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The New York Times

Home Renovation: Time for a Hotel?

By: Tim McKeough
Published: 7/5/2015Source: The New York Times

Bridget and Brian Applegate and their daughter, Cora, in the kitchen of their Brooklyn rowhouse, a work in progress. The Applegates were able to stay put during construction at their home.

 

Sometimes, creating the home you’ve always desired requires living like a nomad. While many people spend months plotting a renovation, down to the choice of bathroom faucet and finish of hardwood floors, fewer spend that sort of time thinking about where they’re going to live when the demolition crew arrives.

“It usually comes as an afterthought, once we start talking about the construction timeline,” said Lauren Rubin, a New York architect specializing in residential renovations. “A lot of people underestimate the amount of work they’re about to do, and how messy it’s going to get.”

While it’s possible to remain in your home during some renovation jobs, it simply isn’t feasible in many other cases. Walls may have to come down or be cut open, floors may have to be ripped out, and plumbing lines and electrical components may need to be replaced.

But in a city where standard rental leases are 12 months long, finding temporary accommodations for just a few months while your home is being pulled apart and rebuilt can be a challenge. There’s also the question of what to do with your belongings — if they must be removed from the home for construction, they’ll have to be packed and stored.

These costs can add up quickly, making an expensive renovation even more painful. But with a little research and good luck, it’s possible to find a home away from home that won’t come so dear that you are forced to scale back alterations or pitch a tent in the park.

The options vary, depending on your budget and your expectations. Extended-stay hotels and corporate furnished rentals offer well-appointed apartments by the month. Sublets can be found through personal networks or websites such as Leasebreak and Craigslist. Short-term rentals, from a few days to a few months, are offered by services like Airbnb and HomeAway.

When Joe and Carol Shaheen began planning the renovation of their two-bedroom co-op on East 57th Street in Manhattan earlier this year, they assumed they could continue living in the apartment, which they bought back in 1995. Dirt and disruption were not part of their thinking.

“We were so naïve,” said Mr. Shaheen, noting that the job, which will cost about $300,000, includes a new kitchen, refreshed bedrooms and dining room, the installation of a washer and a dryer, and refinishing the wood floors. “When our contractor talked to us about the reality of the situation, we realized we had to move out.”

They considered subletting a neighbor’s apartment in the building, and searched Craigslist and Airbnb, but weren’t able to find an arrangement that suited their needs.

That’s when they began focusing on extended-stay hotels, and learned the value of shopping around. Just a block away from their home was a one-bedroom suite at the Sutton Court on East 57th Street for about $6,000 per month. The quote they received for a similar room at another nearby extended-stay hotel was more than double that amount.

Estimates to pack, move and store their belongings came in at wildly different prices, ranging from $6,000 to $25,000. In the end, they hired Moving Man Inc. to move the contents of their apartment into the master bedroom, which was then sealed off with plastic sheeting. Moving Man’s bill, which included wrapping and boxing small possessions and sheathing upholstered furniture in plastic, came to about $800. Once the second bedroom is finished, the contractor will move everything there, Mr. Shaheen said.

The Shaheens are now living at their summer home on the Jersey Shore, and making weekly visits to the city to monitor construction. If all goes according to plan, they will move into their renovated apartment in August. The renovation was designed by Kyle Wells.

“It was a ton of money,” Mr. Shaheen said of their moving-out costs, “but reasonable by New York standards.”

West Chin, a New York architect, said his rule of thumb for jobs involving several rooms “is that you should never live through construction, if it’s financially feasible.” Even if contractors try to contain construction dust with plastic barriers, he said, it still has a way of ending up in every corner of the apartment, which can make for stressful living.

“If you’re married, it’s not good for the marriage,” Mr. Chin said. “If you have kids, it’s not good for the kids.”

That doesn’t mean Mr. Chin’s clients always listen to him. Some decide to stay in their homes anyway, he said, noting that it’s most manageable when working on a townhouse or apartment combination, where construction in one part of the residence can proceed while the owners live in another.

However, renovating in stages may end up being even more expensive than moving out. “We try to explain to clients that if we have to phase a project in order to keep it habitable, it will always, without fail, add time and cost to the project,” said Vincent DiSalvo, an owner of DiSalvo Contracting in New York. “Sometimes, it’s as little as 10 to 15 percent, but in some cases it’s as much as 50 percent of the cost of the project.”

The reason, he said, is that piecemeal work requires subcontractors like plumbers and electricians to return to the job again and again. Workers also lose time cleaning up at the end of each day. Often, there will still be a brief period when the homeowner must quit the premises, such as when hardwood floors are being refinished.

Jim Curtis, the life purpose strategist and chief strategy officer of Remedy Health Media, had already been through three previous renovations when he bought a new two-bedroom condo on Water Street for $1.35 million in January. He knew he didn’t want to live through a $110,000 renovation that included reconfiguring the bedrooms and inserting a sliding barn door between them, upgrading two bathrooms, adding built-in shelves and a banquette made from salvaged wood to the living room, and refinishing the floors.

