Rehab

The floorplan of Mercy Haus was close and dark. The kitchen was in one of the smallest rooms and the living room situated at the darkest point in the house. The second floor was broken up into 4 small bedrooms, each with small windows at chin height. They felt like cells, and in fact one of the rooms had a padlock on the outside of the door. Creepy. I have been told that this room was used for their Rottweilers, in which case it is less? Creepy? It was clear to us that gutting the entire house was the only way to turn it into the best home it could be.

Christopher Alexanders “A Pattern Language” was instrumental in the design. It transformed the way we thought about creating a home and focused our attention on the influence design has on human behavior. The book is broken up into 251 different patterns for creating space with more life. You can read more about them here

http://www.patternlanguage.com/

Since we were limited in cash and time and materials our tentative plan was to fix up the original structure so that we could move in to fix up the two additions. This meant designing the house with the core essentials in 800 square feet. We opened the second floor plan to include a larger bathroom and bedroom letting each room breathe a bit.

The bathroom had been stuck under layers of vinyl tile and plastic tub surrounds. The fixtures themselves were not the worst, in fact the tub and sink were reused in the current bathroom. It was mostly the layout that effected the feeling of the space. The door opened onto a small window above the toilet, and you had to shut the door to see the tub or the sink. If the door was left ajar you were greeted with the view of the toilet, and the windows light did not reach the sink or tub where it would have been most useful. The final design left the sink under the window and a tiled tub that hid the toliet*. 

The demo slowed, it was now winter. Once the initial gut was done we spent too much time pushing garbage around and collecting more of it to use at some later date. Reality had set in. I was working part-time in an unheated warehouse earning just above minimum wage. We were living in a two room studio**and struggling to keep our sense of individuality. I tired easily and often took naps in our tub between house projects, bundled in my thermals, hats and gloves, dust mask on. We had done the easiest thing, breaking everything down, and now we had to impossibly fix everything we had torn apart.

*The final bathroom, was not completed until 2011. Ashby, my sister tiled right before we moved in!

**The winter of 2008 was spent at Jacks parents while we tried to figure out where to move, what to buy and if we were able to. After a unimpressive stay in Braddock in February of 2008 we sought out a friends sister in Pittsburgh and she was kind enough to let us stay with them for June and July while we sorted out our affairs and finally found a studio close to Mercy Haus where we could live while we worked on our fixer-upper.