Touring An Abandoned Victorian Home Ready For Renovation | Architectural Digest

there's something pretty significantly wrong here this is not a brick wall this is that was uh not on purpose we're in goshen new york and behind me is an 1892 victorian that needs a ton of work so this house is listed at 299 000 and similar size homes are actually going for more than double that cost my name is nick schiffer i own ns builders we focus on high-end remodeling and new home construction so this home is a 5 bedroom 3 bath 4 000 square feet and today i want to walk through the space room by room and figure out what it would take to make this home livable when we make our way around the house we're going to want to go around and make sure that the masonry is sealed it's cleaned well it's repointed and just structurally sound throughout the entire space really great window sills solid material the basement kind of flares out giving it that almost column feel and then as you go up you start to see all of the brick details great detail here where you know at the bottom of these windows it's square and then it cuts on an angle up so you're kind of softening the the space between the windows and then above the windows here you're getting these small arches which if i were to guess i would assume that when you start getting into the home you're going to start seeing more and more arches because you're starting to get those details here on the front additionally the roof is a slate roof which i love it's an expensive roof in the beginning but the overall shape of it is probably a b-plus going around and just doing some miscellaneous repairs on that slate roof that roof will last another hundred years if it's kept up well one of the things i would probably uh recommend and i don't think it's necessarily removing the we'll call it the medieval fieldstone but maybe restoring the front porch here the woodwork detailing is really nice a lot of this can be cleaned up if it is indeed solid but then you can come back and do a traditional wood handrail fairly inexpensively obviously pulling off the greenery and the shrubbery is going to really open up this front porch and make it just a more inviting detail let's talk about cost number one the masonry realistically we're probably in that 20 30 000 range to get the facade of this house updated cleaned up and prepped for longevity we talked about the front porch you're talking about having a carpenter on site and then just reviewing all of the framing for the porch making sure the columns are structurally sound and then detailing out and talking about replacing those railings with a more period accurate detail so at that rate we're probably somewhere around another 10 000. i'm stoked to get inside look around see what the condition of this house is even more important what the potential is [Music] first impressions wow there's huge ceilings in here you can see the continuation of the arches you have this awesome almost gothic landsat window type molding here where you have basically an arch that comes to a point at the very top this is something interesting this is actually a detail that we've used in a lot of our new projects you have this herringbone pattern and the herringbone is essentially pointing your way into the home and psychologically i believe that when you walk through the front door and you have this floor kind of guiding you to bringing you into the home you're almost like forced to walk forward if you have say a flat seam that you're walking it's almost like you're tripping over the seams if it was vertical and you were running down it's almost the bowling alley effect so really cool detail something i would absolutely keep in this place let's talk about the rooms in the front here you have some really great rooms that are really grand you have a continuation of the arch a lot of natural light it does look like that some of these walls have been updated with new plaster the moldings you can obviously see an abundance of recessed lighting i'd probably change that i think that for whatever that recessed lighting was installed for it is overdone and it's interesting to see that actually this this pulls over here as well that gothic window where it goes up to a point really interesting to see this above a fireplace so i'm curious to know frankly how that fireplace was vented because typically your fireplace would have a flu directly up and out but it would be interesting to know if they constructed this way back in the 1800s with masonry that led the flu up both sides of this window but really cool really interesting detail another thing i noticed is the floor there's something pretty significantly wrong here you can't tell but i'm at a much lower elevation here than i would be over there the floor is buckling to me that says structural issue structural issue doesn't necessarily mean it's you know an exorbitant cost but it's a cost the benefit of buying a brick house is this is probably a localized problem this wall here is a structural brick wall so if this floor fails it's just failing from the brick wall the brick wall is not also failing this is another actual indication this paneling here that paneling is still in great shape it's still straight but here it's not so to me what that says is this is not a brick wall this is that was a not on purpose but this is not a brick wall it's a wood frame wall so that wood frame is not a structural wall it's sitting on the floor system and it dropped with the rest of this floor you don't want it to get worse you're stripping this floor and you're reframing this floor realistically it's about a week's worth of work from demo to getting this place back ready for the floor so a couple guys for a week you know we're back at that ten thousand dollar number to get this floor repaired and ready for floor finish so when you talk about value and what you want to do here it really all depends on what the end goal is so say you do buy this property for under 299 000 and you do want to do a renovation and say the top of the market in this area is 700 000 that gives you about 400 000 wiggle room which you can certainly invest in a home like this what i would consider you know the aesthetic to approach this the stephen harris of of design you know the level of detail were you know easily five seven could be even up to a thousand dollars per square foot from a renovation cost now that's a lot of money now i think of that another way where if you were to say over invest in a project like this and spend an enormous amount of money you've certainly narrowed who might be interested in this home but you've created something that is beyond just a market value home you've created ultimately a piece of art that someone can live in this could be a really great mud room not really sure where the kitchen goes yet but thinking that with the layout of the home with the more formal on the front this becomes all of the entertaining space and utilitarian space and this big glass panel lends me to believe that maybe this space was used for a commercial space at some point i'm not sure in what life or style home a big glass window