it was pretty close to what we were hoping for.

Our fabricator had to buy two slabs to do our kitchen since the slabs are smaller than the granite we bought for the rental. (This afternoon when we saw him he was grumbling a bit about the cost of the slabs). Here’s the one we’ll use for the island…

The template for the island is the big one to the right. The bottom is towards the door, and you can see where the sink will be on the other side. We are a little worried about the cantilever portion breaking since marble isn’t as strong as granite. Since marble is most likely to break along veins, we kept the heaviest area of veins over the dishwasher where the marble will be most supported. The veins are much less in the cantilevered area.

The little template to the left will be the piece that goes under the microwave in an area that’s not too visible.

We almost went with a stainless counter along the wall since stainless is a lot more practical than marble next to a cooktop. But I’m not a big fan of different counter surfaces in the same kitchen (in most cases). And a white counter will look better than a stainless counter, so we went with the Carrara. Plus stainless cost a bit more. This is the slab that will be used along the wall – on either side of the range…

The two slabs are neighboring slices from the same block – so the veining is pretty much the same. But instead of using the bottom of the slab, like on the island, along the wall we’ll use the top part of the slab (where you see the tape). The big template will go to the right of the range, the little template will go to the left.

One other thing – 90% of the time people say Carrara in the kitchen should be honed, not polished. Apparently you can seal honed marble better than polished marble, and polished marble gets scratched up pretty easily in kitchens. But as Dan pointed out, honed marble next to high gloss cabinets would be a bit odd. Since the cabinets are high gloss, the marble needs to be polished (visually). We’ll just have to work harder to keep it looking good. And if we hate it, apparently wiping it down with vinegar and letting the vinegar sit for 20 minutes or so will dull the polish and make it look more or less honed.

Believe it or not, the fabricator is working over the weekend on the counters and they’ll be installed on Tuesday. It will be great to see that final piece really come together – the kitchens will look so complete.

After my post the other day we decided against Rosewood granite for the rental – it just competed too much with the brick wall. Yesterday we went back to the stone yards and looked for other options. This time we took samples of the cabinets with us and it really helped. Some of the granite slabs just went better with the color of the cabinets. The one we chose was “Colonial Gold” granite.

On the slab below the peninsula will use the lower half of the slab. It’s reversed from the picture of the kitchen below… So the darker side will be next to the sheetrocked wall and the lighter side will be next to the hallway and brick wall.

Since it’s a light colored granite, it’s going to be a pretty light/bright kitchen – almost white on white. The good part is the Colonial Gold won’t compete with the brick wall, but the dark bits are still strong enough to stand up to it (hopefully). Here’s the picture of the cabinets and and the wall again…

There’s a slightly darker more yellow version of Colonial Gold called Colonial Creme. When we went to a different stone yard earlier in the morning they had slabs marked Colonial Creme that were as light or lighter than the Colonial Gold we bought – so the naming seems to depend on the source.

Here are few other slabs we saw that were either contenders or generally interesting. I gotta say, there’s so much cool granite out there – but of course there are a lot of factors that make each one best for a particular use…

Here’s one Dan really liked and wanted to use in the rental kitchen. It’s cool, but I’m not sure if it would have been as successful as the Colonial Gold…

Here’s one that looks like wood – it would be pretty overpowering as a kitchen counter, but I think it would make a great coffee table…

This was another that might have worked as the counter in the rental – light color with dark rust-like spots. But it didn’t work quite as well as the Colonial Gold.

Today we’re off to meet the architect at the house, then we’ll go see the stone fabricator and discuss cuts so we get the most interesting bits of the slabs in most visible location. Then after that it’s back to the house for a meeting with the ironworker about the rear deck/pergola.

One thing we struggled with today was picking the countertops for the two kitchens. Our kitchen still has blue plastic wrap on most of the cabinets, so the color in the pictures is all off – so more on that later. But in the rental kitchen we first started with this demo kitchen being our concept…

That’s Ikea’s Adel white with a dark gray counter. That was pretty much my vision of the kitchen color scheme complete with a Carrara backsplash. That counter isn’t quite as dark as you might think – here’s a close up picture…

But then Dan didn’t want to go so dark since the room doesn’t have a whole lot of natural light. So he started thinking outside the box, but a light color counter with white cabinets would look anemic – there had to be some darkness to it. Dan also didn’t want anything too uniform in color. The stuff you get at places like Ikea & Home Depot is really uniform because they want the sample to match what you get. When you go with a stone that has more variation you sorta have to pick a particular slab – which the big stores can never accommodate.

Here’s the slab we found today that we liked – it’s rosewood granite…

It’s got a lot going on and when we got home we seriously started double guessing our choice. Was it too pink? Was it too busy? It didn’t look contemporary enough. And so on… But what got us back to thinking it was a good choice was looking at a picture of the kitchen…

The biggest issue is the brick wall. It’s got pinks and oranges in it like the slab. And as I looked at the picture of the kitchen, while an almost black might work, a more medium gray just seemed wrong given the color of the wall.

I’m still not 100% convinced, so we’ll see… I think we’ll look a little more before making a final decision.

