Above 1200 Sq/FT An experiment in Bushwick

[jlevers]

I've been dreaming of having a shop since I was 16, but I've been on the road the past few years since I finished school, and I kept my bike and car running by borrowing space in various people's garages/driveways.

Recently, I decided to settle down a little bit, and through a long, convoluted, and surprising (especially to me) series of events, I ended up in Brooklyn. Not somewhere I ever thought I'd be, but I fell in love with it this summer, and here I am!

I have a lot of friends here with various interests that require space (motorcycles, cars, music, art, etc), and I thought it would be a really cool experiment to make a space for people to come do those things. There's nothing more fun than being around interesting, motivated people who're making cool stuff, and I decided to try to attract as many of those interesting people to one spot as I can. That's the experiment

Brooklyn doesn't have a lot of space, and any space you can find ain't cheap. I spent the last several months scouring Craigslist and Loopnet for a decent spot, and I finally found one! It's an old building, and it's beat to hell, and it needs a ton of work...but the landlord offered me a couple months of free rent and basically told me I can do whatever I want to the interior, so I pulled the trigger. This is going to be by FAR the biggest project I've ever taken on...I have no idea what I'm doing, but I'm about to learn!

Here it is when I got it:







From upstairs, looking out into the main area:



Apparently the last tenents were using it as some sort of film/theater studio or something? They took hilariously bad care of it, and as far as I can tell the landlord literally never went inside. There were two major roof leaks that he didn't find out about until after they moved out. There was one above that room in the back, and it totally destroyed all the drywall in the room -- it's warped and covered in mold. I'll be tearing all that out and redoing it.

This is how they were dealing with the other leak:



The roof got redone, so the leaks are fixed (hopefully)...I emptied that bin, and hopefully that's the end of that.

I want the space to feel as open and inviting as possible, so the first step was getting rid of the wall you can see in the second picture. I bought a sledgehammer and a crowbar and went to town.



Much better!! This is looking in from the street (a couple friends are in there getting to work on another wall):



The wall they're hacking away at is covering a large window -- the last tenant covered it up so they could control the lighting, I guess? It's way brighter in there with it removed.

There are also two skylights, which were both covered -- one was easy to remove from the loft area, but the other was in the middle of the tallest part of the ceiling. I couldn't figure out a good way to reach it, so I just drove my car into the middle of the floor, and had a tall friend stand on my rooftent with a crowbar. Sweet.

 

[jlevers]

I need to get rid of most of the wooden floor, so that I can drive vehicles around in there, and hopefully put in some fun stuff like a lathe or a mill at some point. When I drove my car on the wood floor, it made all sorts of funny noises, which confirmed my suspicion that the floor needed to go. Unfortunately, the one intact wall in the place was built on top of the floor...ah well, down it goes.




My friend Max taking advantage of the nice lighting:



Finally, I started pulling the floor up. It's pretty solid -- the best way I could find to remove it was making cuts between floor joists with a circular saw, and then cutting the joists at the seams between the sheets of plywood. Then I crowbar-ed the cut pieces up and out. I did a section, which left me with this:



Over the next few days, I cut up a bunch more of the floor, and today I spent QUITE a while prying the blocks the floor joists were sitting on out of the concrete, and then using an angle grinder to cut the nails off flush with the slab. I tried prying the nails out, but I kept leaving big holes in the concrete where the nails used to be, so I decided the angle grinder was a better route.

I'm procrastinating on getting a dumpster, because I don't have anywhere good to put it. If I put it on the street, I won't be able to get my car out, and if I put it inside, I'll have to park my car on the street and move it every couple days. So for now I'm going to pile up all the waste in the interior, and then hopefully just get a dumpster for a couple days.

In the background of that last picture, you can see one issue that I'm not looking forward to dealing with...the last tenant built a loft, which is great! Buuuuut part of its support structure is sitting on top of the floor that I'm removing. So I'm going to have to find a way to support the loft from underneath the floor, and then cut out the floor. Yikes. We're not winning any OSHA competitions here. I'm going to cross that bridge when I come to it.

I had a few other fun things happen in the last couple days. First, I discovered that the skylights I uncovered are not even close to weathertight. We had a big snowstorm, and this happened:





Also, I've been turning the water off and draining as much as I can when I leave, because I'm not heating the building yet and I don't want the pipes to freeze. When I went to turn the water back on today, this happened:



As it turns out, the landlord has to get a plumber in here anyway to replace the broken water heater, so I guess I'll get him to deal with this at the same time. For now, though, the water's stuck off. Whoops.

