Wednesday, October 31, 2012

1700 Vine has a new facade

The 2nd and 3rd floor windows are in and have really changed the way our building looks from Vine street.

The garage is nearly finished

Building the garage has turned out to be a green project. We reused the brick that we salvaged from the demolition of the condemned 1890s addition and reused the stone roof caps that we salvaged from the Hamer Street building when the roof was replaced/rebuilt 4 years ago.


 This is where these bricks started:


Thanks Andy & Ryan for helping us clean the brick!


New old windows from the interior view

The windows are not only beautiful from the exterior. The molding surrounding the second floor windows is complete, electric boxes for sconces between the windows are in place, and the plaster has been patched and primed. This one finished wall is a glimpse of the whole finished project. It's becoming easier to believe that this will be my living room in the relatively near future.

Thursday, September 27, 2012

New Old Windows

In April 2011, I posted the schematic showing what our old (1870s), weathered, rotted windows would be transformed into by Max Altman of De Timmerman....here is that schematic.
 And here is the before and after transformation....
The windows are so grand at 8' tall and surrounded with molding. We couldn't have gotten this kind of detail with replacement windows. The blue trim in the picture below is the exterior rounded molding. The 2nd floor windows were rebuilt using both new lumber and wood from our original 1870s windows. 

 
The third floor windows will be going in today and next week. The third floor windows had to be built from scratch as the originals were lost to a fire that occurred before we acquired the property.
I am just amazed at what these windows do to the facade of the building! What a transformation...

Thursday, September 20, 2012

Garage doors are in

The deck is looking good

The deck above the new addition has its bones in place. Unfortunately, we have to leave it without the finished trex decking in place, a necessary cost-cutting measure so that we could complete the work within budget. Since Reid & I laid the trex on the roof deck, we feel confident we'll be able to finish this deck out ourselves when we've saved up a bit more money.

Concrete steps

The concrete steps leading into the basement of our back building are in!

Saturday, September 15, 2012

The start of the basement stair

Into an eventual wine cellar (I hope)!

Thursday, September 6, 2012

Parapet wall going up

Parapet for the deck is shaping up

Thursday, August 30, 2012

Now there's a structure to step onto when I open the door from the kitchen on the 2nd floor of 1700 Vine St! When all is said & done, this will have a roof deck & be immediately accessible from my kitchen.

The new addition

The new addition between the two buildings is really taking shape! This will hold a new staircase for the Hamer St building, storage, house 2 rain water retention tanks and enable us to interface with our green space. Is a roof deck on top of thus structure.

Thursday, August 23, 2012

Saturday, August 18, 2012

Many trucks = lots happening!

Two crews are working today, masonry & carpentry.

Thursday, August 16, 2012

Saturday, August 4, 2012

South wall is going up

This will end up about 3' above the 2nd floor so that it acts as a railing on the new deck.

Thursday, August 2, 2012

Building the new addition

The footers are poured and the concrete block is going up.

Wednesday, July 18, 2012

Pouring the footers for the new building & staircase

Clearing the way for the garage

The concrete pad on the Hamer Street side of the lot has been torn out. This is where the new 2-car garage will be built. The granite curbs were sunk deeper so that we can pull cars in.

Thanks Keep Cincinnati Beautiful

KCB is beautifying the plywood on our storefront today. Much appreciated!

Thursday, July 5, 2012

Phase 1 Contruction Begins


Last Wednesday, June 27th, we started digging out for the new foundation that will be built between the 2 existing structures. There used to be a structure in this area - it was actively falling down when we purchased the property and is largely the reason for condemnation orders. Here's a picture of it from 4 years ago:

                       The before picture - South Wall. The exterior steps were obviously rotted.
The before picture - North Wall. The wooden area is the exterior stair for the Hamer St building. It's easy to see how the addition - built in the 1890s - is peeling off the original 1700 Vine Street building. The water pouring through the structure didn't help matters.

We demolished this structure shortly after purchasing the property. The plan for this space is to rebuild both the exterior steps for the Hamer St building and a one-story structure attached to the back of the 1700 Vine St building. This will allow for storage for both the storefront and our home and for a deck for our home, adding approx 400 sq ft of outdoor living space adjacent to the kitchen.

City Lofts is managing the construction. The final product will include a garage, new entrances to both basements, new stairwell, new one-story structure with water retention tanks underneath and deck on top.



Because it has taken us 4 years to get to this point, I'm wondering if I can really call this new construction "Phase 1", although that is what the architectural plans call it. Either way, construction has started and it's very exciting to see progress.

Friday, June 22, 2012



While waiting for some big construction to begin, we've been doing a few small things.
Reid hung drywall on the ceiling of the 2-story hall and I primed the walls in the dining room.
It's a little too soon to prime walls - they still need significant patching - but I needed a big change in the space and paint is the fastest, easiest way to achieve big change. The black sponge paint, more fondly referred to as faux blood splatter, is gone. Good riddance.

