Turning a One Bedroom Apartment Into a Five Bedroom Apartment
by Eric Horowitz ConsultantThis was by far the most challenging
remodel that I or my team had ever encountered. Our job was not simple: we had
to turn a one bedroom apartment into a five bedroom. When I was first tasked
with the job, I was unsure about the procedures that needed to be taken. I was
contacted by the owner of a rental company who owned a building in Manhattan’s
Chinatown. He had been having trouble renting the entire apartment to single
people, couples, or small families due to the price, so he decided to split up
the apartment and rent out each room separately. While it was a good idea for
him financially, it definitely cut out a ton of work for me and my crew. There
was much we needed to do to prepare for this job. There were already four
rooms in the apartment outside of the kitchen and living room, so that made our
job much easier. We still had to install electrical, and other necessities in
three of the four rooms, plus we had to build a fifth room.
Installing
the Electrical
While normally installing electrical
into a home or apartment is not such an extreme challenge, this ended up taking
much longer than initially expected. The building was extremely old and
decrepit and was in a poorer area of Chinatown. We had to install at least one
outlet in each of the other rooms (which had previously been used for various
purposes) in order to make sure that all members of the apartment would be able
to have light and heat. We had to cut a hole in the ceiling to run the wires
through since it had previously not been hooked up to electricity. While this
was challenging, we worked hard, and after a few days we eventually figured it
out.
Building
the Fifth Room
While the electrical only took my
crew and me a few days to figure out and install, we knew that building the
fifth room would be a much greater feat. There was not a ton of space for the
installation of walls, so we had to get creative. We decided the only way we
could do it would be to shrink the size of the living room. We put up two walls
perpendicular to one another. The ceiling was too low to put a proper door in,
so we rigged a sliding door. The owner told us to make sure that the room was
large enough to fit a full sized bed, a bookshelf and a desk. He also asked us
to build a closet. There definitely was not enough room for all of that, so we
compromised and we decided the best way to maximize space in the fifth room was to install a coat locker instead of a closet. It was a bit of a squeeze, but
everything eventually worked out.
Final
Thoughts
This
was by far the hardest job my company and I had ever encountered. The
electrical was very hard to install because of the age of the building. Also,
building the fifth room was far from easy. While I would probably not take on a
project like this in the future, this was definitely a success and the client
was extremely satisfied.
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Created on Nov 30th 2017 12:57. Viewed 516 times.