 

[LaneRover]

Good luck on your project, yes you are correct they covered up the skylight to control the lighting if they were using it as a theater or a studio. At least they didn't paint the skylight!

 

[coldh2o]

This is an interesting space, you're into a bit of work!

Subscribed to follow the progress.

 

[LXCam]

This will be fun to watch. Good luck on your project.

 

[TiFJ]

Looks like a significant project... you are brave! Excited to see where this goes

 

[jlevers]

Good luck on your project, yes you are correct they covered up the skylight to control the lighting if they were using it as a theater or a studio. At least they didn't paint the skylight!

This is an interesting space, you're into a bit of work!

Subscribed to follow the progress.

This will be fun to watch. Good luck on your project.

Thanks yall

Looks like a significant project... you are brave! Excited to see where this goes

Brave or dumb? We'll find out lol

 

[Grizz1963]

Thats a great spavce.

And a brilliant option to utilise the space like you plan.

I would die to have to dump all that wood, but thats life.

Looking forward to it evolving.

 

[jlevers]

Thats a great spavce.

And a brilliant option to utilise the space like you plan.

I would die to have to dump all that wood, but thats life.

Looking forward to it evolving.

Thanks for checking in! I'm hoping to find a way to reuse some of the wood, but it's all so full of screws and nails that I'm not sure how to use it. Open to any ideas

 

[broinkrist]

That is truly an amazing space with tons of potential. I don't think many from other parts of the country/world can appreciate how difficult it is to find a space like this in Brooklyn without crazy lease contracts or payments. I lived in Brooklyn (Williamsburg/Bushwick) for many years and spaces like this are impossible to find, either the owners hold onto them with hopes of selling to a developer, or they're already snatched up by said developers for $$$$.

I dreamed of a space like this when I lived there and should have mortgaged away my soul to buy an old firehouse back in 2007 in Greenpoint for 750k, a far cry from the world we live in now.

Just curious, how are you and the landlord working out costs of improvement? How about permits/inspections and everything? (given how complex and convoluted they are in NYC proper)

Best of luck!

 

[jbrentd]

Nice 3rd gen 4Runner! I can see why the floor started making some weird noises when you drove on it. Looks like a nice space you've found. What ARE you planning to do to the interior after you demo the "flooring" and fix any issues?

 

[MrPink]

Your Landlord should be fixing the sky light right?

 

[jlevers]

That is truly an amazing space with tons of potential. I don't think many from other parts of the country/world can appreciate how difficult it is to find a space like this in Brooklyn without crazy lease contracts or payments. I lived in Brooklyn (Williamsburg/Bushwick) for many years and spaces like this are impossible to find, either the owners hold onto them with hopes of selling to a developer, or they're already snatched up by said developers for $$$$.

I dreamed of a space like this when I lived there and should have mortgaged away my soul to buy an old firehouse back in 2007 in Greenpoint for 750k, a far cry from the world we live in now.

Just curious, how are you and the landlord working out costs of improvement? How about permits/inspections and everything? (given how complex and convoluted they are in NYC proper)

Best of luck!

I think I'm basically gonna get screwed on the improvement costs -- he gave me 2mo of free rent ($7k total) and I'm paying for all the interior improvements. If when I decide to leave, the interior is miles better than when I started, I'm going to try to get him to compensate me in some way but I doubt I'll be successful.

As far as permits and inspections go...I don't think this place has been inspected in a decade, and I'm crossing my fingers that they don't choose to inspect it anytime soon. I'm nearly positive it's wayyy out of code, and I'm not getting any permits for anything I'm doing in there. It's technically zoned residential, which I'm sure means that there's all sorts of legal restrictions on what I can do in there, but so much sketchy stuff goes on around here that I'm not all that worried about getting called on it.

Nice 3rd gen 4Runner! I can see why the floor started making some weird noises when you drove on it. Looks like a nice space you've found. What ARE you planning to do to the interior after you demo the "flooring" and fix any issues?

Thanks! It's my baby...2000, 5-speed. I flew to Washington state to buy it in November 2020 because it was the only place I could find a 4wd 5-speed with no rust.

