London designer Mark Lewis knows how to conjure a world out of empty space: He began his career working on theater sets. So he was the perfect person for the job when a client wanted to transform a charming old garage into a guest room.

Above: Located in Hampstead, in North London, the garage stands alongside a 1905 house that the owners recently inherited and remodeled—they hired Lewis as a consultant midway through that process and gave him free rein over the garage, which has its original terracotta-tiled roof and glazed door with decorative strap hinges.

Above: Lewis stripped the interior to reveal the vaulted ceiling (now insulated and plaster-finished), left the old brick exposed, and laid a new floor of reclaimed pine. He placed the bed against the sealed-up garage doors. Shallow wall shelves serve as bedside tables (for something similar, see the Corbin Bernsen Handyman Special.)

Remodelista and Gardenista regulars know we have a weakness for garage makeovers: See, for instance, our own Michelle’s Grottage, Karen Montgomery Spath’s Airy Studio Apartment, and Model Carolyn Murphy’s Painting Retreat. These transformations are a recurring dream come true—the discovered room you never knew you had. Doll-house-like in their appeal, they’re filled with small-space solutions to be remembered and copied. In the case of Lewis’s project, the trickiest part was figuring out how to incorporate a bathroom—while maintaining peace with the neighbors (and, of course, securing a permit from the planning commission). Join us for a look at Lewis’s industrial-rustic results, dustbin WC included.

Lewis describes the style as “suburban Edwardian,” and says, “The space was being used for garden storage and junk. It had even been a chemistry lab at one point. It was unloved on the inside but externally in good condition.”
The space is just under 194 square feet and took six weeks to make over—the door on the left leads to the new loo. Note the wall lighting: It’s electrical conduit with sockets and bulbs from Urban Cottage Industries.

This half of the room has a flea market desk, a dresser (built to order to get the desired dimensions), and a clothes rack made from industrial hand railing: “It’s thicker than conduit and strong enough to hold heavy things; you can even hang from it”

View full article here at Remodelista

These smart upgrades pay off big in resale value and enjoyment of your home.

“For an immediate face-lift, update your light fixtures,” says Kim Howard, Realtor and co-founder of Howard Homes Chicago. You can buy a stylish ceiling fan for $100 dollars or less and updated semi-flush ceiling mount lights for about $60. Not only do buyers love the cohesive flow new lighting gives the home, but Howard also says new lighting easily increases the value of the home by 1 to 2 percent, which translates to $10,000 on a $500,000 home.

“Replacing your cabinets is a huge cost that is not completely necessary if the cabinets are less than ten years old, functional, and made from a high-quality wood like cherry, maple, ash, hickory, or oak,” says John Milligan, Product Development Manager at N-Hance Wood Refinishing. Refinishing generally costs between $3,000 to $8,000 and can potentially bump up the value of your home between 3 and 7 percent. Here are 13 more tricks to make your kitchen look expensive.

A fresh coat of paint instantly updates and transforms the entire interior of your home, and when you consider that the average price tag of a gallon of one-coat coverage paint is around $38, that’s about the biggest bang for your buck you can get. “Grays are back in vogue, and create a neutral palette that lets your decor really pop,” says Steve Frellick, licensed contractor and founder/broker of Yonder Luxury Vacation Rentals. Repaint your bathroom blue, and your house could fetch as much as $5,440 more than expected, according to a recent Zillow report.

Windows that stick or are warped or drafty aren’t doing your comfort level or your budget any favors. According to the 2018 Cost vs. Value report in Remodeling, vinyl replacements windows average just under $16,000 for ten 3-by-5-foot double-hung windows and have a resale value near $12,000. Plus, you’ll reap even more savings from your energy bill. Replacing the same number of wood windows is a bit pricier at around $19,000 with a resale value of approximately $13,500. Look out for these 12 hidden home expenses that are draining your bank account.

View the full article here at Reader’s Digest

A tweak to Portland’s zoning code will make it more difficult to redevelop mobile home parks, an effort to preserve the low-cost housing they provide.

The Portland City Council unanimously approved the change on Wednesday. It creates a new zone for 56 of the city’s mobile home parks, which house about 3,000 households.

Six of the city’s 62 mobile home parks have closed in the past two years, leaving residents scrambling to find a new place to live. Those who own their mobile homes are often unable to move them elsewhere, but they might still be responsible for a mortgage, turning a financial asset into a liability.

While it would be more difficult for owners of mobile home parks to sell or redevelop the land, the proposal would allow them to sell unused density to developers building elsewhere.

Residents of mobile home parks turned out Wednesday to show support for the proposal, saying it would help preserve communities and maintain families’ access to schools and services.

Gloria Contreras, speaking through a translator, told the city council she has lived at Cedar Shade Mobile Home Park in Northeast Portland for more than 12 years.

“For my family, this is home,” said Contreras, who lives with her four children. “We take care of each other, our homes and we take care of strangers. There are elderly people who know that if there’s any kind of time of need or emergency, we will be there to support them and help them.”

Mike Connors, a land-use attorney representing North Portland mobile home operator Hayden Island Enterprises, said the policy could open the city to claims under Measure 49, which would require the city to compensate property owners for the loss of property value. He also said it could restrict park owners’ access to financing.

“As a result of that, they’re either not going to upgrade or maintain the parks at the level they do currently, or it’s going to result in an increase in rent,” Connors said.

View the full article here at Oregon Live

For New Yorkers — a city of renters with apartments that are usually just barely big enough to accommodate their lives — a vacation home is not always just a house.

