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Two-flat owner journal 2: Demolishing the interior

January 26, 2021 / / 1 Comment

In order to get the two-flat ready for a gut rehab, one has to gut it.

The rehab stage is still months away, as my architect and I continue to develop plans. He does most of the work, but it’s quite collaborative because there are layout, design, and finishing choices that we need to make.

Gutting the house is also necessary for the plans because my architect needs to know what’s behind the walls.

I hired Amplify Property Solutions for the job. APS has a social mission of training and employing young Black men. You can ask me personally how much it cost, but it was between $5,000 and $10,000 (that range includes the cost of six Dumpsters).

I am very happy with the crew’s work and Ron and Ted’s dedication to communication, clarity, and customer service. The work took a week longer than they predicted because of some aspects that I think were next to impossible to know:

  • There were 1-2 “extra” layers of flooring in some places. From top to bottom in the upstairs living room there were carpet, wood, linoleum, wood, and subfloor layers.
  • Because the center beam in the basement has been failing (sagging) for years, the centers of each floor were sinking making the floors unlevel. Platforms were built in each kitchen to raise and level the floor.
  • The house is one of two row houses, so one exterior wall is shared. On this wall, behind the drywall was a 1″ layer of plaster that took awhile to chip away.

The subfloor boards are very wide and old growth and original (so they’re at least 130 years old). I’ve been told that some people find these valuable; if you’re interested in purchasing them, please get in touch!

See more photos below and in the house photo album.

Permitting

With this level of demolition, a permit is required! I pulled an easy permit for this project (which I think cost $375). The Dumpster company obtained their own permits to occupy the street right of way.

Also, as a way for the Chicago Department of Buildings to discourage gut rehabs being permitted with a series of easy permits, when a Standard Plan Review is most likely required, the DOB required that I apply for a renovation/alteration permit and show them in-progress drawings.

Consultants and contractors used so far

First floor kitchen
The demolition exposed the shape of the chimney. The right side was filled in and the wall was flat so we didn’t know how wide the chimney was.
The kitchen platform
The kitchen platform had a level top, but the floor beneath was uneven. The framing underneath the platform had angles cut to ensure the platform was level.

2020 year in review

January 13, 2021 / / 0 Comments
Rear view of the two prefab single-unit detached houses and their backyard ADUs
I was biking around in Denver and I came across these identical modular houses with backyard houses under construction. The City of Denver posts building permit plans online, which is fantastic because it makes design more transparent. Architects from around the world can be inspired by this project.
  • Due to the (ongoing) COVID-19 pandemic, I started working from home on March 12, 2020. I visited the office once in the fall for an hour to perform a minor task.
  • My small business, Chicago Cityscape, hired Casey Smagala to run business development for the real estate information website.
  • I bought a two-flat in East Garfield Park in the summer after touring dozens of houses. I had first toured this house, and met the owner, Carl, who lived there, in February. I toured it a second time that month, with my friend, Kevin. After several more months of touring houses and realizing that I couldn’t afford an already-renovated house, I made an offer to Carl in May. The house closed in July.
  • Friends in Denver asked me and my friend, R, to come visit and camp, hike, and bike in and around Aspen in August. Denver also has allowed accessory dwelling units (ADUs) for years, so I talked to a local housing organizer and biked around the city looking at backyard houses.
  • I didn’t move into my two-flat because it turned out to need more renovation than I had believed. I also started a journal, which has one post so far.
  • I left my job as of December 31, 2020, so that I could focus on developing and growing Chicago Cityscape.
  • By the end of the year, I published eight blog posts. I didn’t have a goal; two of them were based on books I was reading: (1) Before the Lake Street elevated (now the Green Line) was built, a monorail was proposed (via a book about the history of the CTA’s predecessors)! (2) I read Beryl Satter’s book about her father, a landlord in Chicago, “Family Properties”, and I biked by one of the extant buildings.
  • My “hot air balloon” was used for some cool projects that needed aerial photography (both co-produced by Paola Aguirre and her consulting firm, Borderless Studio). I filmed some the massive mapmaking happening at the former Overton school in Bronzeville – which can only be seen from the sky – for an AIA film challenge; I also snagged some clips of the Pink Line ‘L’ going in and out of the California Ave station to visualize an area being studied for a corridor revitalization.

The high rises of the Bronzeville lakefront

January 10, 2021 / / 0 Comments
3600 S King Dr

I shot this aerial photo yesterday from the 3600 block of South Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive.

The “towers in the park” are three groups of apartment buildings (none are public housing).

From north (background) to south (foreground):

  • Prairie Shores (5 identical buildings that are very hard to see)
  • Lake Meadows (4 identical buildings behind the associated one-story shopping center plus multiple buildings to the east, closer to the lakefront)
  • T.K. Lawless Gardens (3 identical buildings, that appear the tallest because they’re the closest, 746 units, and 54 townhouses not seen)

John Warren Moutoussamy (an architecture graduate of Illinois Institute of Technology who studied under Ludwig Mies van der Rohe) designed Lawless Gardens, according to this IIT Magazine article.

