Wades Beach: Out of the Ashes

This is one of the windows we liked at Irreplaceable Artifacts.

It is time to pick up the blog again because we have been making progress on the house. Let me catch you up on the past few months and weeks of what has been happening since May. It is hard to believe that January 18 will be the first anniversary of the fire.

We had to fight with the insurance agency for most of the summer about our settlement. We definitely did not get as much out of the claim as we wanted. I feel like we got a pretty fair settlement for the personal property (the contents) but not for the house itself. At some point we just had to move on, or else we’ll be stalled forever. Could we have maybe gotten more if we’d used an independent adjuster to fight for us? Maybe. And maybe not. We’ll never know. But we moved on.

About four weeks ago we went out to Greenport to meet with our architect, Rob Brown. He is so awesome and we left there really happy with the latest set of plans. We are now refining the set we got earlier in the year from him.

We also learned on this trip the sad news that we are going to have to more than likely demolish the remaining parts of the house. Since the fire, it has stood empty, just a frame, the shell of the old house. If you drove by the house at 15 mph you would think there is a real house there, except for the giant tarp on the roof. The windows are not boarded up; the glass is still in them. But if you look closer, you’ll see it is just a ghost of what Chrissie’s parents built in 1977. Rob said that since a lot of the wood is fire-damaged, it wouldn’t be feasible to build onto a damaged house. We also must jack the house up to pour a foundation (incredibly, it only has a dirt foundation, and we are going to pour concrete to have a full basement) and a contractor may balk at raising up a damaged house. So it makes sense to just wipe the lot clean and start from scratch with a whole new house.

However, the basic footprint of the house is remaining the same, it will not get any wider or longer. We are going to go up a level, from a ranch to a two-story. The second story will have one new master bedroom, bath, and a study/den. And a walk-in closet for my T-shirt museum. I would like this lined with cedar to protect my valuable 1980s rock ‘n roll concert tees! A benefit of having a second story is that we will get water views of the bay, something that was lost when the homes across the street were constructed twenty years ago.

We did spend quite a bit of time talking about being “green” and the possible use of solar energy. Even back in February we considered it. Rob told us about the cost, possibly $50,000, to install solar panels on the roof to collect energy and generate electricity. However, there are state and federal tax credits that can knock a lot of that down. How much remains to be seen, but we are still investigating that. We probably will not collect rainwater from the roof, for two reasons: this is a weekend house, and we get our water from a well. But in the coming months you will hear more about us trying to save money and help the environment at the same time.

Probably the best time we’ve had lately was going to Connecticut for an entire Saturday and paying a visit to Irreplaceable Artifacts, the sister shop to Demolition Depot in Harlem. We had purchased several things for our apartment at Demolition Depot, such as bathroom fixtures, a glass-paneled door, and a beautiful mirror. But the location in Middletown was supposed to be much larger and have more stuff. We also got lucky and got a whole afternoon with the owner, Evan Blum. He is a legend in the business, and has been doing architectural salvage in the area for more than 30 years.

We brought our plans into the shop and met with Evan. He looked them over with a trained eye; he knows his stuff. We then went room by room in the plans and looked at possibilities in the collection. It was so amazing—and a lot of fun—to imagine these pieces that at one time were in homes in places like Greenwich that could be used on Shelter Island. Chrissie fell in love with a light fixture that has an owl motif. I was thrilled to hear about an entire oak-paneled room—saved from a house in Queens—for our planned reading room/sun room. We looked over doors, windows, cabinets and more. It was a good exploration trip to see what they had. I posted the finds here.

Our next step will be to go to Greenport and see what the new plans look like. We need to price out the cost of the items that Evan has located, and then start the process of bidding the job out to contractors to build the house.

We hope to have good news soon about when this can happen.

Stay tuned…

Labels: Construction, Plans, Salvage, Solar Heating