Hey guys, so I want to know what you think! My partner and I scored a gorgeous (and a little disheveled) warehouse apartment. We're both designers (not interior designers though) and we actually beat out an actual interior designer with our (rent) offer. Needless to say, this space seems to inspire the creative. My partner and I consider ourselves highly proficient in personal home interior design, though it is not our direct area of profession (kind of considering it though to be honest) and were very excited to start imagining our space.
The building is a bit of a mess. One of the windows in the hall in front of the building has been completely broken for months. A lot of our appliances don't work. The guy who was here before us lived here for four years, ran his business out of it, and most certainly screwed stuff into the walls. When we moved in it was left with horrible shelves made from those L brackets and literally floorboards that had been scavenged from the trash (there are some great trash finds in this area to be honest, most of our now-furniture was once trash). In fact, I think that the guy who was here even before the guy who was before us screwed things into the walls because there are random jagged nails and hooks that have literally just been painted over. There are random screw-holes in the ceiling, maybe from re-positioning pipes in the past, or again, just past tenants.
The bathroom door has a halo of tiny holes on it, remnants from a dart board.
The walls are made of cement, for clarification.
So when we were looking at the apartment, we asked the guy if we would be allowed to build things, he said that basically, you can do it, if the landlord likes it, they keep it, if they don't, you have to get rid of it. The building its self is home to a colorful array of tenants, all young, hip, and from some kind of art or design background. I've had a peak into some other apartments and they're all very different. It seems like tenants just go nuts with the space, there's a loft in one of them, definitely home-made, people have built partition walls, etc. One guy even fully renovated (beautifully)... but I think it might be a case of him owning that unit. A lot of tenants stay in this building for multiple years.
When we moved in, they had barely cleaned the walls, which have black soot resting on the tops of the bricks due to the old tenant's smoking habit.
Basically, I really don't think that the landlord cares.
There are new renovations going on in our building. They're planning to renovate a lot of the units over this year, one or two people are actually being kicked out completely, but most people will get to stay, and just be relocated for a short time. Since our unit is probably the smallest, a studio, and the weirdest (it has a random structural pillar in the middle of the kitchen, you can't even open one of the drawers... but there's literally nowhere else the kitchen could go), we doubt they'll make any major changes to ours, and will probably do it much later in this process.
The interior designer who we beat out for the flat was proposing renovations herself, which they seemed to like the idea of.
Also don't get me wrong, aside from all of the problems with the apartment, it is absolutely beautiful, airy, open, extermely high ceilings and one wall is basically entirely window. We love it.... and we've been drilling into the walls.
We're hoping to make some slightly bigger changes - creating a room partition shelf wall using the Ikea Elvarli system, which involves posts that you drill into the ceiling (which is also cement). There are no wires or pipes or studs to hit as all of those are external. We'd also like to install a large, custom mirror on one of the walls, which will also involve drilling.
Honestly, what's the worst that could happen? They don't give us our security deposit back? We can take everything down and fill the holes when we move on. Or if they wouldn't repaint for us because they're expecting those future renovations, surely they already planned on fixing the walls themselves. I've drilled / put holes in every apartment I've ever lived in... and only ever got charged by one... and those were all drywall.
Just wondering what you think, if you've done anything similar, and how that turned out!
Submitted October 09, 2019 at 05:42PM by innowayisthisme https://ift.tt/35m62BS
No comments:
Post a Comment