Lost Art Press

Anthe Update No. 5

Posted on by Lost Art Press
The first floor of the Anthe building on Saturday. The retail store is coming along. All the drywall is required by the county for fire suppression.

When you rehabilitate an old building, your plans have to change (almost daily) to keep things moving forward and to code.

The “code” part of the project is what has been driving us for the last few weeks. We want the building to look like it did when we bought it and was empty. But it also has to be safe and adhere to the county’s regulations if we ever want to occupy it.

This week, the fire-resistant drywall went in around the stairwell, and it was (honestly) a bit dispiriting. I know we are going to cover parts of the drywall with beadboard (some of it original), which will look better. But the drywall really changes the look of the place. And it made us re-evaluate how we are going to use the second floor of the building.

The second floor with the required drywall (the steel ceiling had to be pulled off for the drywall – not our call). The boxed-in stairwell shrinks the space for our offices. We will likely give this floor up to storage.

My hope all along has been to use the second floor as our editorial offices, with excess storage at the rear of the second floor

But after the walls went up to meet code and were covered in the first layer of drywall, it was obvious that the second floor isn’t ideal for offices. The fire-resistant walls interrupt the building’s front windows. And the resulting space (and all the mechanicals on the wall), made me rethink the space.

I think we are going to devote the entire second floor to storage. 

After some thought, this makes good sense. The second floor has a double door at the rear (right above our loading area). We can use our forklift to put pallets directly into the second floor from a delivery truck. No elevator necessary. 

The third floor is more spacious. Plus we don’t need to remove all of the ceiling. This will likely become our offices. I hope….

The third floor looks like our future editorial offices. The fire-rated drywall area is much smaller, so the space is more open. And we don’t have any plans for it yet. This allows us to grow with lots of storage on the second floor and offices on the third floor, with room for workbenches and all the other things in my head.

Despite all this faffing, we are getting close to occupancy. If our schedule holds, we will be able to move fulfillment operations to Anthe by the end of this month. 

It’s not all dispiriting. We have a new functioning awning on the front of the building, which looks fantastic and works. Our bathroom works and is to code (after moving a wall about 5/8″).

And this is my fourth rodeo with 19th-century building rehabs. I know it is always worth it in the end. I had a similar crisis with all of the other buildings we’ve rehabbed. We get through it. And it’s awesome.

Thanks for all of you who have helped fund the restoration. It has made a real difference.

— Christopher Schwarz

31 thoughts on “Anthe Update No. 5”

  1. Hi Chris and crew

    Could you please resend round the link to help with the funding of the Anthe building refurb – I love what you guys do and am keen to make a small contribution.

    Thanks

    OJ

  2. See if code will allow fire suppressant intumescent paint instead of drywall.

    I know we got that approved for two story projects in Murray KY.

    Patrick

  3. Thanks for the update. It’s nice to see things coming together.
    Did you ever give any thought to contacting the This Old House folks?

  4. It’s great to get to see the progress your making — when thinking of the work-in-progress photos you’ve shared previously of the Willard Street downstairs renovation, and how that place looks now, it is really exciting to try to imagine beyond that bare drywall!

    Keep on buckin’ them bronco buildings!

  5. The word is waffling, not faffling🤪. Just kidding, glad you’re moving along.

    1. Faffing: ” to spend your time doing a lot of things that are not important instead of the thing that you should be doing”

      2. So there goes my idea of you selling your house and moving to te third floor of the Anthe building to be closer to work

        1. So there goes my idea of “Fitz” selling “her” house and moving to the third floor of the Anthe building to be closer to work

      3. Love seeing these updates, and glad the project is moving along so (relatively) smoothly, despite the challenges and inevitable compromises. Can’t wait to see it completed.

  7. I think that the smooth ceiling will contrast nicely with the brick walls and the windows and also brighten up the space even more. I’m sure it will look great when it’s all done.

  8. pretty soon you will be the ‘go to’ person in town for building rehab! Just a little side gig for all that time you have on your hands, LOL.

  9. … (after moving a wall about 5/8″) … sheesh. May I ask what required this drastic rework?

  10. Thanks for the update. Sounds like you have sorted out the second floor. I doubt this would help but if you put thin brick over the drywall on the second floor, do you think that would help its look? Sounded like it was more of a light and flow issue by the new wall though.

