Good Day: 243 W 120 Sells, Our Windows Clear Customs

Posted on October 1, 2011 by BeatingUpwind

It was a VERY good day yesterday. Our windows had come arrived in port Thursday morning, and managed to clear customs in a single day. Given all the other delays on our project I was half expecting to hear that there would be a 3 or 4 week hold for customs inspection. They’ll probably be delivered on Tuesday morning. Getting the building closed up will be a major step for us…

But the really big news is that 243 West 120th Street closed yesterday – just in the nick of time – it was the last day before the loan limits dropped over $100K – so things went right down to the wire.

I feel a bit of accomplishment with this sale… I had done a blog post ages ago (April ’10) about how I thought the place was an excellent opportunity. Location is just incredible – it’s just steps from everything that’s new and exciting on 8th Ave / FDB, and it has a really high FAR for anyone who wants to add space. It took about a year for the blog post to get noticed, but early this year I started hearing from blog readers that they saw the post and were interested in the house. One contacted, me, then another, then another…

In the end it was a bit of a battle between two of those three blog readers to get the house. One of them was working with the real estate agent we used when we sold/bought, the other went directly to the owner through a social contact. The one working with our agent contacted me on June 20th saying “…so it looks like we got the house…”, then on July 10th the reader who had gone directly to the owner contacted me and said “we signed a contract on the house on 120th last week”. I was a little flabbergasted that two people thought they had it and I knew both of them. Turns out the listing agreement had just expired so the seller was able to sell the place without paying a commission.

For those of you who are curious – the sales price was $620K plus a few thousand in other concessions to the seller. That works out to about $182/sq. ft. The place is possibly in worse condition than ours was when we bought it since demolition has not been done yet. But it did have a certificate of no harassment and it had approved plans with active permits to convert to single family – so it was pretty much ready to go.

You can see from the pictures I took nearly 2 years ago that needs tons of work…

Given the location and the fact that shells south of 125 are getting very hard to get, I think the new owners got it for a good price. They could do a $1M renovation and not over-invest.

It was a nail-biting closing. It turns out there was a lien on the property that was rather sizable and when push came to shove there wasn’t enough money to pay off the seller’s mortgage. No one was expecting it to be a short sale and people had to scramble to get the seller’s bank to approve the sale in time for the buyers to get their loan before the loan limits went down. It almost didn’t happen, but after a 5 hour closing on the last possible day, it did finally go through.

And after all that the new owners went to the house last night to check things over and left covered in fleas! So job #1 is to get rid of the fleas…

Harlem’s Charming Townhouse Wrecks

Posted on September 28, 2011 by BeatingUpwind

I went through another incredible townhouse the other day… It has such incredible potential, but it’s also an enormous wreck. On the plus side are tons of original detail including this wonderful stained glass window…

But the house was suffering from major water damage…

Luckily, despite how horrible the picture above is, the house isn’t too far gone provided someone renovates it in the next year or so… Fortunately it’s priced well and has a great location, so I’m pretty confident it will get a new owner in the not-too-distant future. If they do a historically-sensitive renovation it will be really incredible place.

We Have Chimneys!

Posted on September 28, 2011 by BeatingUpwind

Progress has seemed a little slow lately. Long story, but part of it is that they’re working on the front façade and cornice and they have mesh over the scaffolding, so we can’t really see the progress until the mesh is down so it feels like not much is getting done when there is actual progress being made.

One thing that is done are the chimneys. We’re not using the old chimneys. They were in really poor condition, were only ever made for gas fireplaces (too small for a wood burning fireplace), and they were on an exterior wall – which is a no-no since cold chimneys don’t draft well.

So we have a new fireplace in the living room (only) on the opposite wall from the originals and we’re putting the chimney up through each of the rooms above that as an exposed pipe…

We could have framed it out and put sheetrock around it, but that amount of sheetrock on an exposed brick wall would have looked weird and it would have taken up more floor space than the bare chimney does. It’s a little unexpected, but looks pretty good…

When you get to the roof it comes up the required 10′ over the roof…

That picture is sort of also a gratuitous pic of our skyline view (you can click to see a slightly bigger version).

