A happy home in a Brooklyn brownstone
One of the original fittings in the house that was missing was the front doors. They had been replaced with a cheap panel door set at some point in the past and we really wanted to get that double door classic Brownstone look. Unfortunately that was when I discovered that a single antique salvager had…
The house still had the original 19th century stairs in place and that meant not a single right angle was remaining. It seemed important to replace the stairs before the baby came and repair the damaged wood work including the newel post. Here you can see the stairs before we started the work with the…
One of the things I love about Victorian houses is all the decorative embellishments like the ceiling and surface moulding. Like a lot of things in the house though the former owner had not maintained the decorative plaster. Pieces were missing or had many layers of paint on them that meant lost definition. I had…
Anyone who knows me knows I’m a social butterfly so it was important to me that we had a good guest suite set up for regular international guests. The room we had designated for the guest room runs off the kitchen floor and was larger than the other rooms. We didn’t need to do too…
Like a lot of the house minimal and sometimes strange maintenance decisions had been made in the house. The ground floor for example had been hand dabbed in uneven plaster to cover where the wallpaper had been damaged and the floor was covered in cheap 80s tile. Here we can see the kind of surprise…
The bedroom that was to become our Master bedroom looked like it was in okay shape after the windows were replaced but the closet doors, mouldings and lights all needed to be redone. The floors were a recent addition and other than a couple of light switches there wasn’t a lot of major reconstruction. Being…
We are lucky enough to have a basement under the ground floor which is a luxury of space not afforded to most in NYC. A number of people have commented it’s large enough to be its own rental but since we are project hobbyists and frequent DIYers we opted for more space over more money….
Between the guest room and the dining room was a large walk in closet with a wall in the middle. Since the guest room already had two other closets this space seemed better suited as a walk through pantry. First we gutted the space and removed the dividing wall. There were already doors at either…
The kitchen was going to be one of the largest projects in the renovation with wall changes, plumbing reroutes, new floors and cabinets the works. This meant replenishing our cash reserves after the last one and mostly what you’re looking at is my annual bonus turned into physical things. ;o) Firstly it was important…
Our Brownstone is old enough to have been designed for servant’s quarters which made for awesomely easy partitioning of the rental floor but means that actually they have the main kitchen for the house. Victorian bedrooms were often created with a matched sitting room attached to the main bed chamber and all the bedrooms in…