Our kitchen is a whole other story – but that’s for another day. The short version is that we’re going to go with polished Carrara marble counters with gray lacquer cabinets. Yes, most people say to do honed Carrara in kitchens, but Dan’s emphatic about polished. And we were thinking about just having Carrara on the island and having stainless along with wall, but I think ultimately it will look better with Carrara everywhere – even if it’s not quite as practical.

UPDATE #1:

We’re now thinking the rosewood granite isn’t right for the rental… We’ll go Friday morning to pick something else. I’ll update this post when we pick the new slab…

We went with a basket weave sort of pattern in the living room and dining room. It’s a pattern I found by surfing the Internet – not sure what the proper name of it is…

We like it because it makes the room feel wider. We were afraid if we went with the standard linear pattern it would make the parlor floor feel like a bowling alley. We do have a standard linear pattern in the kitchen, but since it doesn’t go the whole way so it looks fine.

One thing that we have been a little ambivalent about is the color variation – we were expecting less variation. The 1930s apartments that we’ve been living in for 15 years now have pretty consistent floors – but the wood was higher quality back in the 1930s because it came from older trees. These days the engineered floors are so highly processed they have consistency of color, but “real wood” isn’t as high quality as it was back in the day. If I had it to do all over again I might get “clear grade” instead of “select grade” even if I had to go down to flat cut (from quarter/rift sawn) to get the better, more consistent grade of wood. We’ve also heard bleaching the floors can make the color more consistent – but we didn’t think seriously about that until after it was too late. Still, I think what we have is pretty good and it does seem more consistent once it’s sealed.

The other thing that’s progressing is the staircase in our unit. The top flight has been painted white…

And they’ve been working on the treads. Quite a few of them have been stained and will be sealed soon…

We’re going with flat cut on the top two flights of stairs and quarter/rift on the lower two flights. They’re starting from the top down, so what you see is the flat cut treads.

You can see some of the variation I’m talking about in those treads – there’s one against the wall and another in the second big panel that are pretty dark except a strip down the edge that’s quite light. They still look pretty cool though..

The contractor has also started putting the kitchen cabinets together – seeing them go in is yet another thing that makes the house feel like it’s “getting there”. Pictures of that soon…

In the process of cutting up all that wood sawdust was flying everywhere. There was so much sawdust being created that it has literally coated the walls of the dirty studio where they were doing the work…

The T is one of the workers starting to write his name on the wall with the air pump… They also wrote more mundane things in the sawdust on the walls…

Today the contractor discovered that the stairs aren’t square. Blame it on the foreman he had on the project initially, or blame it on the guy who fabricated the stairs, or blame it on the contractor himself for not double checking things – but the end result is that the stairs are pretty obviously out of square.

[Then again, the building isn't square either - it's bigger in the rear than in the front.]

So that means they have to make things that aren’t square appear to be square – which is more difficult than it should be, but the guy working on it is up to the task.

After they get things cut so they appear square, they have to stain and seal all those boards. Meanwhile another guy is painting all the steel white…

He’s actually a guy who I’ve had working for me sporadically for 3 years now. Good guy, but very afraid of heights. In the picture he’s about 40 feet up off the parlor floor. He said it was the scariest thing he’d ever done (which is why he’s wearing a harness)…

I’m pretty sure that’s just primer – so they’ll have to come back in and do it all again with the final coat of white.

Since we’re coming to the end of construction as well as the one year mark on our Builders’ Risk policy we’re converting over to traditional homeowner’s insurance – and it’s a lot more expensive than I expected it to be. But admittedly I hadn’t researched insurance properly…

I had a little sticker shock when our insurance agent (David Bodansky - david@zamzok.net, 212-561-8990) told me the new homeowner’s policy was going to run $6,400 (with Chubb as the insurer). So I called GEICO (where we have auto insurance) and was told their policy was going to cost $5,800. It was a bit of an apples and oranges comparison but it seemed Chubb was just a little more expensive – but Chubb is Chubb – the best insurance company out there.

At the end of the day GEICO would insure the building for $1.087M (125% of $870K “base”) with $609K of coverage for personal property and $500K in liability coverage. Problem is, if it was a catastrophic loss, I don’t know that we could rebuild everything for $1.087M – it would be tight. That coverage cost $5,800/year with a $1,000 deductible and (I think) $5,400/year with a $2,500 deductible. They then would charge $400/year for another $1.5M of umbrella coverage for a total liability coverage of $2M. So GEICO’s total was roughly $5800/year with a $2,500 deductible.

I had our agent redo the Chubb quote with an umbrella policy and auto (so structured more like the GEICO quote). Chubb will insure the building for $1.4M – so plenty to cover a catastrophic loss. Liability coverage was quoted at $500K. The cost of that was $5,700 $5,050/year with a $2,500 deductible or $5,450 $4,800/year with a $5,000 deductible. So Chubb cost about $350/year more LESS than GEICO, but AND it had more coverage ($1.4M instead of $1.087M). But Chubb charges $700/year for a $2M umbrella (compared to $400/year for $1.5M with GEICO).

