A floor full of storage. Now the floor pays rent.
The typical DC configuration: a lower level with its own walk-out entrance, and the primary residence beginning on the second floor.
By the time we walked it, the lower level had accumulated so many years of belongings that it was difficult to tell what the rooms had originally been for. There was a bathroom and a small kitchen at the front, and dim, closed-off storage and utility space behind. The owner wanted income. The floor was already his.
The plan organises the main living areas, the living room, the dining area and the bedroom, in a zone along the right side of the long space. The entry, the kitchen, the bathroom and the closet run along the left.
A wall separates the living area from the bedroom, and the bathroom straddles it as a Jack and Jill, so it is reachable from the living side for a guest and from the bedroom side for whoever lives there. Bright colour does the rest of the work in a floor that starts with limited daylight.
The direction of the money changed. He is not paying for the house; the house is paying him.
And a steel beam, uncovered during demolition, painted orange against a black wall. Nobody knew it was there. It is now the brightest thing in the room.
"It was difficult, even for us, to see the potential in a dim, damp and crowded basement. But I knew the apartment was already in there."
Luis Boza · On the first walk-through
Have a floor doing nothing?
Most owners assume the code is a wall of no. In much of DC a rowhouse can hold two full units by right.
Read what your zoning allows →Rather talk it through? Start with one question.
