Wednesday, April 7, 2010

The remodel next door

A few months ago the apartment manager told the S.O. they were planning to rehab these townhouses (to the left of the pool), which are one-bedroom lofts, into either 2 bedrooms or 1 bedroom with a den, in hopes of attracting more tenants.  I think our one-bedroom loft-style apartment is fine (despite the occasional day when I'd kind of like to be able to lock the cat out of the bedroom)(hard to do when two of the walls are more like railings), but apparently I'm an exception.  Most prospective renters apparently aren't that thrilled with the current floorplan.

Given the snail's pace taken in rehabbing the building that burnt almost 2 years ago (they're still not done to the point of actually renting out any units in it), I did not expect to see any construction activity until sometime in Obama's second term.  I was wrong.


I got home from work today and discovered two roll-off dumpsters in the parking lot, the doors to all the vacant units open, and several radios blasting out norteño tunes.  The demo has begun. 

The S.O. was wrong, too.  He's been totally convinced there wasn't a scrap of insulation in the walls in these buildings.  Now that the drywall is gone, insulation is visible on both the exterior walls and the party wall between the townhouses. 

I  hate to see them destroy the historic integrity of the buildings -- they're circa 1968 -- by changing the fenestration on the side facing the pool when they put in a different second floor window, but it's hard enough to find decent tenants for an older garden apartments complex with minimal amenities (no weight room, no wifi, no covered parking, just the outdoor pool that's usable for maybe 4 months of the year) that I can understand why they're doing it.

Plus, if we stay here long enough (and I have no plans to move any place else as long as we have to be in Atlanta), I will eventually get to enjoy a space that can be a cat-free zone.  We've been told that once the unit next door is done, we can move into it without experiencing any increase in rent.  If we do, that will be one of the easier moves we've made.

2 comments:

  1. Sounds good, actually. I wouldn't worry about the changes to the exterior. I remember 1968. It was a terrible year for building design. One of a whole lot of bad years for it, in fact.

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  2. That wall of glass on a western exposure in Georgia was indeed a bad design, but more for functional reasons than aesthetics. Before the trees grew up these townhouses must have been unbearably hot and stuffy May through September.

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