This was by far the most challenging remodel that I or my team had ever encountered. Our job was not simple: we had to turn a one bedroom apartment into a five bedroom. When I was first tasked with the job, I was unsure about the procedures that needed to be taken. I was contacted by the owner of a rental company who owned a building in Manhattan’s Chinatown. He had been having trouble renting the entire apartment to single people, couples, or small families due to the price, so he decided to split up the apartment and rent out each room separately. While it was a good idea for him financially, it definitely cut out a ton of work for me and my crew. There was much we needed to do to prepare for this job.  There were already four rooms in the apartment outside of the kitchen and living room, so that made our job much easier. We still had to install electrical, and other necessities in three of the four rooms, plus we had to build a fifth room.

Installing the Electrical

While normally installing electrical into a home or apartment is not such an extreme challenge, this ended up taking much longer than initially expected. The building was extremely old and decrepit and was in a poorer area of Chinatown. We had to install at least one outlet in each of the other rooms (which had previously been used for various purposes) in order to make sure that all members of the apartment would be able to have light and heat. We had to cut a hole in the ceiling to run the wires through since it had previously not been hooked up to electricity. While this was challenging, we worked hard, and after a few days we eventually figured it out.

Building the Fifth Room

While the electrical only took my crew and me a few days to figure out and install, we knew that building the fifth room would be a much greater feat. There was not a ton of space for the installation of walls, so we had to get creative. We decided the only way we could do it would be to shrink the size of the living room. We put up two walls perpendicular to one another. The ceiling was too low to put a proper door in, so we rigged a sliding door. The owner told us to make sure that the room was large enough to fit a full sized bed, a bookshelf and a desk. He also asked us to build a closet. There definitely was not enough room for all of that, so we compromised and we decided the best way to maximize space in the fifth room was to install a coat locker instead of a closet. It was a bit of a squeeze, but everything eventually worked out.

Final Thoughts

This was by far the hardest job my company and I had ever encountered. The electrical was very hard to install because of the age of the building. Also, building the fifth room was far from easy. While I would probably not take on a project like this in the future, this was definitely a success and the client was extremely satisfied.  

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