Speaking of the fireplace it’s one of the few things we might have done differently if we had it to do all over again. Given that our place is a 15 footer the fireplace takes up a lot of width in the living room. Our couch doesn’t really fit right – we’ll have to design around it. And the fireplace will dominate the living room. If I were doing it again I’d probably go with a smaller gas fireplace. Still, it will be nice on a cold winter night to sit by a raging fire…

The chimneys / vents for other stuff are also now complete…

Going from left to right that’s 1) the rather huge exhaust vent for Dan’s art studio, 2) the plumbing vent, and 3-5) bathroom vents, boiler chimney, and hot water heater chimneys (not sure which is which). It’s a lot of stuff, but it’s gotta be there… You can also see the drain pipe for the front portion of the roof snaking past the vents.The roofer will be by soon to clean all of that up and make it water tight.

Picking A Color For Our Cornice

Posted on September 27, 2011 by BeatingUpwind

One of the things we’ve been contemplating lately is the color of our cornice. We thought we had a color picked out, but as I was half way done writing up this blog post I changed my mind. When I talked with Dan he agreed with me – that we should change our strategy.

It all started with me walking around Mount Morris Park taking pictures of townhouses for real estate clients – with the objective of understanding what was out there and possibly available. I looked at the cornice colors and my favorite color was gray – it just makes for an incredibly handsome cornice. Here’s the gray cornice from 30 West 120 which sold recently for $2.5M…

To my eye that’s a bit of a brownish gray. There are also some handsome gray cornices at the other end of our block – 102 and 104 West 123rd both have gray cornices…

As you can see 102 (on the left) has more of a taupey gray and 104 has more of a bluish gray. Personally I don’t really like the bluish gray so much. I like a taupey or brownish gray..

What we’re worried about when it comes to using gray is that our façade will have too many different colors. Our windows will be a chocolate color, our stoop railings and the grill work on basement level will be black – gray wasn’t really a color we were going to have anywhere else except the cornice, so it didn’t really make sense. The places we liked that used gray used it elsewhere on the building.

The chocolate is sort of tone-on-tone with the brownstone façade. We could have gone with a chocolate cornice… Those look good too…

But the color we’ve decided to go with is black…

That means our building’s hat (cornice) will match it’s shoes (stoop railings and basement grill work) while the windows and basement doors will just blend in with the brownstone. The only down side is that it will be a pretty somber/formal color combination.

The one remaining question is the color of the front parlor doors. Dan’s advocating for chocolate colored doors with the logic that all the wood on the façade should be the same color. I could see that, but I could also see black since that the façade’s accent color is black and the parlor door is a focal point of the façade. We’ve got some time before we have to make that decision. I’m guessing we’ll go with chocolate – it will soften the look and make the façade seem less formal.

Looking For A Townhouse In Great Original Condition?

Posted on September 20, 2011 by BeatingUpwind

Every now and then I come across a place that’s just special. This weekend I went through one of those places. I can’t mention the address or give too much detail, because as a licensed agent I’m not allowed to advertise other agents’ listings, but if you’re in the market for a great old house with no issues (other than being old), then contact me – jay@beatingupwind.com and I can tell you more about it.

This place is a nice, big, wide legal 3 family with a C of O from the 1940s. The use and configuration still conforms to the C of O since the same family has owned it for the past 60 years and they didn’t chop it up. It’s two floor through 2 bedroom apartments over a duplex. That means it is not an SRO and has no Certificate of No Harassment issues. It also seems to be clean from HPD’s perspective.The block is also completely charming and quiet with some architecturally interesting buildings.

On the downside the ground floor apparently needs a gut renovation (I wasn’t able to see it) and the two kitchens I saw appear to be from the 1970s. The bathrooms appear to be from the ’30s/’40s. Despite the age of the kitchens/bathrooms everything was in remarkably good condition… Just a bit “retro”.

The other potential downside is that it’s in a neighborhood that doesn’t have a lot of services. It’s not a hip/bustling area – it’s a sleepy bedroom community. That may actually be an advantage if you want a peaceful quiet place to live and don’t mind Fresh Direct. Not being in a hot neighborhood means the price is lower. The same townhouse in Mount Morris Park or South Harlem would probably go for 50% more money.

I think the owners are more or less being realistic on price (asking is $295/sq. ft.) – so it’s a place you could actually get. On top of that, being 3 family can be a huge help since the rental income makes it easier to qualify for the mortgage (assuming they let you count the rental income).