I'm planning to keep it pretty bare-bones for the time being. I want the main work area to stay wide open. The upstairs room is going to get redone and turned into a work area (I'm a freelance software engineer and have other friends who'd like to use the space to do their day-to-day work, the loft will be a hangout area (couches/etc), and the room in the back will be a music studio. I'm not planning anything too carefully -- I'm just going to see what I find myself wanting (or what other people want), and build the space out accordingly.

Your Landlord should be fixing the sky light right?

Yep! And the non-working heaters, and the broken water heater lol

 

[jlevers]

No big updates, but a couple little things and a funny story.

In order to remove the other part of the floor, I needed to move all the wood/insulation/drywall onto the freshly exposed concrete. I figured in the process I might as well try to recover any wood that seemed like I might be able to use it later for...something. I'm sure I'll manage to dream up some silly project.

Here it is near the beginning of that project -- the little stack of plywood is flooring that I salvaged by prying the glued and nailed floor joists off with a crowbar, then knocking the nails backwards through the plywood with a sledgehammer. It took a long friggin time, so I better find a use for that plywood. Also: I bought a sledgehammer and crowbar right when I signed the lease on this space, and I think they've already achieved the highest usefulness-per-dollar rating of any tool I've ever had.



Lots of prying, hammering, cutting, and stacking/throwing later:



It looks like I ended up with more stuff than when I started, but really all the insulation just got un-squished when I took all the other **** off from on top of it. I'm planning to keep the plywood and the little stack of 2x4s in the middle, and dump the rest. If anyone's in Brooklyn and wants some firewood...let me know.

Since the heat wasn't working, the landlord and I met with a heating guy today. The refrigerant pressure on the roof unit read a whopping 0psi. Hmm. We quickly found out a couple things: 1) the leak in what I thought was an air line was actually the refrigerant line (I had a basic misunderstanding of how the heating/cooling system worked), and 2) the last tenant was even more of a wack job than either me or the landlord realized. The leak was coming from a cut line that appeared to have been accidentally hit with an angle grinder?? Like, how does that happen? And then the heating guy pointed out that there was a 3rd set of lines, but only two visible interior units. We eventually discovered that in that back room, the last tenant built another wall inside the room, about 8 inches away from the actual wall, and the missing heater was in the space in between the two walls. Absolutely bizarre. I'll get some pictures of that situation sometime when it's light out.

One unfortunate thing the heating guy told me is that he needs to access the wall right above where my big pile of wood is, so I'm going to have to move that again. Whoops.

Here's the funny story: me and the landlord stood around and shot the **** for a while after the heating dude left, and he told me that he found out that the last tenant was throwing illegal raves in here, during the height of COVID in spring/summer 2020. Like, to the point where there are articles in major news outlets about this specific building. I'm not going to completely doxx myself by linking to anything, but it's truly hilarious that that's what comes up when you google my address.

And as it sat when I left tonight:



I also finally emptied the other huge plastic bin of water that used to be "catching" (not really) a roof leak over the back room. It took many, many trips up and down a ladder with a small bucket. Definitely would have been a good time to have someone else in there.

Seeing these pictures makes me realize that 1) I can't wait for this place to have better lighting, and 2) I want to get a half-decent point-and-shoot so these photos aren't quite so bad. For some reason half my close friends are professional photographers/videographers, so a camera shouldn't be hard to come by

 

[jlevers]

Quick detour (sorry if this isn't what you're in this thread for): I took a couple days off to do some skiing, since a rare east coast pow day showed up. I drove up to Killington, VT and camped out in their parking lot for two nights. I loooove this setup. I did some work from my car when I wasn't skiing.





My dad met me up there, and we did a really nice (if very cold) day hike over Killington and Pico. High of 5 on top of Killington that day, and windchill somewhere in the -20 to -30 range.





We're preparing for a 4-day backpacking trip up in Baxter State Park in Maine in a few weeks, so this was a good shakedown hike.

Anyway -- back to our regularly scheduled program!

I got most of the rest of the floor out, and was able to save a bit more of the wood this time by prying up entire sheets of plywood at once. I cut the floor joists in between the sheets of plywood. It was a lot harder than how I did the other half of the floor, but I'm hoping to use all that plywood for something.

Once I pulled up the plywood, pried all the leveling blocks out of the concrete, and cut all the nails off flush with the floor, I the moved the huge pile of scrap again so that the heating guys have easy access to both units when they come to fix them tomorrow. Oh, and I found another chain cemented into the floor. Not sure what the deal with that is -- I cut it out with the angle grinder.



