Old houses are full of surprises. Busted pipes, wonky electrical wiring… but once is a while you find some odd things hidden in the walls, under the floor boards, or buried in the back yard.
Unfortunately, our dream of finding a wad of cash has yet to come true. We have, however found this: Continue reading
I always wanted to pull the original architectural drawings for our house, a task that requires equal parts patience and luck. New York City often notes the building date of 19th century structures as 1899, a year that is essentially random. I’ve been told that this is because there was a fire, and records were lost. I’ve also been told that it’s just plain old sloppy record keeping. I believe both explanations.
(or at least I think that’s what the weird bird thingies are). Continue reading
If you are researching the ownership chain of your New York City home, or looking for the builder or architect, chances are you will spend many hours browsing the Real Estate Record & Builder’s Guide. A weekly publication listing all the real estate transaction in the city from 1868 to 1922, the guide lists buyer, seller, amount paid and, if you’re lucky, an actual address, not just the distance from the nearest intersection. The search engine is clunky and it requires a lot of patience.
A bonus of spending so much time poking around is that you get to see some of the building trade ads of the time. For instance: Continue reading
The great bedroom saga has been quite the epic (as in long and torturous) project. Here is a recap and here is a tour of the whole third floor as it used to be.
A full post is to come, but here is what it’s looking like: Continue reading
(a true story of real estate bat shittery)
I was working on a TBT post for yesterday, pulling photos of the house the day we got the keys. I spent some time looking through lots of pictures and pulling the ones that I thought would best illustrate what the Pink Lady looked like when we became her caretakers.
For some reason, I didn’t take any pictures of the garden level kitchen before we started working on it, and I wondered if the old listing for our house was still up – you know, the with SOLD in big bold letters where the asking price used to be. Figuring I could still find the old listing, I googled our address. And that’s when things got interesting.
A house two doors from ours has been on the market for a while. It’s a cheap-o flip with a giant price tag, but taste is subjective thing – so whatever.
(the flipper of that house ripped out an intact Kilian Brothers mantel, the wall where it stood for 120 years is now a featureless exposed brick wall. But again, taste is on the eye of the beholder).
(also, exposed brick in a brownstone? It’s the avocado green kitchen of our times.)
The part that concerns me is that the address of the house in question was actually our address, while the interior photos and the description belonged to the house actually for sale. The exterior photo was of the house next-door.
I called the broker listed, who didn’t seem to think this was a big deal at all. Well, when you’re dealing with real estate agents, who as a group belong in the same realm as used car salesman and personal injury lawyers*, it is a huge deal. Last time this happened (yes, this is not the first time a broker used our address for a listing) I ended up with an agent breaking into our house with a client in tow, parading through our home before realizing they were in the wrong house. Yes. that actually happened last spring.
I kept scrolling down the Google results and found another listing, this time for our house and the listing agent was the person representing the seller when we bought the the Pink Lady. It seemed to be a new listing, virtual tour and all (with the old photos I was looking for). The listing included a random price (not the asking price at the time we purchased it) and a listing ID. WTF, right?
I called up that broker and left her the meanest voice mail I could muster, which I’m sure sounded pathetic, because I have a cold and my voice is about 3 notches lower than usual – or maybe that made me sound like a rich old lady with her lawyers on speed dial? Anyway, that listing came down right away. Given her lack of skill when we were dealing with her, I’m inclined to chalk that one up as a mistake. The other listing however – the one for the house 2 doors away – I believe is more malicious. I took several calls to get it taken down, including threats of getting lawyers involved. By the end of the day yesterday, the listing was gone.
One would think that that for as much as brokers like to say it’s all about “location location location,” that the ONE THING they should get right is the address of the property they are selling. I was told by a few people who deal with brokers on a regular basis that this is more of a systemic practice. I don’t understand how listing the wrong address benefits them, but I do live in a neighborhood where harassment is rampant, and the calls, flyers and knocks on the door asking whether the house is for sale are constant. There is a lot of shady stuff happening in Brooklyn real estate. Scruples, it turns out, are in very short supply.
Regardless of whether it’s a honest mistake or something more, I know this much: it’s illegal to advertise a property for sale without the consent of the property owner.
So here is the public service announcement part of this post: if you live in an area where real estate is bananas, such as brownstone Brooklyn, you might want to Google your address on a regular basis. You never know, someone may be advertising your house for sale.
What do you do if it happens to you? If you are a resident of New York state, you can file a complaint against the broker and the real estate agency here. You should also contact the office of the Attorney General and the local real estate board. If you see the add on sites such as Zillow, there is a button to click to report fraud. I suggest you do that, too. It goes without saying you should keep frame grabs of the ads.
This concludes the public service announcement.
