 |
| April 2020 issue of Washingtonian // a street in our neighborhood |
I love house hunting - when we're not actually looking to move. (Job hunting, too, when I'm not actually looking to switch employers.) It's just fun to see what's out there! Sometimes I'm just daydreaming, like when I browsed big old houses on lots of land way out in Maryland at the beginning of the pandemic; this will always be The One That Got Away. But, over the last year especially, I've gotten more intentional about my Redfin searches, which I use to research our renovation plans.
We live in a Wardman-style rowhouse, one of thousands built in the first quarter of the 20th century here in Washington, DC. Many of these homes have - or had - the same original floor plan, and I love seeing what other occupants have done with what is, essentially the same structure and space that we have. Over the decades, owners of these rowhouses have made internal changes that I pour over when the properties come on the market. They give me great ideas for what we can do (and, equally importantly, for what I don't want to do) with our own home.
This saved search on Redfin is the best way I've found to filter all the houses for sale to show only those that, now or once upon a time, look/ed like mine:
- property type: townhouse
- <$1.5M
- 1500-2500 sq ft
- min. 4 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms
- year built: before 1940
- must have basement
These filters give me properties that are - or were when they were originally built - a lot like ours, which means that I can mine them for updates that are actually actionable given our space. (I set $1.5M as the top limit because it tends to exclude Victorian rowhouses, which are completely different architecturally.) In fact, about half of the rowhouses that come up in my searches originally had very similar or even identical floor plans to our house! That makes it easier to picture how upgrades developers or owners might have done could look in our home.
There are certain things I know we want to incorporate into our renovation that are very common in renovated Wardmans, like a second full bathroom on the second floor. Other plans are more rare: for instance, the vast majority of renovated rowhouses combine either the front or back two bedrooms into one master suite, and I know I want to retain all four bedrooms upstairs. Here's the current iteration of my plan for the second floor:
Who knows if we'll end up with a rendering like the one on the right when it comes time to actually renovate, but I'm getting tons of stylistic as well as layout ideas that I'm noting for when we get to the stage at which we talk to an architect! Here are some of my favorites so far...
While I don't want an open floor plan on the first floor, I do think that taking out the wall under the stairs will make the hallway leading from the entry into our kitchen feel wider and more spacious. (This is how it looks in our house currently.) I definitely want to mirror the banister going upstairs with a horizontal rail and balustrades serving as the protecting divider for the stairs going down to the basement.
- <$1.5M
- 1500-2500 sq ft
- min. 4 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms
- year built: before 1940
- must have basement
These filters give me properties that are - or were when they were originally built - a lot like ours, which means that I can mine them for updates that are actually actionable given our space. (I set $1.5M as the top limit because it tends to exclude Victorian rowhouses, which are completely different architecturally.) In fact, about half of the rowhouses that come up in my searches originally had very similar or even identical floor plans to our house! That makes it easier to picture how upgrades developers or owners might have done could look in our home.
There are certain things I know we want to incorporate into our renovation that are very common in renovated Wardmans, like a second full bathroom on the second floor. Other plans are more rare: for instance, the vast majority of renovated rowhouses combine either the front or back two bedrooms into one master suite, and I know I want to retain all four bedrooms upstairs. Here's the current iteration of my plan for the second floor:
Who knows if we'll end up with a rendering like the one on the right when it comes time to actually renovate, but I'm getting tons of stylistic as well as layout ideas that I'm noting for when we get to the stage at which we talk to an architect! Here are some of my favorites so far...
While I don't want an open floor plan on the first floor, I do think that taking out the wall under the stairs will make the hallway leading from the entry into our kitchen feel wider and more spacious. (This is how it looks in our house currently.) I definitely want to mirror the banister going upstairs with a horizontal rail and balustrades serving as the protecting divider for the stairs going down to the basement.
All of these houses were built with decorative dormer windows in the mansard roof but without proper usable attic space. I've seen a lot of renovations that open the front of the ceiling of the second floor to get the light from those dormers, like in the top two of the photos directly above, and I really like that idea especially since our house faces north and those bedrooms need as much light as they can get. A few friends have this, though, and have strongly recommended against it because of how it messes with airflow. And then I saw another other option, pictured in the bottom three images, which creates a small finished room in the attic - brilliant!
There are a few near-universal external marks of a flipped rowhouse in DC, and the entrance to the basement is a pretty good clue. Our home, like most unrenovated Wardmans, has a narrow stair down to the basement door and there's a wall under the front of the porch hiding the crawl space below. (You can see what I mean here.) I'd love to dig out the area under the porch so a little more light can get into the basement and and to make it a slightly more welcoming entrance.
Or, you know, we could just take off the max price filter and win the lottery and buy this property, a 6bd/6.5ba rowhouse on a cobblestone street in the heart of Georgetown - priced just under $8,000,000!
There are a few near-universal external marks of a flipped rowhouse in DC, and the entrance to the basement is a pretty good clue. Our home, like most unrenovated Wardmans, has a narrow stair down to the basement door and there's a wall under the front of the porch hiding the crawl space below. (You can see what I mean here.) I'd love to dig out the area under the porch so a little more light can get into the basement and and to make it a slightly more welcoming entrance.
Or, you know, we could just take off the max price filter and win the lottery and buy this property, a 6bd/6.5ba rowhouse on a cobblestone street in the heart of Georgetown - priced just under $8,000,000!
Comments
Post a Comment