Here's how the place looked when I was done today:



I also took down the weird false wall in the back room that was covering the third heating unit. Not sure why the last guy decided to build a wall in front of it, but whatever. You can see the unit at the top here, while I'm in the process of tearing out the wall:



You see that outlet in the lower left? Here's how they bridged between the original wall and the new one...super sketchy.



And with the wall 90% removed:



There's mold absolutely everywhere in this room because of the roof leak that was right above it, so all the drywall in here has to get replaced, and probably most of the insulation.

I'm stoked for the heat and hot water to be working soon, and I can't wait to finish tearing apart the back room so that I can actually start making it nicer!

 

[Klokwerk]

What a cool space! SO much potential. So renting? And you can do what ever you want on the interior?
Sounds like a win for the landlord too. They get to have someone remodel for free! Better yet, you're paying them to remodel. Nice!

Looking forward to updates, this'll be fun!

 

[jlevers]

Yep, renting, and yep, the landlord said I can do whatever. Pretty amazing setup — the only way this could get much better would be if it wasn’t zoned residential. I accidentally woke up a neighbor last night…apparently one of the outer walls is also the wall of her bedroom next door whoops!

It’s all good, though…I’ll keep it to a dull roar

 

[jlevers]

Ooook, it has been a while! Between a last-second work trip, and a little bit of frozen-handed fun (see below), things got busy.





But I've made some progress

First of all, there's now heat and hot water! Those were the two biggest things that were out of my control, so I'm glad they're dealt with. Now I get to find out how much my electric bill is gonna be...I'm going to keep it pretty cold in there for now, since the only time I'm in there is when I'm ripping things apart (and so I'm never cold). I found some heat tape for the pipes that I'll plug in if it's going to get really cold, but other than that I'm not concerned about it being on the chilly side in there.

Max started ripping apart the back room for real. The bad news is, it's every bit as wet and gnarly as we thought. It's like wading through a swamp...but instead of trees and mud there's wet drywall and wetter insulation. It's all gotta go. The good news is, we found a couple more windows!



For some reason, two of the four walls in this room have another wall behind them, and we need to remove all of em. Here's what Max found after he put a hole in another one of the walls: more wall!



If anyone knows why someone would build it this way, I'm very curious.

I made some good progress on the floor, too. I figured out where I wanted to have the concrete to wood transition, and set up a rip fence (is that the right term?) using a couple of old 2x3" studs that came out of the back room. For some reason the plywood flooring wasn't square to the floor joists all the way across, so I measured my fence off of an exposed floor joist, which gave me a consistent reading.



I started cutting, and after just a few feet, the circular saw hit a hard stop. I couldn't push it any farther, but I couldn't find any reason why. I thought maybe I was running out of power? I went to Home Depot to get a 60v Flexvolt battery to up the power, but they were out, so I decided to come back to it the next day.

When I tried again, I realized the deck of the circular saw was running into the head of a nail that was very slightly elevated above the plywood, and painted the same color. I lifted up the saw a quarter inch, and voila! Doh. That was a dumb one. I like to write my silly mistakes down so I can go back later and laugh at them when they're no longer annoying

The floor, with the final cut made!



Whew, that took a surprisingly long time. If there's one thing I've learned from working on cars and bikes (and my professional life, where I do freelance software work), it's that everything always takes 5 times as long as I think. I don't know why I'm still surprised by it

A couple friends came over to help me with the next project: replacing the rotted out flooring in the upstairs office. The roof parapet was completely trashed when the last person moved out, so water had been running down the side of the building and coming right in above the windows.

I started by cutting a hole in the floor to create a starting point to pull from...unfortunately, I didn't realize the floor was made of two layers of overlapping plywood, so there's now an unnecessary hole that goes through both layers (and should have just gone through one). Live and learn. I figure if I make enough of these mistakes now, someday I'll start making a few less, lol.

Rohan and I (with Sarah acting as team photographer) started pulling the rotted flooring up. It was in pretty rough shape.



I don't know what I'm pointing at here, but what I SHOULD be pointing at is my coffee that I just knocked over right into the circular saw! (bottom left)



We quickly discovered a new hurdle: the rotten plywood goes between the metal frame below and the window framing above. That means to remove the rotten wood fully, we need to pull the windows, I think. If anyone has a smart idea of how to go about this, I'd love to hear it. I'm hoping I'm wrong and that pulling the windows won't be necessary, because I would really like to avoid not having windows for any period of time.

You can see the problem more clearly here. Window framing on top, plywood in the middle, metal on the bottom.