* of course, not all real estate agents are bad. My mom was one, as was my mother in law. A dear friend is an architectural historian (and a real estate agent). The nice folks behind House By We, who represented us on the purchase of our house, are professional, competent and honest.
I love peeling back the layers of our house, unearthing little clues about the past. In a recent kitchen refresh ( swear I’ll post about it soon), we came across this teeny tiny piece of wallpaper. (Hand shown for scale) Continue reading
Lots of work happening at the house over the weekend – floors and painting galore, post to come soon.
Till then, check out what we found in the cellar: Continue reading
I had every intention of organizing the mess in the cellar today, because I need to make room for a whole house worth of trim (but not before removing approximately a million billion quadrillion nails – I’m totally not exaggerating. There A LOT of nails). The situation is dire, and I need to make room for more dusty treasures by Monday.
an itsy bitsy sample of the mess in the cellar.
Yet, it’s past 4 o’clock and the only reason I’m not in my pajamas is because I had to take the garbage out this morning. The rest of the day was spent poking around the interwebs researching the builder of my house. This is all because of tag found on the back of the salvaged mantle from yesterday. It seemed to have the tiniest of vestiges of a name I recognize: Daniel McDicken, the man who built my house (on spec). So one Google search leads to another, and my two great enablers: BPL’s digitized collection of The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, and Columbia University’s collection of the Real Estate Guide lead me down a rabbit hole that is just impossible to resist. So… basically nothing got done today.
While you’d be shocked to learn that my pile of trim did not neatly stack itself (crazy, right?) you might be amused to learn that Mr. McDicken advertised his houses as “the most complete two family house in the market; two baths; two refrigerators; dumb-waiter; everything latest.”Even if the refrigerator was an ice box (this was 1896, after all), it’s still pretty cool. Some of my neighbors still have theirs. We, sadly, do not.
(actually these were painted, dirty and discarded things, but we’ll get to that in a moment)
Ah focus. Some people have it, I don’t. I’m easily distracted by possibilities, by day dreaming and by imagining the worst of the worst case scenarios. Yet, once in a while, I will spring into action at a moment’s notice, after realizing that life cannot continue on in this manner. After having one of those “I cannot stand this room one more minute” moments, I decided to get serious about our dining room. I had already attempted a Style Cure (HA. HA HA HA HA!) that was interrupted by 6 weeks of 14-hour work days, followed by binge holiday cooking baking (not having an oven for 3 years will do that to you), followed by a very sick kitten (who has since recovered, but not before consuming a healthy amount of our home restoration savings). Anyway, time to get this room done!
With newfound enthusiasm, work resumed. I begun skim coating the walls – after a steep learning curve, I’m getting quite good at it. It’s t time-consuming (what else is new?) because I discovered that many thin coats are much better than one or two thicker ones.
please excuse crappy cell phone photo, which makes the moldings appear bowed. They are not.
So slow we go, that is, until I notice that one of the houses in the back is being renovated. This precipitated a trip around the block and the discovery of a ton of Victorian trim, just tossed in the front yard.
This is a good place to mention that the way I feel about architectural salvage is the way a lot of women feel about shoes: you can never have too much. Like a lot of people who wouldn’t pass up a good shoe sale, I cannot let 120-year old lumber be tossed in a dumpster. It’s against my nature, and it will cause me great intestinal distress to just let it go. After hemming and hawing about whether a pile in the front yard is fair game (I knocked on the door but no one answered), I decided to leave a note asking whether I could come dig through their “trash.” Much to my surprise, the contractor called me back within 30 minutes and said “be my guest.”
What started as a quick peek, stretched over a couple of hours of treasure hunting in sub-zero temperatures. The guys showed me inside and to another pile of “garbage,” far more than what I could take in one day. With a gargantuan dumpster looming over me (and my soon to be) salvage, the nice people said I could come back Saturday morning at 8 am and take anything they didn’t want to keep.
Long story short, the car was filled 3 4 times (and counting). The overflow (which included two carved fireplace mantels) was walked around the corner. I’m happy I was able to save so much mill work, yet I’m sad for all the other wonderful things I wasn’t able to save. The house was nearly intact before the gut renovation started. I wish I had stopped by earlier. It’s heartbreaking (to me) when people rip out details from old houses. A Brooklyn brownstone is not meant to look like a loft; I have very strong feelings about plaster and the role of bricks in a brownstone (to be hidden by plaster and never seen). I also realize I’m not Queen of the Universe and these are just my opinions (surely this is an oversight due to be corrected any day now). Until then, if detail must be ripped out, then at least it should not go to the dumpster. It should be saved and re-used by those of us who appreciate it.
Now if you please excuse me, I have another carload of stuff to rescue. One man’s trash is another woman’s treasure…
A Pink Brownstone in Brooklyn 