Let me please take a moment to describe what the house was before I get too in depth about what we were going to turn it into, and the long period in between.

It is three storeys; there are separate apartments on the first, second and third floors, and two apartments in the basement. A visit to the city archives reveals that there are no original plans for the house on file, but the archives have the permits from 1937 to transform the house into two apartments and from 1938 to transform the house into three apartments. The basement apartments were probably done (on the sly) in the early 1980s or perhaps late 1970s.

The basement has been dug down to 6 1/2 feet, but it still has a rather cramped feel to it. The basement also has a coin operated washer and dryer (none of my business, I suppose, but that seems a bit, well, cheap to me.) and that's where the furnace, water heater and electrical panel all are. The common area with all this stuff in it has been built around the location of the ductworks.

The first floor has the main entryway for all the apartments, which leads straight to the central staircase. On the right is the door for the first floor apartment. The bedroom is in the front of the house, there is a little cubby under the stairs, the living room is in the middle with the bathroom between the living room and kitchen. The kitchen is in a large 'L' shape, and leads to the back door. One of the main features is a long closet about 2 feet wide that runs from the kitchen to the bedroom - we speculated that it used to be a servants' hallway from the kitchen to the dining room. There is a stained glass window featuring a fleur de lys that looks like it's original to the house.

The second floor is a little more straight-forward. The front room is a largish living room (with an old fireplace, sadly, not working at the moment.), the middle room is a bedroom, there is a small bathroom and a closet and the kitchen is at the back of the house. There is a small room off the kitchen, about 8' x 8'. This is part of a two storey structure added to the back of the house so that the fire escape from the third floor can have a landing, catch an exit on the second floor and then proceed down to the back yard.

The third floor is shaped like a backwards upper case letter 'G' - the stairs open into the hallway, from which you either turn toward the front of the house to the living room, through the living room to the bedroom, through the bedroom to the bathroom, or you can turn left to the dine in kitchen. The fire escape is reached from a back door off the kitchen, and there is a deck which leads to the fire escape. This deck is one of the most immediately attractive features of the house.

The front yard is crushed brick; the back yard has been completely paved over except for a small area of interlock brick. The back yard is also dominated by the 1940s cast iron fire escape.

Throughout the house, there are the old hardwood floors and the high baseboards, high ceilings of somewhere that was really special. We found it charming, and we had the idea that we were restoring it rather than renovating. Certainly, the work that had been done most recently was the poorest in quality, but it hadn't lost the look of a century home.

As well, we were intrigued by some of the mysteries - what had that odd, long closet been before? Was there a fireplace on the first floor as well? What was behind that odd angled wall in the downstairs living room? Most importantly, what were we going to keep and what were we going to take out? That was what we talked about for many long nights between January and March of 2007.

I'll have to tell you about the plans, version 1a in a later post...