It’s sorta odd with our building – floors are getting built that we’ve never stood on before and we’re just now starting to really understand what our place will be like. The contractor now has 3 of the 5 floors completed and he’s racing to get up to the roof since water penetration is affecting some of the plywood subfloors he’s already put down.

That means in addition to the floor for the basement rental apartment, the parlor floor is in as is the one above that – where our home office will be. Here’s the parlor floor, first looking back. You can see the opening for the stairs. There will be a dining area just past that, and then the living room beyond that (see plans below).

The rooms are a decent size, but not huge. We’ll have about the same amount of entertaining space as we did in our old apartment.

And here’s the parlor floor looking towards the front…

The area in front of the stairs will be the kitchen. Here are plans for the parlor floor so you can get an idea of how things will be laid out…

(Click to see bigger version of plan.)

The next floor up is also in. That floor will have my/our home office in the front and a spare bedroom in the rear. Here’s a photo looking forward. The space just past the staircase will be the home office.

And here’s a plan for that floor. In the back there will be a guest bedroom with a private(ish) bathroom and the laundry room… Since this version of the plans we’ve made the bedroom 6″ shorter and the bathroom 6″ longer in order to accommodate a proper soaking tub (an issue we were alerted to by Julia Angwin’s blog – we were planning on the same tub).

I gotta say it’s sorta cool to see it all coming together. I can really start visualizing space I’ll be living in 8(?) months from now… For example, here’s what the view from my/our home office will be…

The red building with the white arched windows (157 West 123rd Street – a formerly City owned building that’s gone coop, built in 1895) is what you see directly across the street when you go in the office door. But when I’m sitting at my desk I’ll see some other buildings – the red brick condo (155 West 123 St), “The Shakespeare” (the white rental building – 151 West 123rd St), and The Greater Metropolitan Baptist Church (147 West 123rd St. – originally built in 1897 as the German-American St. Paul Lutheran Church of Harlem – designed in the Gothic style by architects Ernest W. Schneider and Harry Herter).

We’ve known there was a fire in the building at some point – we think it was in 1997 or 1998. We can now see where it started – there was apparently a kitchen on the floor above parlor. There was a cooking fire and it got into the ceiling and burned the floor joists. You can see what I’m talking about in the picture above and to the right. I’m pretty sure that was the end of it for our building. In the 12 years since then no one has lived in the building – until now 🙂

Here are just a few cool pictures from the last week of renovation…

This is about as much “original details” as we have on the interior of our house. That’s one of the only remaining window frames – it’s in what will be the spare bedroom – 2nd floor of our unit, back of the house. Needless to say, we’re doing a rehab, not a restoration… Going forward the look will be contemporary.

The fireplace in the same bedroom as the window shown in the first picture. A random hard hat adorns the wall…

Here you can see the contrast between the new metal joists and the rotting wooden ones they’re replacing. Focus is a bit off – sorry…

And here we have the space under the stoop showing the layers of decay and renewal…

When I went by our place yesterday I had visions of getting a role of painters tape and marking off where walls would be so we could get an idea of the various spaces. Then I saw the reality of the situation…

There was just a lot more dirt and debris than I was expecting. Construction is a dirty business (literally). So what you’re looking at in the picture above is the main floor of our basement rental unit looking from the front of the building to the back. The joists for the floor between the rental unit and our parlor floor are half way in. It’s starting to feel like a real space and each of the rooms felt bigger than it did the other day when the joists were in but not the entire subfloor.

Here’s the same space looking from back to front (notice the car outside – which should give you a frame of reference)…

You can also see that they’ve thrown plywood over the opening for the stairs into the cellar.

One thing that’s quite visible now is the window on the parlor level on the front of the building. We always knew it was huge, but now you can see exactly how big it really is… Notice the size of the window compared to the size of the existing “front door”. It’s far bigger than a regular door – it’s 4’8″ x 7’7″!

It’ll be quite dramatic when it’s in because we’re doing tilt-n-turn windows, so the entire window can open up (much like a door). With the window open there will be incredible cross ventilation and it will be as if the kitchen is open to outside. Given that the street is right outside, that’s not an incredibly exciting prospect, but that’s OK for a kitchen (not so much for a living room had we put the living room in the front).

When it comes to the front door there will be a small vestibule – so two sets of doors. The outer doors will be made more or less in the style of the original doors. The opening is 10 feet high and just shy of 4 feet wide. So there will be two (French) doors that are 10 feet tall and 2 feet wide – very typical of Harlem brownstones (the historic preservationists should be happy).

Speaking of historic preservation we got a letter the other day saying the New York State Office of Historic Preservation has forwarded our tax credit application onto the National Park Service with a “recommendation to approve”. The big question is whether NPS will be OK with the vinyl windows we’re putting in our bathrooms. Typically vinyl windows are never allowed in historic buildings, BUT they’ll be in a location almost no one can see, and they’ll be literally in the shower area in each bathroom. It makes much more sense to put plastic windows in showers than a wood window that will rot with all the humidity and water spray. Still, I get the sense it’ll be a big exception for NPS to say OK to vinyl windows. Our fingers are crossed.