Things are slowing down just a little – mostly because there are a few critical things that can’t happen for a couple months (utilities and windows) and there’s no point in doing a “hurry up, then wait”. It’s better security-wise if they work a little slowly so someone is in the house every (week) day. They’re still making progress though…

Right now the critical path is the roof (when it rains we still get a fair amount of water in the building). To do the roofing all the stucco work needs to be done on the bulkhead and parapet walls. We were a bit nervous about the stucco color. We really wanted to see samples, but the contractor took our “sand color” comment and ran with it. Luckily he did a great job interpreting what we were looking for and we like the color…

The only question is whether the color is too yellow. We had an architect with us yesterday when we saw it and her first comment was “oh… yellow…” There are some pictures where it looks more yellow and others where it looks more tan. Thing is, if it weren’t at least a bit yellow it could look drab or dirty. Yellow is what gives it it’s brightness.

And one more, taken the next day (later in the day after I intially wrote the blog post)…

So as soon as the stucco is done the next job is putting 4″ of insulation on the roof deck, building up a cricket on the front roof, installing a drain pipe from the front roof to the rear roof, and then putting on the actual roofing material. The contractor is going with a seamless spray-on system – a Kemperdur sytem.

We want a fairly light color because it would be reflective and cool. The next issue will be the color of the roof. New York City is starting to require white roofs. At first I was thinking we’d be required to literally have a white roof. But when I went and looked into the colors that are available Kemperdur roofs it seems that somewhat counter-intuitively white is not the coolest roof color. On that linked page the higher the numbers the cooler the roof. So “Cool Adobe” is the most reflective and has the highest overall “SRI” score, while “Cool Mint” is best at giving off heat. I just sent off a request for samples so we can see the actual colors. Right now we’re leaning toward “Cool Mint” – so we’ll literally have a “green roof”. I’m hoping NYC law doesn’t literally require a white roof since there are colors more efficient (and attractive) than white…

Otherwise, we’re still working out the details for the windows and exterior doors. The architect pushed back a little on the contractor’s dimensions and installation methods plus there were details that had to be worked out with the manufacturer.

The (steel) staircase in our unit is also a point of active discussion. In the process of doing shop drawings we realized there were some headroom clearance problems for the first flight of stairs. So we’ve had to reconfigure things somewhat. The funny part is we like the new configuration better than the original one. The only downside is that the steps will be slightly steeper than we wanted (7.4″ rise per step instead of 7″) – but it’s necessary to get headroom in our powder room.

We also heard through the grapevine that a neighbor (on 122nd Street?) has been calling the police about our building. One time they said work was being done on the weekend when that wasn’t the case – maybe they just saw Dan and I in the building (but the police have never come by while we were there). Another time they said a fight was happening at the building when nothing like that was happening. Apparently the police are now pissed at the caller and want to figure out who they are so they can pursue the person for filing a false police report (multiple times). All I can say is… Seriously people… Do you want the neighborhood to get better or not? How is an abandoned building that would have had serious structural stability issues in a few years better than having us fix up the place?

Progress was made on a few fronts this week. Before they can put on a proper roof they need to finish up the messy stuff up there – the parapet and the bulkhead. The parapet walls have been raised and around the area that will be a roof deck they’re making them look neat and uniform. Capstones will be put on top of what you see below.

I should also mention that we’re having to rebuild our neighbor’s chimneys. They were in horrible condition with (multiple) holes in the side. Rather than debating who should pay what since some of the holes were on our side of the wall (but their chimney) – it was easier to just fix it ourselves.

They’ve also started stuccoing the bulkhead. First step was putting up wood and wire lath. On the far side (along the alleyway) they’ve done the next step and put first coat of concrete (?). On top of that will go a finish coat.

Today we were discussing the color of the finish coat. Looks like we’ll tell the contractor to go with a sand color – light and neutral, though with all the soot in NYC air it’ll start looking dirty at some point and we’ll need to clean it.

The other thing that they worked on this week was wiring. They put in the casings for the electric meters, and started wiring the top few floors.

There was a little drama with the electrician. He needed plans so he grabbed the DOB approved plans off the wall. Thing is, they’re the originals that were signed by the plan examiner and they have to be available if an inspector shows up. Wouldn’t have been a huge problem except for the fact that he marked them up with all sorts of different colored markers. I’m not sure exactly how you replace original, signed plans… Needless to say there were some tense moments as I made it clear we weren’t happy that it had happened.