If the window really does need to get pulled, I think that's going to be a landlord thing, because I'm a little nervous I'll screw it up.

And that's about it! The next step is to get rid of the part of the original plywood floor on the bottom story that's built underneath the loft structure...should be fun.

I'll leave you with an action shot of Rohan that Sarah got through the new (and unnecessary) hole in the floor

 

[nadogail]

Best of luck with your project. I have visited Brooklyn and learned that I am much better off and happier with my present location.
The few people I met in Williamsburg and Coney Island were very nice.

 

[jlevers]

Best of luck with your project. I have visited Brooklyn and learned that I am much better off and happier with my present location.
The few people I met in Williamsburg and Coney Island were very nice.

Thanks! Yeah hahaha Brooklyn is definitely not everyone's cup of tea. I tend to like the extremes -- I never had any desire to live in a city (and I've been to a lot of cities) until I spent more time in NYC. It's about as intense of a city as you can get in the US. But when I'm not here, I want to be in the middle of nowhere

 

[Lou's Garage]

Regarding your chains in the floor. If that building was ever used as a body shop, old frame repair equipment was portable and anchored to a chain in the floor. You would need at least two: one to hold the car, another to anchor the frame puller. If they were a little over a car length apart (a 60's car length), that might be what they were for. Usually they were mounted in "pots" in the floor but this might have been a very old installation (30's / 40's) or a "quick and dirty" installation in a rented building. See where they were located and that might be your answer.

Lou Manglass

 

[jlevers]

Interesting, thanks for the info! I do think this was used as some sort of car repair shop at some point, and the chains were roughly a (long) car length apart, so that would make sense.

 

[jollygreengiant]

Very cool project! It's neat to hear the challenges of working in the big city, if nothing else to make me appreciate how relatively easy it is here to do stuff.

Regarding the second wall behind the first, I have a couple thoughts. It could be that the original wall had some mold problems like the other walls in your building and instead of replacing it they just built a new one. The second thought I had, and the more dangerous, is that the old inner wall wasn't touched because it contains something nasty, like asbestos. If I were you I'd take some samples of it and have them tested before I disturbed that wall. I'm not sure about costs in your area, but here I had some drywall tested when I was doing work in my old house and it was only a couple hundred dollars or so.

 

[jlevers]

Thank you! Yeah, I'm pretty new to the city myself, and it continually amazes me that anything ever works here at all, logistically. The complexity of putting a new building up must be insane, considering how hard it is to just move stuff around.


Interesting thoughts about the second wall. You may very well be right about the mold. I don't think there's anything dangerous behind the original wall, just because the landlord told me that the back room was built after he bought the property (in ~2005), so I'm not too worried about that. I appreciate the ideas

Also, I checked out the beginning of your workshop build thread -- that looks like quite a project!!

 

[jlevers]

It’s been a minute! Work has been busy, and progress on the warehouse has been slow and frustrating. I hit a few different roadblocks that stopped me in my tracks for a bit, but today I finally made some visible progress, so things are looking up! I gotta remember that this is how it goes with every project for me: initial excitement, then a period where it feels impossible, and then slow but steady progress. Deep breaths

When we left off last time, I had just torn up the floor and discovered that the rotten plywood flooring was trapped between the window framing and the underlying metal girder. The only real way to fully remove the plywood would be to remove the windows. I texted my landlord (twice, over 2 weeks) to ask if he wanted to hire contractors to do this the right way, but he never responded, so I decided to do what I could on my own. That meant getting rid of enough of the old plywood to be able to fit a new piece, even if I couldn’t get rid of all of the old stuff.

I started by putting a ladder up from the first floor so I could access the bottom of the old plywood. I used a router upside down to cut the plywood right along the edge of the girder -- the window framing is proud of the beam, which is why I had to do this from the bottom. I’d never used a router before, so I definitely made some mistakes, and also wildly underestimated how much sawdust there would be! At one point I had to shut off the router and climb down the ladder with my eyes closed, because there was so much sawdust in them. Whoops.

After cutting the plywood back as far as possible with the router, I laid on the floor and drilled lots of holes into the plywood horizontally.



Then, I chipped away enough of the remaining wood with a chisel so that 1” of the metal beam was exposed, to give the new floor somewhere to rest. That took a verrrry long time.

At some point during all of this, I was working during a rainstorm and discovered why all the wood had rotted in the first place: the seams between the windows were leaking!