like that would be installed in a house over here this looks like it could be another maybe tv or den or some sort of sitting room maybe a first floor office again i'm thinking that this space may have been used for commercial really interesting above us with these ceiling tiles where if you were to see them in the photo you might think that they have a beautiful coffered ceiling in the space but in fact they're plastic tiles from the local lumber store again the floors are in really great shape i think that's something that this house really is benefiting from is that you know there is damage to the hardwood but the majority of it's in good shape and the damage that is here can be easily fixed similar to the walls the ceiling that drop ceiling panel that would go as well and i would just bring it back to you know a really high ceiling plastered one of the things that happens when i walk around a house is my mind changes a lot and as i walk back here i realize that this is going to be a much better space for not only the mud room i talked about in the front space there but also the kitchen over here we actually have a really great spot for a proper mud room the space in the front there while it would work i'm flipping my thought process here and saying that this makes more sense because it's more private it's separated you can tuck a powder room back there you can have a bunch of lockers and have all your stuff kind of hidden away from your guests really just open this entire back of the house up into one space and building a grand kitchen essentially eating kitchen or a dining area that spills its way back into those front rooms that then can become the living and sitting rooms i look at this back wall there's natural light coming through these two small pieces of glass here but maybe this lends itself to being you know a big piece of glass a slider some sort of exterior door that you can walk out to a private patio you could have a grilling station out there you could have seating out there and essentially you know you're gonna have a big island maybe in this direction or headed in the other direction but this small room we just get rid of all of this this all goes away we open this wall up and this opens up into what was that other fireplace in that room with the glass wall so originally i had talked about maybe using that room as a mud room powder room but in fact i think this becomes the more informal eating kitchen more modern way that we are living these days rather than the separated or compartmentalized kitchens and dining areas so this house is over 100 years old and we have to realize that we live differently than you know they did back then back then everything was compartmentalized it was to create privacy for possibly the servants in the kitchen or the kitchen just wasn't a place that people congregated and nowadays that's the number one place you know people entertain in their kitchen they want to sit down around the island they want to socialize and that's the way we live in respect to that dream home versus you know what it takes to make this livable we're going to be opening this space up to lend itself to be more of a valuable space in general building a kitchen appliances cabinetry things of that nature and also finishing that addition in the back realistically we're gonna wanna budget somewhere around a hundred thousand dollars anytime we're doing a kitchen it really does spill out into the rest of that first floor that's exactly what's happening here so all of those portions are what spills out of the kitchen design so i'm dying to see the upstairs i'm not going to use this back staircase i want to go up the front one because i think that staircase will stay and it'll be interesting to see so let's head up there and see what we can do [Music] so coming up here this lends me to continue my thought about this place being used for some sort of commercial aspect you come up and you have this double set of doors one that has a keypad on it i think regardless of what we do with the rest of the space up here this just goes away you have a great oval window directly across from the staircase that wants to let light in they tried to allow that with the glass doors but it's just unnecessary for an entire second floor of this home the tile here very outdated unfortunately they've installed it flush with the hardwood so we would want to go and rip this out and try to find something that is going to match or maybe we can salvage it from another area in the home that may not have hardwood in the future this stuff is rotted this is not repairable in the sense that we could reinstall this this would be stripped back and we want to look for areas in the home that we can salvage some of the hardwood and reutilize them we need a couple bedrooms and a couple bathrooms up here to make this a livable home right off the bat i feel as though this side facing the street has an enormous amount of light lends itself to being the primary suite again we have another window above the fireplace super interesting to see how this is built and vented uh it does look like i might have an animal up here but it does look like it's active at some point they've added gas but they must have used the left chase for downstairs in the right chase or vice versa to vent this but the window above the fireplace is really really unique i think simply just you know again whiting out all of the walls getting a more you know uniform pallets which can make this place feel a lot brighter lighter and more modern it's interesting because you have these really square windows and on the outside you do have this arch brick you want to make sure that what you're doing on the inside is not negatively impacting the outside so in here i look at all right well i have square casing i think one of the more natural things and a relatively easy thing to do is to just replace the casing on the top of the window with something that is arched and maybe plays off this arch or maybe this arch becomes modified or you could do one continuous piece of molding that kind of captures the two windows together and not these two separate windows to talk about dream home or the more expensive option is to actually create what we call a juliet balcony and i would increase the height of the brick opening and i would actually install a double wide door and that door would open up and you'd have just a railing across it's not a balcony that you can step out but the nice thing is you'd be able to open the door up and you'd have this really great natural light one of the things that we're doing when we're building and or renovating is we want to understand morning routine when you don't think about the flow of how a suite works you can impact someone else's sleeping pattern so for us we're thinking about all right when you get up in the morning that flow should be through the bathroom you know touch base in the closet and then exit that space not in the bathroom back through the bedroom into the closet back in the bedroom back out we want to think about it as a flow and kind of this one continuous motion all the way throughout so for me you