curb cutting

We have a driveway now! We kept a little bit of a lip/raise on the edge so that water doesn't collect, and so that the driveway doesn't eventually crack where it meets the street

ikea kitchen

Last week, Debjoy and I made and installed our Ikea kitchen cabinets. This kitchen only cost us about $4k for the cabinetry (plus we get everything we want). The hardest part is making sure that the cabinets are level with each other. The cabinet fronts are missing because they wait for the granite to be installed first (bulls in a China store, as our contractor puts it)

electricity hookup and repointing of brick

The electric company wouldn't hook up the electrical box to any plaster/siding, so it was mounted on the party wall, which they had to uncover since it was hiding underneath layers of plaster. The lights in the house are working, although plumbing and gas still need to be hooked up to the front.

drywall

pre-drywall

Kitchen (north wall)

Kitchen (south wall)

Dining Room

2nd floor guest bath

Master Bathroom

Master Bedroom

2nd floor ceiling

1st floor bedroom (south wall)

1st floor bathroom

Laundry Room

Utility Closet

garage faucet

Electrical, Plumbing, HVAC

Electrical, plumbing, and HVAC routed throughout the house. Electrical and framing inspections done earlier in the week.

new facade

Framing Completion

Taking down the facade

Framing Early Stages

Framing began at the beginning of the week, after the weather cleared up. The procedure is to start the framing from the back of the house, and to move forward, so that the structure will remain sturdy (remember that there will be a giant opening in the front of the house for the garage).

This is the view from the fire egress door. You can see that the facade of the house is still there (it will come down when the framing is more developed in the front).

termite exterminator

 Before they poured the concrete the next day, we came to the house after work to spray the ground with termite barrier to provide protection for 9-12 months.

removal of the fire escape wall/sally port

Yesterday they removed the wall dividing the house from the fire escape

They had to put up temporary joists so that the party walls were confidently stable.

Backfill

This week, they've started to add the backfill and establish some of the main water lines. The contractor found a good water line, and was able to reroute it (although I'm not sure why it appears to be sticking out in the middle of where the garage floor will be). For slab-on-grade foundations (such as ours will be), the crushed gravel or stone is a good alternative to soil for its high strength and permeability.

You can see that the subgrade at the back of the house is about 10 inches higher than the grade level on the street-side (entrance) of the house. Additionally, for slab-on-grade foundations, the slab should be sloped; in this case, it will be about 1/8'' per every foot.

Some things we should ask the contractor tomorrow:
1) Can they do insulation on top of the backfill before pouring the slab
2) How are they tamping the dirt
3) Where is the sewer going exactly

Permits and Planning

This is our awesome alley house shell.  It didn't have a roof, nor some of the windows, when we bought it, but it was a great deal. This is a picture of the house from about 8 months ago (you can see the sign posted for the public hearing for the zoning).

     

We bought the shell about 9 months ago, and this is the progress we have made (anything that can go wrong, will probably go wrong in the planning process)

Yep, that's a bouncy ball floating in the dirty mud water inside our house, from lack of roof. Here is a picture of the glorious moment when my husband broke into our house for the first time with a crow bar (we never got a key for the fire escape tunnel on the side of our house).

We were lucky enough that our fire escape tunnel is located entirely on our side of the property (lots of row houses share this fire escape egress), so that will give us an extra width of ~18-20'' on the first floor.

Sorry, I'm getting too ahead of myself. Let me explain what's been going on in the 8 months before the last two pictures were taken:

Month 1: Before the zoning hearing, it helps to have a letter of support from the Canton Community Association, saying that they support your construction project.  The development company got our letter of support and also hired a law firm to attend the zoning hearing to get our plans approved.  Unfortunately, we got rejected for building a 2-car tandem parking (we can only have 1-car parking) since one of our neighbors protested this at the zoning hearing. He said that a 2-car tandem parking garage would "make him late for work in the morning."  -_-
We were previously warned with horror stories of this part of the process--someone buys a property and can't have a garage-- but our situation was more promising because our house is located on an alley (meaning it's a skinny one-lane street with no street parking).  By having a parking garage, we're not removing street parking for other Canton residents.
Some initial drawings must be made when you apply for the permits. My husband and I designed the floor layout and then got it approved by a structural engineer (you need the official structural engineer "stamp" from the state of Maryland for it to be legitimate). To say that the first set of drawings lacked attention to detail, would be an understatement. But it was good enough to get the permits through.

Month 2:  Demolition began. The demolition team ripped out the rotting floorboards and took out the back wall of the house. They also put new concrete CMU footers around the back section of the house  (picture below), but then everyone stopped and didn't do anything for 7 months (explanation below)

Month 3:  ?