The other thing we worked on this week was the window order. We’re ordering from a manufacturer in Austria and being European they close the entire factory for two weeks in the summer. We were hoping to get the windows shipped before the holiday, but it turns out we were too late.  🙁  There’s just a lot of details to work out in the order and you gotta get it right – there aren’t really any do-overs with windows that are shipped from Europe. So it’s going to be a while before we get our windows…

It’s been a little while since I wrote up a status report on the house. Things are coming along, but the change is less dramatic and more incremental.

The Bulkhead

The one thing that’s a bit dramatic is the bulkhead on the roof (or “the penthouse” if you want to take a legalistic definition of it as the DOB does).

Our roof deck looks a bit small in that picture – the three of us sorta fill up the space,  but that’s partially a depth perception thing with the photo. But then again, our place is only 15 feet wide.

The two big openings will be pretty much all glass. The one on the right will have a glass door and a window. The one on the left will have two windows. Each window/door will be 3′ x 7′ – so nice and big with lots of glass to get light into the building.

We’ve opted for a bulkhead in lieu of a skylight because it should get a better quality of light into the house. Skylights, being flat on the roof, get the most light/heat in the summer and less light/heat in the winter. That’s the opposite of what you actually want. We wanted a big scoop to catch light/heat in the winter when the sun is low on the horizon and give us less light/heat in the summer when the sun is high in the sky – a bulkhead achieves that goal. Initially we weren’t going to make it go all the way across the building, but were forced to by zoning rules regarding “side yards”.

At some point we’ll also put a retractable awning above the door/windows so we can have shade in the summer when we’re sitting up on the roof deck or if too much light is getting into the building. Dan’s “clean studio” in the front of the building will have large clerestory windows directly opposite the bulkhead windows. That room in particular may be too bright at times.

Since Manhattan points NNE, the bulkhead windows will face SSW. The photo above was taken about 10am and the sun hadn’t hit the windows yet (morning light in Manhattan, north of the Village, hits the “North” side of buildings). So the bulkhead will mostly get light in the afternoon and early evening. though there will be a fair amount of reflected light coming in the morning.

Just behind the bulkhead steel beams have gone in which will hold the condensor units for the mini-split A/C system. Originally our architect was planning on mounting them on pads on the roof, but everyone told us that would be a bad idea since we’d feel the vibration and hear the noise. Steel beams are the best way to go.

Cellar Windows

Staying on the window theme… The openings for the windows in the cellar have been made larger. Since Manhattan real estate is all about maximizing every square foot, we decided early on that we wanted to have part of the cellar dedicated to the tenant. It should make the apartment more attractive and make it almost as good as a 2 bedroom.

We went into a lot of townhouse cellars during our search and didn’t like any of them. So, to make it feel less like a cellar and actually a place someone would want to spend time, we did two things – we lowered the floor in the cellar a few inches and raised the floor on the ground level to give both levels a full 8 feet of height.

But the size of the windows was also really important. We wanted as much natural light to get into the cellar as possible. The window face South, so it should be possible to get a lot of light in there. We figured we’d lower the bottom of the windows slightly and since one of the windows went up pretty high we thought we’d have a bench by the window on the ground floor to give clearance for a bigger window below. But Dan never did like the bench idea. He always wanted smaller windows and a flat floor in the rental bedroom.

Well, it looks like Dan is getting his way 🙂  The contractor had to replace the lintel between the windows (it was cracked), and when he put in the new one he lowered it so it’s now even with the other, smaller, window (which looks “right”). The bigger cellar windows are a pretty nice size even with the top being lower on the one window. And the flat floor in the bedroom is definitely nice. So that’s a deviation from the plans we all seem to like.

That means the window in the rental bedroom (ground floor) is now the same size as the door. We’ll have the contractor put brick in the bottom of the opening to avoid the need for tempered glass in the bottom pane and make that window more like the rest of the windows in the house which have their sills at about 18 to 20 inches off the floor.

From inside the cellar the windows seem pretty big. They will start above the ceiling – immediately under the floor above.That said the framing of the windows (3 1/2″ all around) will make the actual glass area considerably smaller, but they should still be decent sized windows that let in lots of light.

What’s really great is that the back yard is almost 3 feet lower than the sidewalk out front. So, while the ground floor is about a foot below the sidewalk, it’s 18″ to 2′ above the back yard. That means the cellar space is not completely below ground in the back. That makes a huge difference and when the tenants look out the cellar windows they won’t just be looking at the concrete wall of the light well.