Two-flat owner journal 1: Peoples Gas charges a lot of money for no gas

October 5, 2020 / / 3 Comments

One of the first things I did after I bought a two-flat in July was contact Peoples Gas and Comed to ensure utilities were in my name, and that the utility connections would not be interrupted.

A few days later I decided that I wasn’t going to move in, because I wanted to make a good amount of changes and the best time to do that would be when nobody is living there. “Good amount of changes” turned into “gut rehab”. One of my friends is an architect and we (mostly him) are drawing permit plans right now.

It wasn’t until a week ago (8 weeks since I bought the house) that I realized there’s no reason to be paying for Peoples Gas to maintain a connection when I’m not using natural gas.

I’m writing this journal entry to exclaim how expensive it is to just “leave the gas line connected”.

It costs $50 per month per unit to have the privilege of possibly purchasing the delivery of natural gas through a pipe. Both units used 0 therms in the longest-period bill I received. (I received three bills, only one of which was for 30 days.)

The bill for the only 30-day period Peoples Gas served one of the units in my two-flat. Both units are unoccupied until after the gut rehab is completed. See the “customer charge”, which is the charge just to have an account open and for the potential to use gas.

I’ve got to pay $50 per unit for no gas.

I visited a three-flat under construction in Pilsen on Friday, and talked to the developer, Brent. He described how he’s following high-efficiency building wall standards to create a “tight envelope” (one in which very little air can leak) so that the tenants can “receive the comfort they’re paying for”. When it comes to setting the thermostat, the air delivered by HVAC machines should match that exactly, no more, no less. No oversized furnaces pushing too much heated air because so much of the air leaks through the walls and windows.

And, as a way to control costs, Brent will not connect a natural gas pipe to the building, mostly because of the expensive and default customer charge that persists even when no gas is used. A VRF (variable refrigerant flow) and heat pump machines will be entirely powered by electricity to serve the tenant’s heating and cooling needs.

Brent said that the tight building envelope coupled with the high-efficiency HVAC means that it’s more cost effective to use electricity to heat a house than natural gas.

After our meeting, I looked again at my final bill from Peoples Gas (I closed the account two days prior) and understood what Brent was saying about controlling costs. With an electric water heater and an electric range, there’s no need to have any gas connection.

I will probably have to keep the gas at my two-flat, to power the furnaces, because I don’t have the expertise or financial resources to renovate an existing building to have a tight enough envelope to make electrically-generated heat more cost effective than gas-generated heat.

Update January 13, 2021: I turned off the gas and closed the accounts so I don’t have to waste any money while I’m not living there (a gut rehab still needs to happen).

To keep water pipes from freezing and bursting I cleared the vast majority of water lines and added an electric pipe heating cable to keep the remaining sections warm.

The two water service pipes (I don’t know why there are two) have an electric pipe heating cable and are wrapped in foam insulation. The cable has a thermostat that touches the pipe and starts heating when the pipe drops to 38°F. The pipe is heated until the thermostat detects ~46°F.

What is this place? Des Plaines “park” edition

October 4, 2020 / / 0 Comments
Screenshot shows the “park” in Des Plaines, Illinois.

I was methodically reviewing features on OpenStreetMap that could benefit from additional attributes, namely missing names and cities. The information on OpenStreetMap feeds into Chicago Cityscape so that the real estate information service I created can show people looking up addresses the locations of nearby amenities, including parks.

This particularly large park in Des Plaines had no name and no city, so I started investigating. From the overhead imagery view, it looked to me like a landfill.

Since there was a forest preserve to the east, I looked in the Forest Preserve District of Cook County’s nice interactive map for any properties near Beck Lake. Nothing found.

Overhead imagery of the so-called “park”. Source: Mapbox

I looked on Google Maps Street View for some insight and there was no name. (Note that data from Google Maps cannot be used to amend OpenStreetMap because of Google Maps having a data license that isn’t compatible with OSM’s openness requirements).

Next I looked at the Cook County parcel map that Chicago Cityscape has to identify its “Property Index Number” (PIN). All of it fits within 04-31-300-003-0000 – the database pointed to “Catholic Cemeteries” as the property owner.

I looked up that PIN on the Cook County Recorder of Deeds to try and find more information. Lo and behold, the most recent document that was recorded against the PIN was for a “Memorandum of Option Agreement” that identified the Catholic Bishop of Chicago as the landlord and Patriot Acres, LLC, as the tenant.

Patriot Acres has a website that describes a new commercial composting facility being built at this location.

I re-tagged the feature on OSM with “amenity=waste_disposal” and “waste=organic” to properly describe it as a composting facility, and not a park. Case closed.