know i see the turret and naturally immediately say that's an amazing spot for a bathroom you don't need much space to get a sink just a shower and a toilet now you're lending yourself to having a really big walk-in closet that you can access right off the bathroom access the hallway for the suite and then the office is accessed also through the hallway or possibly both so let's talk about dream home because this i've been obsessed with this area of the home since we've started this conversation i look at you know the the bathroom especially in the primary suite as being this ultimate experience this should be the wet room the shower basically playing off the shape of this round wall getting rid of everything in here and essentially having this massive rain head that just kind of sits above you all the walls are maybe a waterproof plaster or a tile or something the whole entire floor is draining as one big shower i would even leave the windows now i wouldn't leave the exact windows that are here we would replace them with a fixed unit and we would add privacy film up to about shoulder height reason i say up to shoulder height is of course you need the privacy but when you're able to sight through a window it actually adds a level of depth that adds a level of space it's not going to feel as claustrophobic so obviously the shower would be amazing but there's all of this additional space up here which lends itself to its own special space whether it's a quiet space or a meditation room or something like that and i can only imagine the views that you have up there so it would be almost wasteful to block it off and create just a shower down here without understanding how we could regain access to that space and utilize it again creating an additional feature in this home that becomes an additional talking point being able to capture the primary suite on this end of the house makes a lot of sense you have the work from home potential office here in the front and then over there this was originally a five bedroom we want to be able to capture at least two maybe three additional bedrooms over there doesn't get us back to that five number but we do want to make sure that we're getting the amount of bedrooms that this house deserves being 4000 square feet but that makes me wonder if there's additional space maybe in the attic that we can capture even more space looking around the attic here one of the things i'm looking for is daylight and there's some small areas that you're seeing daylight through the sheathing on the roof whatever is below the slate is either compromised or damaged or simply just non-existent so those are going to be areas that we want to adjust or modify or make repairs on and that's where we start getting into the complexity of the roof repairs so being a full height attic you know with the two possibly three additional bedrooms downstairs this lends itself to having the ability to be possibly two additional bedrooms up here realistically to make the home livable i think that this just kind of stays as is certainly not an area that needs to be adjusted but looking into that next step or even dream home status you know there's a lot of square footage up here that can be utilized whether it's bonus space additional bedrooms work from home space [Music] this home is awesome there's a few things i really like about it number one as we talked about outside it's a brick home in general the condition of the outside from what i can tell is in really good shape even up on the roof the slate roof is something that can literally last forever with the proper maintenance just like the proper maintenance of the brick from a fixer upper say you're trying to do a flip or maybe live here and try to do it in a more inexpensive route we talked about a hundred thousand dollars in the kitchen realistically that's trickling throughout the first floor there's a lot of the first floor that you can leave the floors a lot of the walls could be simply just patched and repainted a good majority of the trim can really be patched and painted you're going to have some rooms that do need to be boarded plastered trim the bones of what you have going on here truly do lend itself to being easily brought to a point where it's livable going back up to the roof yes there are some leaks up there yes there's daylight and there's holes everywhere but i don't really see that being this major deterrent as far as like that's going to blow the budget there's a lot of really great details that i would love to hold on to a lot of that centers around the windows and how they're connected to the outside we really don't want to impact that or change it hardwood floors i think are something else that they're going to have a ton of character in them even after they're refinished and then even thinking about some of the archways and the original millwork and the original doors and even the staircase that i'm sitting on all of those things should remain but at the end of the day if you wanted to get this house livable i think a three to four hundred thousand dollar budget to do that is certainly obtainable you might look at this project and wonder can you do this is this a do-it-yourself type project is this something a weekend warrior can tackle in my opinion the answer is never know but you know looking at a home like this and the scale of work this is definitely something that you're going to want to pair up with a professional now if we want to talk wild in the dream home i think that you know we're going to easily double or possibly triple or even quadruple that with a million dollars you'd be able to touch this home in a way that from the outside you have respected and restored what once was and on the inside you've taken that into a realm of a more modern day living with more open concept on the first floor more natural light throughout the entire home and just really thoughtful approach to the design to make sure that it works for modern day living a good friend of mine always says that you're basically building a house with a house in the way that couldn't be more true for someone that is looking for a really cool project this is definitely it i would absolutely recommend purchasing this property great location it's a great lot it's a great home there's a lot here to be celebrated it just needs another chance i was going to say a second chance but i think it's already had a second and a third it really needs a fourth chance at life and a thoughtful one at that you

Channel: Architectural Digest

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Keywords: abandoned building, abandoned building renovation, abandoned mansion, abandoned victorian mansion, ad home tour, ad home tours, ad mansion tour, arch digest home renovation, arch digest mansion tour, architectural digest, complete home flip, complete house flip, home design, home flipping, home makeover, home remodel, home remodeling, home renovation, house makeover, house renovation, house transformation, real estate investing, renovation, victorian

Id: 9cXZ5vIwpOQ

Length: 19min 54sec (1194 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 24 2021