Plumbing

Plumbing is progressing pretty well. It’s actually pretty amazing when you think about what our place looked like two and a half months ago. Looking up in the building it feels completely different – you see the guts of a real, modern home…

They’re concentrating their plumbing efforts on our unit initially, since the rental unit isn’t all that secure yet. As you can see in the picture to the right drain vent and supply lines are largely in. There are 4 copper lines running up the building. One is just for the flushometer toilets (so there are no pressure drops when we flush a toilet). Then one for hot water, one for cold water and there’s a little one that’s a return for the hot water so it can circulate and we’ll get hot water as soon as we turn on the tap. Without that it would take forever to get hot water from the cellar to the top floor.

One change we made to the plans was wall mounted toilets in our unit. We had originally wanted wall mounted toilets but thought they were too expensive. But after thinking about it, it’s just so much easier to clean around them, so we told our contractor we were OK with the extra cost ($500/ea) for the wall mounting apparatus.

The tub has also arrived (see picture below) and presumably will be put in place soon. We got the same one Julia Angwin had wanted – a 5.5 foot Kohler “Tea For Two” – a nice, deep soaking tub. Luckily it’s getting put in place while the framing is still flexible. In her case they realized too late that they framed incorrectly so they only had room for the 5 foot version which is completely different – it’s much shallower and was very disappointing for them since it’s not a soaking tub at all. Actually each of the three sizes of Kohler’s Tea For Two is completely different from the other sizes. The 6 footer has armrests built into the sides of the tub (yuck!)

The tub is made out of cast iron and weighs a ton (not really, but it almost feels like it). Metal tubs was another thing Dan wanted, and I’m glad he insisted. We put a fiberglass tub in our last apartment and it’s just not the same… It scratches and feels completely different (doesn’t hold heat, etc.)

The other plumbing thing going on right now is the paperwork to get a new connection to the water main (ours isn’t working). That was submitted this past Tuesday. Apparently it takes a really long time to get a new water main connection – everyone is saying two months. Unfortunately the new water main connection has to be done before the plumbing can be inspected and the walls closed up. And ConEd won’t put in gas and electric until the new water main connection is done. Which is a bit of a problem since it means our contractor has to continue to use generators.

That means early August things will start getting very busy. The windows will be arriving from Austria. The water, electricity and gas will be connected, then a few weeks later insulation will go in and by September hopefully they’ll be putting up sheetrock.

Signs of Life

I’ll leave you with a cute picture… Today we saw a tree that’s trying to grow in the brickwork in our parlor window. How it managed to get situated there and grow even that big is beyond me. But it’s sorta cool…

Hopefully this week the electrician will be in and the roofing guy will get a proper roof on the building so we can stop worrying so much about water pouring in the building when it rains.

One thing we like about our place is that it’s an end unit. That means we can put windows in the sidewall to get air and light into the bathrooms. They’re not “legal” windows in that they can’t count towards air and light calculations nor can the be the required window for a bedroom since they’re on a lot line. But they’re legal in the sense that they’re allowed – though they either have to have wire glass in them or there has to be a sprinkler head in front of the window (we’re opting for wire glass).

We’re putting a small window in each of the bathrooms – so 4 windows total. Two are in, and one is in progress. Here’s what the opening looks like – almost looks original…

You’ll notice that at the top there’s steel. The steel is two rather large angle irons – it’s not a flat piece of steel. The angle gives it strength, but you sorta have to deconstruct the wall to get the angle iron in place. Here’s what it looks like as they deconstruct the wall to get the angle iron in place…

The window that we put in there will be double glazed. The outer pane will be wire glass (required by fire code). The inner pane will be “frosted” – the question has been what type of frosting we should use. The window manufacturer has 32 different choices(!) The leading candidate at this point is this one…

We weren’t considering that glass ’cause we thought it showed too much (the window will be in the shower area). However, what we realized today is that it’s almost impossible for the people across the alleyway to see much of anything so we can go for a glass that’s a little closer to clear. We’d rather have a window that shows something outside (even if it’s a brick wall) than to have something that’s so opaque that it’s just a boring white panel.

As you can see from the first two pictures, a fair amount of light will come into the windows – more than you might think on a narrow 4-5 foot alleyway. Should make the bathrooms noticeably better…