Month 4:  We got married at the end of month 4, because for some reason we thought it wasn't a big deal to get married and reconstruct an entire rowhouse at the same time.

Month 5:  We had to get BGE to approve the location of gas and electric lines going into our non-conventional house plan. They have very strict rules about where you can place gas and electric meters, and it actually resulted in us having to re-think the first floor of our house plans. Here is the manual of gas and electric metering for your leisure reading later

Month 6: BGE needed to inspect the electrical conduit going into our property to make sure that the conduit hadn't collapsed so that a new electrical line could be pulled through. Lots of houses in the city have above-ground electrical lines, but ours went underground into the former basement of the property. If the conduit had collapsed, they would need to dig up the entire street to re-wire the new electrical line which would have been time-consuming and expensive. Luck for us, it hasn't collapsed. Hurricane Sandy struck during this time, so getting a hold of BGE to do the inspection was not an easy task that month.

Month 7: To minimize potential BGE complications, we tried creating a house layout where we wouldn't need to move the gas and electric meters (keeping the original basement, and building a garage on top of rebar enforced concrete).  The engineering aspect was feasible, however it would be slightly more expensive to build, and it would require digging the footers deeper. To dig the foundation deeper in a rowhouse, in a process called underpinning, you need permission from the neighbors that live on each side of you (since they share a  brick wall with you).  One out of two of our neighbors became wary of this, thus negating the basement possibility.  I think as of Dec. 2012 the city passed new legislation saying that you don't need these permissions anymore, although we abandoned this plan anyways, since it was going to be expensive and more time consuming.

Month 8: The general contractor assigned to our project needed more detailed plans. My husband slaved away for hours on SolidWorks (we're both mechanical engineers) to create plans for demolition, framing, etc.  We still had a structural engineer give it a look-over after it was done, but having drawn it and done most of the calculations ourselves, saved us the cost of hiring an architect for about $5-10k.

Our development company also filed for the curb cut permit, finally, which ended up getting rejected by one of the dozen people from different departments that need to approve it. Even though we had been previously approved for a garage, we needed a separate permit to cut the sidewalk for the driveway.  We went to get the decision appealed, and they agreed that there wasn't really a good reason for them to reject our permit. So...that took about a month.

Month 9: Baltimore City is not cool with people buying shells and doing nothing with them.  We  got a few angry calls and letters from the city, but when we called them back to explain the situation, they were pretty nice. They just don't want people sitting on uninhabited buildings, especially in the nicer neighborhoods. This month, we also terminated our contract with the development company, since they had made the majority of their profit already, and our house still looked like this:

The development company finished pulling permits and talking to general contractors, and it was time for us to cut the middle-man out of the picture and work directly with a general contractor, anyways. I think we were pretty lucky to end our relationship with them amicably and get them to sign a legal termination document (which we drafted with a lawyer).

About the Bradford Project

About one year ago, my husband and I started looking to buy a rowhome in the neighborhood of Canton in Baltimore, MD.  We decided to live in Canton since we wanted to be in the city, but also within a close distance to the interstate.  Not only is it easy for our work commute, the location is safe, fun, has beautiful water views, a huge park, tons of restaurants and bars, and friendly people. But it's expensive. You can basically either buy a dump for $100k or a mansion for $700k, and anything in between is in high demand.

So my husband and I had a few requirements for our new house: 1.) 2-car parking (a valuable commodity in Canton) 2.) no rodents and 3.) reasonable taxes.  You would think that these three things are simple enough that we would find a house, no problem...

This is not going to be a blog about our original real estate search, but long story short--any house in a good location with 2-car parking was going for more than $350k, and we decided that if we wanted a house done right, we should do it ourselves.

For those interested in knowing why we abandoned our pre-built house real estate search: As we were doing our search for a house, we had met with some rehab contractors, and we were a little wary of buying a rehab since they were basically keeping old wooden joists in most of the houses and also jacking up the prices by at least $150-250k more than the price that they bought them for. Everyone is also marketing this "historic house tax credit" in Baltimore right now.  Basically, it says that that if you don't alter the historical style of your rowhouse, your taxes will be locked-in at the low rate that you purchased the original (a.k.a the "shell") house. Real estate agents and general contracting companies seem to use this tax credit as a selling point, and this helps them raise the sale price of the houses. I agree that it's a good deal, but if I'm considering this house as a long-term investment, after ten years I end up being stuck with high taxes AND the original inflated mortgage.

So we decided to do it ourselves...sort of. My husband and I knew nothing about building houses, so we needed someone to basically hold our hand during the whole process. We found a sweet shell at a location we enjoyed (halfway between Canton and Fells Point), and a development company to help us get the permits and the right general contractor.