I texted my landlord again (since exterior issues are theoretically his to fix), and he basically told me to caulk it. Guess I might as well give it a try…there are some significant gaps to fill, and some in strange places, so I bought these bendy caulking tips that I’m hoping will make it possible to reach some otherwise unreachable spots. I’ve literally never caulked anything in my life, so this oughta be interesting.

I wanted to use the (still intact) plywood that I tore up from the downstairs floor to replace the upstairs floor, which meant I needed to figure out how to cut an 8’ straight line with my circular saw. I’m about as novice a woodworker as one can possibly be, so every problem I’m encountering is a new one to me…which is both challenging and kinda fun. I ended up using one fresh sheet of plywood as a straightedge to cut a strip from another new sheet of plywood...



...which left me with a 2” x 8’ straight (ish) edge. It’s out by ~1/16” over its length, which isn’t perfect but good enough for my purposes -- I’m enjoying trying to be accurate. While it’ll be decades before I’m a tenth the craftsmen he is, Gregor Halenda (aka sakurama on here) has inspired me to try to be as accurate as I can be. It’s a fun target to shoot for.

With my new 8’ straightedge, I cut the first strip for the floor! It worked well, although I should have made the straightedge wider -- it bends in the middle if I push against it too hard with the circular saw.



I was having a really hard time pressing the new piece of flooring into the slot where the old wood was. After a couple hours of trying to do it all delicately, I grabbed the sledgehammer and pounded the board in place in about 30 seconds. When in doubt, use more force!! Here's the first piece in place:



It was a huge relief to have made some visible progress. I managed to get the second big piece of flooring cut and installed in about half an hour, so now I have a semblance of a floor again!



I still need to screw the new pieces down to the girders, fix the extra hole in the floor, and lay down a new second layer of plywood on top, but I’m super happy to be moving forward.

 

[jlevers]

I was deliberating endlessly over how to cut the downstairs floor that the loft uprights are resting on, and finally realized I wasn’t going to come up with a perfect solution that I could do in any reasonable amount of time, so I just sorta went for it. I fully embodied the “if you don’t have time to do it right, you must have time to do it over” strategy and just cut the floor one joist at a time, chocking under the remnant of either end of each joist to keep the loft supported.



It actually went pretty quickly, and a few hours later, the joists were gone!



Then I pulled all the old joist leveling pucks out of the concrete, used the angle grinder to cut the remaining anchor nails flush with the concrete, and gave it a quick sweep...



Yes! I can finally drive into the main part of the space. Stoked to actually start working on my car now (and my bike, once I get it down here in a month or so).

I also made some more progress on the upstairs floor. I cut out and replaced a patch that had been soaked with some sort of oily fluid, and fit a second layer of new flooring where I’d removed the old rotten boards near the windows.

I tried to secure the bottom layer of flooring plywood to the metal beams underneath with some big wood-to-metal screws I bought, but I couldn't get them to go into the metal at all.



Maybe they're not rated for metal this hard/thick, or maybe my drill isn't powerful enough? But either way, those bottom boards are fit tightly enough that I'm not worried about them moving with the top layer installed and screwed down.

This room is now usable! (If not exactly pretty.) I want to put in some proper flooring at some point, but in the spirit of getting the space functional as soon as possible, I'm just going to put down some rugs for now. This will be office space, so the rugs will hold up fine.



I also got the most important piece of equipment for any shop: a (mini) fridge! Now there’s shop fuel on hand (sometimes called beer). Sick.



Next steps: tear out everything in the moldy/rotten back room, get a dumpster to get rid of all the scrap from the demolition, and get wifi wired in.

 

[booch]

Great project! My youngest brother still has an art studio in Bushwick, and he had undertaken some similar projects when he moved into it 10 years ago, although not as extensive as yours. I think he added a loft, tore out an office, and added a shower... also definitely without any permits
I was living at Bedford and Broadway at the time, and a buddy and I wound up renting a garage in Maspeth as nothing closer was available at our price. It was cheap-ish and could fit two race cars plus our tools, so it worked out, although the neighborhood homeless guys would oftentimes try to steal our spare rotors and stuff for scrap. I found it pretty amazing what people get done in tiny-*** garages in NYC, though. You'd see a decrepit door closed up tight for months, then one day it's open and someone has an amazing hot rod, or drag car.

 

[m6z]

Cool space.