Needless to say, we’re going to go with Chubb even though it’s $600/year more expensive. It’s $50 less per year and we get $300+K more coverage on the building, $500K more liability coverage, and we get the Rolls Royce of insurance companies.

Our agent said he had done similar quotes for another client and Travelers also came out more expensive than Chubb. So it seems that townhouse insurance just runs a bit under $6K/year. I’m not happy it’s that high, but it is what it is… There might be cheaper insurers out there, but I can’t imagine fighting with cut rate insurance company over a million dollar claim.

The whole question of how much umbrella coverage to get was a big question… After researching it online I’m still not 100% certain $2.5M is sufficient – but it probably will be. One thing I do know is that we’ve been under insured for a while now. We should have gotten an umbrella policy a long time ago. Better late than never, I guess…

I should also mention that the Allstate insurance agent on 116th Street in East Harlem booked an appointment to sit down with me and only after I got there did she tell me that Allstate doesn’t write homeowner’s insurance in the 5 boroughs. If she had told me that upfront it would have saved me over an hour of traveling down and back to meet with her. (Grrrrrr…)

Along those lines my partner Dan has thrown his hat into the ring and is trying to get onto Community Board 10. As you can see in the map to the right CB10 goes pretty much straight up from Central Park – it quite literally is Central Harlem. Our neighborhood, Mount Morris Park is the in the lower part of CB10′s territory – around the notch on the eastern side.

The community board is pretty badly broken and one of the things in Harlem that needs to be fixed. If you go to a board meeting you’ll see just how big of a mess it is. Much of the thinking on the board seems to reflect the failed policies that have kept Harlem a depressed area with a relatively high crime rate, lackluster schools, etc.

To change things people have to get involved (problems rarely fix themselves). Dan’s running instead of me because he’s better suited to being on the community board than I am. Where I can be a bit standoffish until I get to know someone, people generally really like Dan when they first meet him. He’s also more of a consensus builder – he genuinely wants people to get along and see eye-to-eye. But when push comes to shove he’s got a backbone and when a line needs to be drawn in the sand, he draws it and stands his ground.

Here are some of the issues we’re concerned about… I say “we”, ’cause Dan and I agree 95% of the time and I’ve agreed to attend meetings with him to ease his misery.

• Crime in Harlem is unacceptably high.  Specific things we’re disturbed by are:
• The rate (per 100,00 residents) in Harlem is generally more than double what it is in Inwood & Washington Heights or even East Harlem south of 116. On top of that there’s been essentially no reduction in crime 10 years in Harlem, while other precincts have brought down the crime substantially during that time.
• We don’t feel NYPD is aggressive enough in combating drug dealing – there’s always a drug dealer available somewhere in Harlem. Given the number of drug treatment facilities in the neighborhood, the combination of lots of addicts and readily available drugs has predictable outcomes.
• We don’t feel NYPD is trying hard enough to get rid of the dirt bikes and ATVs that disturb the peace and safety in the neighborhood on warm days.
• We’re not happy with NYPD’s relationship and interaction with the community – they haven’t built trust with residents.
• We support Stop & Frisk, but are not happy with how it’s implemented. We want to see NPYPD use “Courtesy, Professionalism & Respect” when they stop people.
• Development in the area needs to favor owner-occupied units and quality construction. Owners generally care more about their communities than renters. And if something is constructed poorly, people will treat it poorly. We want residents to have a sense of ownership and take pride in their homes and in their neighborhood. When people care it makes a huge difference.
• Shops, Restaurants & Bars are needed to support the growing demand of the middle and upper income people moving into new condos, higher end rentals, and renovated townhouses.
• You can never have enough high quality grocery stores, bake shops, coffee shops, etc.
• The community board approves liquor licenses and some members of CB10 have been trying to have Harlem bars close two hours earlier than anywhere else in the City – which will really dramatically slow the growth of interesting places to hang out in the neighborhood.
• Schools in Harlem need to improve. This is a bit of a touchy issue since there’s a high concentration of charter schools in Harlem. Dan’s actually a big advocate of public schools since many of his students at CityTech (CUNY) come from public schools. Part of his job at CityTech is evaluating high school graphic design curricula. He sees how hard the public school teachers work and understands that they need more support in order for them to improve. He even testified on behalf of The High School of Graphic Communication Arts which was one of the schools spared from the latest round of closures. At the same time I sort of like how the charter schools are holding public school’s feet to the fire – showing how miserably the public schools have failed some students – that the problem isn’t the students, it’s the schools.

There’s a lot of other issues I could go into, but those give you an idea of where we’re coming from…

It’s not like the community board will change over night because Dan gets on it – if he gets on he’ll be one of 50 people on the board. But CB10 won’t change at all unless people like Dan get involved. I’m sure there are already some great people on the board – there just need to be many more.

I, meanwhile, have already started working with some of the people from the Mount Morris Park Community Improvement Association on issues around our immediate neighborhood that require attention. More on that later…

So if you’re planning on moving to Harlem – think about how you can better the community once you get here. If enough of us participate, we can make things better.