A Marigny Renovation Story

I met with one of my favorite people this morning to discuss the renovation process of her double. Boy, did I learn a lot from someone else's first hand experience. Here's what she shed some light on: 

She bought her double a few years ago after moving down to New Orleans to retire after a few years of a passionate love affair with the city (New Orleans has a way of making you stick around, huh?). She took her time, over a year, to find the perfect one. She said it's very important to spend time in the neighborhood that you think you'd like to be in, as well as the local restaurants, nightlife and other services. Location is critical! Think about what you like to do, where you want to be and see if the neighborhood is a good fit. 

One of the first lessons that she learned was that it is important to show up to properties with a good team on these historic, old houses. Good inspectors are going to save you a lot of grief when they're checking the house out. Unfortunately, an inspector missed some major damage under the house by not crawling into the crawl space to take a look. Inspectors should ABSOLUTELY crawl under houses and check out things like pilings, support beams, etc. 

It is also a good idea to have a trusted contractor to come out there with you, who is in the know about what you're trying to do. Also, please get a termite and plumbing inspection. This house was torn UP with termite damage. She said that people don't realize how some of the "good" looking ones can really be in horrible shape underneath- be careful!

She ended up purchasing the property without realizing how much work actually needed to be done due to it being in such bad shape underneath the interior walls. This was not a blighted property, just a rental that a slumlord owned, renters on both sides- you'd think it would have been in acceptable condition. She estimated that it was 5x a bigger job than she had anticipated- the entire house needed to be rebuilt. She also says it cost her 2-3x the budget she anticipated (and much longer to do so), she warned to always have a cushion in the bank for a job like this. 

This story fortunately has a happy ending! She was able to rebuild on the same footprint and got to keep her historic facade. Most of the bargeboard in the house was unusable due to the extensive termite damage and the layers of beautiful yellow LEAD paint. She recycled and donated most of it, but reused some of it to build pretty impressive shelving in her beautiful kitchen and also her garden boxes in her cute back yard. She also borrowed the color yellow from the bargeboard to accent her kitchen walls as well since she was unable to reuse then like she wanted. 

Some other neat tidbits about the house: while they were renovating, they found a door that had been buried in between the walls of the two sides. She thinks a family must have lived there at some point and shared access to each other's homes. She reused this door in her side.