Friday, June 1, 2012

Brewery District Heritage Trail

What an important next step for Northern OTR. So much history and so many breweries!!! 1700 Vine LOVES this :) Brewery District lays plans for Cincinnati Brewing Heritage Trail Posted: 05/31/2012 Last Updated: 3 hours and 8 minutes ago By: Jessica Noll, jnoll@wcpo.com OVER-THE-RHINE - The Cincinnati City Council and the Over-the-Rhine Brewery District celebrated a collaborated effort to restore and revive part of downtown's history. "What we’re doing here is tying all of our downtown back together, conceptually and physically, and that’s part of redefining us as a city, telling our story as a city,” said Mike Morgan, Brewery District’s Historical Committee Chair. “We’re a beer city. We’re a brewing city. We’re a German-American immigrant city. And there are great stories behind that.” Cincinnati has a rich history, especially when it comes to brewing, said Greg Hardman, CEO of the Christian Moerlein Brewing Company and President of the Brewery District Board. "It's time we leveraged our history to help add to a positive, marketable image for our city, and to create a unique experience for both residents and visitors," said Hardman. A motion by Councilman P.G. Sittenfeld directing the City to begin working with the Brewery District on implementation of the trail has super-majority support among Council members. "Cincinnati is the once and future beer capital, beer brewing capital of North America and that this Brewery Heritage Trail is going to help support the revitalization of the city's core as well as help create new jobs and commerce and I think we can all drink to that," said Sittenfeld. The Brewery District has created a master plan for a new Cincinnati Brewing Heritage Trail. It's hard to tell now where all the old breweries once lived and thrived, but Morgan said that he hopes to change that. "This trail is going to tell that history and it's going to do that physically, so it's going to give people a reason to go a little further; to go a little deeper into the city; and to spend more time there. When you look at heritage tours statistics nationally, people that get interested in the history of cities; they stay longer and they spend more money." The new historical markers will give visitors an opportunity to locate more than a dozen of Cincinnati's breweries in Over-the-Rhine. The trail will have codes to scan with your phones—making the walking tour interactive with historical facts and photos. But the Heritage Trail is more than just about Over-the-Rhine's history. It's about preserving and giving the entire city new life. "As long as half of your downtown is a place that people are afraid to go, you are never going to have a healthy city. If you want a healthy Cincinnati, you have to have a healthy Over-the-Rhine," Morgan said. "We've got to turn what's been a huge problem into this city's biggest asset." The Brewery District said that they hope to start with Phase I of the trail, beginning at Hudepohl Brewing Company on McMicken, later this summer. Stops on the Brewing Heritage Trail will include original brewing sites, ice houses, bottling plants, homes of the great brewers of the 19th century, and sampling of locally brewed beer.

Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Ready for paint!


Although there are a few more details still to complete, the storefront has been rebuilt and is ready for a coat of paint. As long as the weather holds up, we'll be painting it next week! We're going to leave the plywood in the windows (instead of glass) until we have a tenant, but the structure is now sound and ready for finishing details.

Framing out the storefront

Replacing the rotten beams under the entrance.
Poured a new concrete pad at the entrance
Rebuilding the entire front

Sunday, March 4, 2012

Remembering where we started

I wanted to take a moment to remember The Before Picture of 1700 Vine Street. Every now and again, it's important to take a look back so that we can appreciate how far we've come in a relatively short amount of time.
We purchased the property in January 2008. The roof was more than leaking - water was pouring through the back rooms so badly that the previous owner had set up a 6' long fishtank to collect the water. This turned out to be a bad idea (surprise!*sarcasm*) since it was winter and the water in the fishtank froze. The fishtank glass shattered, resulting in a giant 6' long ice cube laying in the middle of what will become my kithen. Before we had even closed on the property, Reid set up a tarp system under the failing roof that diverted water back outside and we pushed that giant ice cube out the door so that it wouldn't destroy anything else as it melted.



There was trash everywhere, including remnants of dead animals (mostly rodents), a mattress that was so water logged it had mushrooms growing on it, and a stove that had been wedged into a stairwell.





And now look at it. The building has a new roof, tuckpointed masonry, a fresh coat of paint to highlight it's Italianate details, it's garbage free inside and, with all the framing happening, has the smell of new lumber. A 3-story rotted addition has been removed. Rotten floorboards have been replaced and architectural plans are drawn. The pocket doors have been pieced back together (one had been sawn in half and both had been chewed by a fairly large dog) and the original arched wooden windows are being repaired and will be installed soon. Several rotted floor joists in the back of the storefront were replaced with pressure treated lumber.



Now, it's time for the historic storefront to undergo some much needed repair and restoration. A temporary enclosure is keeping it secure while the crew works to rebuild all of the floor joists under the front door. It's going to look spectacular once complete.