I was lucky. I was able to buy a house in Brooklyn, NY with my partner Amy and our two daughters D and J. The catch was that this house was a fixer upper. A major fixer upper. But that was the reason we were able to afford to buy our very own home in this city.
My wife and I first saw this house scanning zillow while searching for a place to buy around Bed-Stuy. We were not impressed with this house at first because the asking price was too high for a property that needed so much work. We nicknamed it the ugly house and saved it in our search anyway. Four frustrating months later, after seeing 30 houses and losing bids on two separate properties, we saw that the price came down a couple hundred thousand dollars on this place. Suddenly this house looked beautiful. We scheduled an appointment to see it and instantly liked it. It was completely empty, the architectural details were stripped out decades ago, all the floors were crooked, the roof needed to be replaced, but there was something about it that felt right. Maybe it was the backyard. Maybe it was the location. Maybe it was the asking price. So we made an offer.
Above is the 1940 tax photo of the house. I hope one day we can bring back some of the details like the missing portico. What happened there? Also, you can see this house had wood clapboard siding. That siding is still there today under three layers of vinyl. We’ll dig it up one of these days.
According to the Department of City Planning, our house was built in 1899, but I suspect the house is much older. After we opened up the walls, we discovered that the house was wood framed with brick nogging between the studs. Back in the day the only insulation they had besides straw and plaster was brick. They built brick between the wood studs to help keep the wind drafts down, but more importantly, to keep the rodents out. Although wood houses were common in Brooklyn at the time it was built, exterior wood frame construction was banned in Manhattan below 155th Street by 1882 because of new fire codes at the time. Then the first NYC building code of 1899 was published and outlined common practices for new building materials. Because the five boroughs were annexed into the city of New York in 1898, my engineer told me that the newly established consolidated city designated 1899 as the “year built” for buildings they were not sure about the actual date built.
This is what our brick-nogged walls looked like beneath the layers of crap we stripped away. More about that later.
Now the tour:
The New York City Department of Buildings (DOB) makes you classify floors as Cellar, Basement, First Floor, Second Floor, etc. That was the first rejection we received, even though the basement floor is is on ground level. I learned quickly to just adjust to whatever the DOB asks for on the plans and move on.
As soon as our offer was accepted, I contacted the realtor to see if I could survey the whole house because I wanted to start planning as soon as possible. One of the quirky things this house had were two staircases. I don’t know why it was there, but I knew the stair in the back was not original. It was too steep to pass code. Plus, I hit my head on the ceiling every time I used it. Gave new meaning to the term “header.”
I couldn’t figure out the layout of this kitchen, but I figured out how to hammer that tile off the wall.
This was the tub room. Look at that thing. Couldn’t wait to take a sledge hammer to it. There was a toilet in there somewhere too.
Crooked stairs, but they were perpendicular to the crooked floors.
This house is a legal two family dwelling. Like a lot of old houses in Brooklyn, ours was configured with the basement and first floor as one unit, and the second (or top) floor as a separate apartment. We wanted to flip the layout for several reasons. First, one of our goals during this renovation was to try to bring back as many of the Victorian details as we could. Modernized of course. The original layout would have had the apartment on the basement floor, and the main house on the first and second floor. Second, our plan was to have my mother-in-law move into the apartment after we finished, and we didn’t want her climbing stairs daily to get to her apartment. In the picture below, to the left was the house, to the right was the stairs to the apartment:
Gotta love cheap vinyl rolled “as wood” flooring. Unfortunately, there were no hidden gems of an unfinished wood floor beneath. Just more linoleum over rotten planks.
This was the apartment:
The custom door fitting the crooked closet header was my favorite.
So this is it. The blank canvas, the money pit, the American dream, whatever you’d like to call it. I hope to make it home for my family soon.