 

[jlevers]

Great project! My youngest brother still has an art studio in Bushwick, and he had undertaken some similar projects when he moved into it 10 years ago, although not as extensive as yours. I think he added a loft, tore out an office, and added a shower... also definitely without any permits
I was living at Bedford and Broadway at the time, and a buddy and I wound up renting a garage in Maspeth as nothing closer was available at our price. It was cheap-ish and could fit two race cars plus our tools, so it worked out, although the neighborhood homeless guys would oftentimes try to steal our spare rotors and stuff for scrap. I found it pretty amazing what people get done in tiny-*** garages in NYC, though. You'd see a decrepit door closed up tight for months, then one day it's open and someone has an amazing hot rod, or drag car.

Thank you! Hah, small world. I think I might take a leaf out of your brother's book and add a shower at some point...that sounds like a major improvement.

I looked all over (including Ridgewood and Maspeth) when I was looking for this place, but just got super lucky and found somewhere that was right in central Bushwick. And yes -- it's so cool seeing some crazy project emerge from a random warehouse! I walked past a garage door that was open about two feet the other day and saw a bunch of old Ducatis hiding inside...I gotta go knock on that door sometime

Cool space.

Thanks!

 

[jlevers]

I wanted to start to actually use part of the space, so I focused on getting the upstairs space cleaned up. I spent a LOT of time sweeping and vacuuming (holy hell, sawdust is really good at getting on every available surface), and got the loft from this…



To this!



Aaand then I realized that half the loft ceiling had some really old, gnarly drywall above it that I wanted to get rid of, so I rolled the rug back up and started destroying the ceiling.



It actually didn’t take that long (that’s a first!), so I bagged up the trash and re-swept and re-vacuumed the space. Then I cleared all the construction debris out of the front room, and moved my work setup in there! It’s fun to actually be making use of the space now.



A friend helped me get the bathroom cleaned up (thanks Stephen!). Little things like this make using the space wayyy nicer -- the feeling of cleanliness goes a long way.

I’ve continued demolishing the back room. It’s super gnarly in there. I want to get a dumpster this week so I can get all the moldy, wet drywall and insulation out of the building, because the whole place smells like mold when you walk in the door right now. Then I need to figure out if the framing of the room is salvageable, or if I need to destroy the whole thing and start over. A friend of mine who used to be a general contractor is coming down this weekend, so he’ll help me figure that out. As you can see, some of the wood is in pretty rough shape.





In the corner where the roof leak was, there are literal mushrooms growing from the walls. Like, a lot of em. Yikes. That was unexpected.



I did the small but satisfying task of cleaning up a super hacky electrical connection that was just hanging from the ceiling. I love knocking off these little things that just make looking at the space more enjoyable.





I gotta say, I don't understand electrical very well, and the semi-hidden danger freaks me out a little bit. This was a simple job (shut the breaker off, rewire, and reassemble) but I really need to learn some more before I take on anything complicated.

Months ago, I saw Wago connectors mentioned on GJ somewhere and bought them because they looked super slick…well, I finally had a chance to use them, and they’re awesome. Sayonara, wire nuts!



Aaand last but not least, the wifi guy came and hooked everything up. A perk of city internet I hadn’t experienced before is that I got the cheapest, slowest plan, and it's 300Mbps down and 50 up. Bangin.

 

[momobuttons]

Awesome space, looking forward to the updates. Born in Flushing, so I know the struggle regarding wanting some space, any sort of space here in the boroughs lol.

 

[Quarter Life Crisis]

I'll be watching this one! Awesome!

 

[jlevers]

Finally made some really visible progress this weekend. Feels awesome.

My friend Dan came down from MA to help me clean the place out for a couple days. I rented a 20yd dumpster, thinking it was going to be wayyy too big but knowing that it was cheaper to overestimate than underestimate. Spoiler alert: it wasn’t too big.

Here’s where things stood on Friday afternoon.



We spent the next many hours hauling scrap wood, insulation, and drywall out of the building and into the dumpster. First, we got rid of everything in the main room, which made things feel much more spacious. I’ve basically never seen the space without trash everywhere, since I started tearing it apart the day I got it.

Then we started working on the back room, which was piled a few feet high with soggy drywall and insulation. You know it’s bad when the best tool for moving drywall and insulation is a snow shovel…we took turns filling trash cans with garbage and bringing them out to the dumpster. We must have made a couple hundred trips back and forth -- I was amazed by how much **** was in there. Dan has quite a bit of experience as a general contractor, and was smart enough to bring painting suits to wear (or as we called them, body condoms) so we wouldn’t get all itchy from the fiberglass.