  12. Sorry to the audience for my detour here. There is over 100 years of history (and many times that, depending on the perspective) in this country of learning from past failures, and involving professionals from a lot of different fields of expertise, that gets us to where we are today with building/construction codes. Sum total- do we provide the minimum to keep occupants safe and healthy? Provide accessibility? Provide safe paths of egress? Prevent, compartmentalize, and supress fire? Provide structual integrity? Protect the neighboring structures?

    The Codes are a set of minimums that a jurisdiction (fed, state, local) has established to answer those questions. The code is the business I’m in. Daily, I see the wonderful and the horrific. I love shaking hands at the end of a successful project. I hate being on the scene of disasters.

    Stay safe.

    1. Sum total: Do we balance the cost (financial, aesthetic, opportunity costs and so forth) with those purported benefits? Should the owners and occupants have something to say about balancing those costs and benefits out?

      I’m not against codes and regulations, but those writing and enforcing them seem often to tally up only one side of the ledger.

    2. We didn’t conjure up building codes from spite. They all originated because of problems, often leading to injuries and death. Others are there out of decency and basic humanity to facilitate access to those who need help. Thank God for building codes.

      The codes are really not onerous, either. No one is making owners replace wiring and plumbing. But if you take down the plaster, you need to upgrade. I’ve seen folks spending $100,000 to remodel a kitchen complain about having to spend a few extra bucks on wiring and plumbing vents.

      I can feel Chris’s disappointment in what firewalls did to his initial vision. But people died horrible deaths in factory fires in the years the Anthe building was built. They never had to upgrade when they were still in business. But now that it’s changed hands, it’s time for those long overdue upgrades. Despite his disappointment I know he’s a safety first human being.

      1. We always meet or exceed code. And I am not complaining about the codes. I am just disappointed that we had to lose the flow of the second floor. In the end, it will look great, work great and be safe.

        BTW, we are waiting for the final report, but I’m told we passed our first drywall inspection.

        1. That’s good news!

          I can feel the disappointment, and I’m sure it will turn out great. And there’s never any doubt you’d do things properly, in a first-class manner.

          You folks have all been running yourselves ragged this year. Really ragged, even for you. Please make sure you’re taking care of yourselves so you can enjoy the fruits of your labor.

  13. I lived, temporarily, thank heaven, in a building that was not up to code. The kitchen floor was slanted toward the center of the building. It, and several other buildings, had been built on a hill but they had skimped and not used casons on the clay slope that also had small natural springs in it which undermined the foundations. I know this because my father was in heavy construction and would mention that they were not building to code every time we passed during construction. I never expected to live in one of those buildings. The slope from the back door (in the kitchen) to the little hall (in the middle of the buildling) was almost 3 1/2 inches over ten feet, The owner was a cheapskate and wouldn’t mudjack the building and as it was the one at the bottoem of the hill the pressure from above of the other building wa also pushing it off the already compromised foundations. I was very relieved to get out of there. It’s only a matter of time before that building either collapses into itself or slides the rest of the way down the hill. The new owner has no clue and there was no inspection done by a competant building insector or the city. There are 5 apartments in that building, a huge void under it and nothing done to stabilize it or bring itup to code.

    1. Sounds like the Millenium Tower in San Francisco. It is a high rise condo tower they built 15ish years ago in San Francisco. Rather than pound pylons through the landfill and into the bedrock, they opted for a big cement tub to “float” the building. I lived nearby at the time and thought it was a bad idea to stray from tried and true technology. My speculation is it cost less to do it this way. Unsurprisingly, the building now leans on the order of 12″ out of plum at the top and they are now trying to drive pylons down to bedrock to fix it. So far doesn’t seem to be working and some windows have popped out of frames near the top. Lawsuits a plenty with lots of the blame game.

  14. So because the orientation of the second floor stairway landing is toward the front windows and the stairway had to be boxed in to meet the fire code, it ended up intruding into the planned office space but the third floor didn’t have that problem because the third floor landing was oriented away from the windows, correct?

    Just trying to visualize the layout in my head based on the two pics.

    1. The third floor walls occupy MUCH less space because there is nor stairwell going up from there. It terminates. So it occupies about half the space as on the first and second floors.

      The boxing around the basement is similarly small because there is no sub-basement….

  15. It’s too bad there’s not another path to meet the code requirement, like adding a fire suppression system instead of walking off your space.

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