Mr. Curtis’s 7-year-old son, Aidan, lives with him on weekends, so he was intent on finding safe, comfortable temporary accommodations. “It would have saved me some money to live there, but especially with my son, a good living situation is worth the expense,” he said. “You can live happily, and not somewhere that could make you sick.”

Before moving out of his old place, Mr. Curtis pared down his belongings by donating many things to charity, friends and family; he then had FlatRate Moving store the rest for about $250 per month. “You have to ask yourself: Do you love your stuff enough to pay for it to live somewhere else?” Mr. Curtis said.

For the first two weeks of his exile, Mr. Curtis traveled the country, visiting friends and family. When he returned, he moved into a furnished studio in Greenwich Village with a 30-day minimum stay, which he found through Furnished Quarters on the recommendation of David Favale, an associate broker at Town Residential.

The convenience wasn’t merely that the studio was available for a short term, Mr. Favale said, but also that “it comes with cable, Internet and everything you need already included.”

Mr. Curtis, who paid about $2,700 a month, ended up staying for two and a half months before moving into his apartment, which was a project of L. Kate Interiors, at the end of March. “It was easy,” he said. “When my renovation went longer than expected, I’d just call them up and say I needed extra weeks, and they were very flexible.”

If you’re buying a new home with plans to renovate it, remaining in your old home during construction is an option. If the home to be vacated is a rental, you could potentially extend the lease on a month-to-month basis. If you own, and the proceeds from the old home will be used to buy the new one, it may be possible to include a post-occupancy agreement as part of the sale, through which you rent back the home from the buyer for a set period of time.

However, “Lawyers hate post-occupancies,” said Karen S. Sonn, a New York real estate lawyer. “There’s enormous potential for litigation and for things to go wrong,” such as damage from a water leak and disputes about the condition of the home at the end of the rental period.

 “Or, the elevator goes down the day the person is supposed to move out,” she continued. “If you’re post-occupying, you pay huge penalties for missing the move-out date.” The safer bet, she said, is to clear out before the closing.

When Midori Takada, an architect, sold her one-bedroom apartment in the Bronx last December, she avoided any complications by moving before the closing. She sent her belongings to American Self Storage for about $240 per month, and moved for a month with her two cats into a furnished studio in Murray Hill, on Airbnb for about $2,700.

When that time was up, Ms. Takada moved to another Airbnb furnished studio, this time in Morningside Heights, for about $2,500 per month.

In February, she closed on the $375,000 purchase of a two-bedroom co-op apartment in Morningside Heights, which she found with help from Marjo Benavides, a saleswoman at Halstead Property. A month later, she began a renovation costing about $50,000 that included a new kitchen and new floors and doors throughout. The project was expected to take six to eight weeks.

By the time Ms. Takada realized she needed more time in the rental, it was too late: Someone else had already booked her temporary quarters.

“The downside of Airbnb is that the hosts sell it out,” she said. “They want to book as far in advance as possible,” which can make extensions tricky.

Fortunately, Ms. Takada had a friend in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, who invited her to live there. She stayed for about a month before moving into her partially completed new home in May, two months after the renovation began, while the contractor continued work on the kitchen.

“I’m occupying half the apartment; they have the other half,” she said, shortly before the job was finished last month.

Some people are even braver. After buying a three-family townhouse on 11th Street in Brooklyn on the Park Slope-Gowanus border last August for $1.4 million, Bridget and Brian Applegate decided to stay in the downstairs studio while the two upstairs apartments underwent a gut renovation and combination.

They put most of their belongings in a nearby CubeSmart storage unit for about $400 per month, and moved their bed and a few essentials into the studio. Construction began in September.

“Financially, it’s a big burden to cover the whole mortgage without having a renter in place,” said Ms. Applegate, a saleswoman with the Corcoran Group, so they didn’t seriously consider paying rent for an apartment elsewhere.

For three months, the couple barricaded their year-old daughter, Cora, in an alcove behind boxes at night to block light while they put on headphones and watched television from their bed. (There was no sofa.)

Even though the work was in another unit, dust became a problem. “It was a constant battle,” said Ms. Applegate, noting that they had completed an asbestos abatement and tested for lead paint before starting construction. “Inevitably, I’d have to go up to talk to the contractors and track dust back down, or they’d have to come through.” With hammering overhead, she added, “nap times were difficult.”

At the end of December, the family moved upstairs, where they celebrated Cora’s second birthday in January, ignoring their new kitchen’s open wall with exposed framing, clapboard siding and wire. After permit delays, construction resumed last month, and the dust has begun to fly again as the contractors turn their attention to the studio and add an extension to the rear of the house. The entire project will cost about $300,000.

“People definitely think we’re nuts,” Ms. Applegate said. “But at the end of the day, that’s how we’re getting our dream house, so it’s worth it for us.”

Copyright © 2015 The New York Times Company. Reprinted with Permission. Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times. 

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