The one problem with the suits was that we got really, really, really sweaty inside them, so a few ventilation/beer breaks were in order.



By the end of day 1, the dumpster was already almost full, and we were both completely wrecked. I'm really into long outdoor sufferfests, and I was about as physically beat as I’ve ever been…I was more tired after this than after the longest single-day hike I’ve ever taken (35mi, 18k feet of elevation gain). We were going to go to a bar, and instead we ordered a pizza, destroyed it, washed it down with some Ben and Jerry’s, and passed out.

The floor in the back room was now finally exposed.



After taking one look at it, we decided it had to be completely removed. The exposed parts looked ok, but we didn’t know how much water had gotten underneath the floor. The answer: a LOT. The floor joists were the most rotten thing in the whole room. We tore them all out, and then cut the baseboards out and shimmed the studs to support the ceiling until we install new baseboards.






Here's a taste of the kind of shape the baseboards were in...



Dan’s going to do most of the rebuild of the room with me as his sidekick -- that way he gets some work, I get to learn from him, and the whole project will go much faster and better than if I did it all myself. My inclination is to try to do everything myself, but there are two (well, probably more) problems with that:

1. It’ll take forever since I don’t know how to do any of this
2. The whole point of this place is to get lots of people with different skills to come together to make cool ****!

Dan left on Sunday morning, and my parents arrived a few hours later. We spent most of the day unscrewing and grinding off the old drywall screws from the studs, since most of the studs will be reused. It’s one of those jobs that takes forever, and never feels like you’re making any progress, but just needs to get done. Between the three of us, we cleaned up the majority of the screws, although there’s still some left. My mom also sprayed down the moldy areas with a borax solution, and then I left for a couple days with two big fans running full blast -- I just got back, and the room is basically 100% dry and hardly smells like mold anymore! Awesome.



Oh, and the front room was still leaking really badly from above the windows…the landlord had someone come and re-point all the masonry on the front of the building, so hopefully that does the trick. I also found another leak at floor-level right where the wooden floor stops, so we’ll have to fix that. Can’t wait for this place to actually be watertight....

 

[Ford52PU]

good progress! Enjoying watching your progress.

 

[broinkrist]

Pretty epic progress for sure. Progress looks great so far and looks like you're learning a lot in the process.

 

[xtremek]

This was a great way to spend the last 2 hours sitting in a meeting, waiting for my turn to come up. Very cool project, and very wild issues. Count me in for the ride along, it looks to be a interesting journey.

 

[captain14]

Cool project. Will you have a conditioned space at some point if you are going to be using it as office space? When the weather changes, I’m sure it will be hot inside with very limited air flow.

And do any of the windows open?

 

[jlevers]

good progress! Enjoying watching your progress.

Pretty epic progress for sure. Progress looks great so far and looks like you're learning a lot in the process.

This was a great way to spend the last 2 hours sitting in a meeting, waiting for my turn to come up. Very cool project, and very wild issues. Count me in for the ride along, it looks to be a interesting journey.

Thanks guys glad you're enjoying the ride!

Cool project. Will you have a conditioned space at some point if you are going to be using it as office space? When the weather changes, I’m sure it will be hot inside with very limited air flow.

And do any of the windows open?

Yeah, this is an issue that a friend brought up a couple days ago that I hadn't thought about. You're totally right -- it's going to get really, really hot in here. There are 3 minisplits that do both heating and AC, so I'm hoping they'll be able to keep up. I'm also going to get a window-mounted unit for the upstairs area where my office is. The front windows open, and there are some tiny windows in the back that open, but nothing large enough to create significant airflow. If the heat becomes a problem, I think I'm going to try to get my landlord to install an exhaust fan in the roof to get the air moving.

 

[captain14]

Do any of the skylights open? I know that’s a long shot.

If you get a rooftop exhaust fan, calculate the space of the shop matching the correct size fan and when you turn it on and crack the bottom floor door(s) you’ll be amazed how cool you can keep it as long as the air is moving. Which way does the building face?

 

[jlevers]

Unfortunately not -- that would be awesome. There's a roof access hatch I can open, but that's about it. The building faces west, so right now it's real cold until about 3pm and then it gets warm all of a sudden. That said, the concrete slab seems to do a pretty good job keeping the downstairs cool...it's never gotten warm downstairs unless I have the garage door open.