Sometimes, it’s more like a long-distance lover, the kind you only see when the weather is nice and no one has to go to work in the morning. Or maybe it’s a favored child, lavished with attention and worry.

If you don’t own the place where you live during the week, the vacation retreat becomes the final destination. A proper dining room, even one that’s two hours away, means you have space to host Thanksgiving dinner, plus you have enough rooms for your in-laws to spend the weekend. Soon enough, that scrappy cabin in the Catskills starts to house not just the trinkets collected during three-day weekends, but the memories that make a life.

“Because we live in small places, this is where we sleep, this is where we work, but it isn’t where we live,” said Kathy Braddock, a managing director of the New York City office of William Raveis. “We Live, with capital letters, in our country home. It’s where the kids spread out. It’s where they can run. It’s where we can actually live like, quote unquote, normal people.”

Which is how you might find yourself driving from your co-op loft in SoHo to your three-bedroom farmhouse in Cold Spring, N.Y., to retrieve a pair of misplaced tap shoes the night before your son’s dance recital. When your life is spread between two worlds, “nothing is where you put it, and in this case it’s 70 miles away,” said Jennifer Keller, who drove upstate to fetch those taps for 11-year-old Max Schoenstein last spring.

It’s not always love at first sight, though. Ms. Keller, a stay-at-home mother, wasn’t even looking for a vacation house romance when her partner, Richard Schoenstein, a lawyer, suggested the idea a decade ago. She had grown up in the city; to her, Central Park was all the open space anyone could need.

But Mr. Schoenstein, who grew up in the suburbs of Cleveland, couldn’t imagine raising children on concrete and splash pads alone. “We had a baby and something in him said, ‘If you have a baby and you don’t own grass, then you’re not doing a good job,’” Ms. Keller said. (The couple has since had a daughter, Audrey Keller, 5.)

So they bought the house and Ms. Keller, despite herself, fell in love as the house grabbed hold of not just misplaced shoes, but family memories. Now she worries about what will happen when they eventually leave the farmhouse — because love affairs do end. (Let’s face it: The long-term commitment is with the apartment in the city, which comes with a super who handles all the repairs.)

“It’s just a little bit heartbreaking,” Ms. Keller said. “Emotionally, the story is: I didn’t want you, now you’re here, and when I sell you I’m going to be sad.”

Sometimes a country house is the fun extrovert in your life, the one everyone wants to be around. Kathy Kemp lives with her husband, Tom Hughes, and their 12-year-old son, Jack Hughes, in a tiny rent-stabilized apartment in the East Village. The old farmhouse, with a barn overlooking the Delaware River in Halcottsville, N.Y., that they bought in 2005, is where the family can exhale.

“Our son is over six feet tall, our dog is over 35 pounds,” said Ms. Kemp, a clothing designer who owns Anna, a store on Christopher Street. “Everything is much larger, much faster than we expected.”

Mr. Hughes, 53, a writer, spends summers upstate with Jack, and Ms. Kemp, 53, comes up for the weekends. In the country, neighbors drop by unannounced and city friends come up to stay for long weekends, a luxury that isn’t possible in a tiny apartment where even the art on the walls has to be curated so as not to “take up too much visual space,” Ms. Kemp said.

The first few years they owned the house, as they would drive up from the city Ms. Kemp would wonder what had happened while she was away, like the house had a secret life. “Was it still there? Did we have heat?” she recalled. “Would there be a ghost?”

There was no ghost, and instead the family’s life migrated north. Years spent at summer camp means Jack has a circle of upstate friends. And a few years ago, the parents of one of his city friends coincidentally bought the house across the street in Halcottsville. “We have different lives in the city and the country,” Ms. Kemp said.

A second home is ultimately an escape hatch, the fun alternate existence where there is no daily grind and you can imagine a life of sleepy Sundays with birds, not car alarms, chirping in the morning. It can be tempting to shower it with attention and money.

Tom Postilio, 48, and Mickey Conlon, 42, rent a one-bedroom apartment in Midtown Manhattan that Mr. Conlon describes as “just a nice hotel room.”

Rather than buy a more inviting apartment, the couple, Douglas Elliman brokers who have a roster of clients that includes Barry Manilow, Joan Collins and Liza Minnelli, decided to splurge on a weekend house.

After six years and almost $6 million, they are nearly finished building an 11,000-square-foot house on a two-and-a-quarter acre parcel in Nissequogue, N.Y., overlooking the Long Island Sound. The lavish spread has six bedrooms, five fireplaces, a library, a banquet-style dining room and a conservatory with a Murano glass chandelier from the 1940s. Mr. Conlon describes the space, with its antique black-and-white-tile marble floors and a carved wood ceiling, as “Gatsby-era Long Island.”

Their extravagant investment begs the question: Why spend six years building a weekend palace when you could buy a pretty nice apartment in the city, where you actually live? It comes down to what you get for the money.

“In an urban market where space is at a premium, I think the second home, in terms of its personal attention, is distorted,” said Jonathan J. Miller, the president of Miller Samuel Real Estate Appraisers and Consultants. “You’re making up for the shortcomings of your primary residence by being perhaps more aggressive in modifying your second home.”

Or maybe you’re just never home in the city. Mr. Conlon and Mr. Postilio work long hours and mostly use their apartment as a way station to eat and sleep between other engagements. It’s not a space they care about much. The house on the North Shore of Long Island, though, is the opposite: a glamorous fairy-tale destination.

“We think of our lives in New York as a stream of consciousness,” Mr. Conlon said. “And this house adds punctuation.”

View full article here at NY Times.