Monday, January 8, 2007

The Search Continues, and Uxor Way is found

After the detective agency, my mom and I looked through realty websites ourselves at first, but then began talking with Maureen States, a real estate agent for Neighborhood Realty in Regent Square right by my apartment and my parents' house.

To start with we looked at some regular houses in the Regent Square, Edgewood and Southside areas in case I changed my mind and wanted to do something more traditional. After looking a bit I still wasn't struck by anything. One day Maureen called very excited and told me she'd found the perfect thing for me. When I went to see her to take a look at the documents she'd printed out it turned out it was a large 20' x 72' garage that my mom and I had seen online before in the Southside but had dismissed it without looking at it closely.

We went and looked at it in person and my initial reaction was "it's really cool, but it's not big enough". My mom and Maureen though though it was plenty big and that I was crazy. At the time I envisioned having a work-out room, a studio room, a bed room, a TV room, an outside area, a roof deck etc etc. After we'd looked at it my mom and I drew it up a little and began to feel a bit better about it, though still a bit unsure. A little while later we went and revisited it and an architect friend of my mom's who live in the Southside nearby named Andrew Lang stopped by to check it out with us. He instantly could see its potential and had a very different plan than what we'd imagined: don't live in the garage portion... live above it. It was such a simple and obvious solution to a number of the problems we were stuggling with. Adding a second floor made significantly more room, allowed for light to be let in, left room for several parking spots and just gave much more flexibility and total worth to the end result.

The only two major downsides we saw to the property at this point was the fact that it's located in an alley and the difficulty of building the second floor. The alley it's in is one way, very narrow and allows parking on one side. It's narrow to the point that you definitely want to turn your mirror in when you park on it to avoid it being smacked off. It's a bit difficult to manuever down at first, but over time it's not a problem, and the other advantage of this is that it cuts down on traffic. If I go to sell it in the future, I imagine this aspect will scare some people away.... hopefully not everyone though :P

The other issue of building the second floor was difficult because of a zoning code which states that you are not supposed to build on the property line and walls of structure must be 5 feet set-back from the property line. The purpose of this is to avoid fires spreading from one building to the next. This law is fairly new, and so most buildings in the Southside, and many other areas do not adhere to it. Another code which is broken in many instances in the city is that you cannot add windows to walls already built on the property line, because again, it facilitates the spread of fire from one building to the next.

In her work my mom's dealt with situations like this where a code restrict a project and she knew that to get around this, we would need to get a variance from the City of Pittsburgh Zoning Board. Once I made the call that I did want to go forward with purchasing the building we spoke with Maureen and got her to write in our ofher to the seller of the garage that our purchase of the property would be contingent on me getting the approval to build the second floor. After agreeing on a price, the legal process began....... more on this to come soon.

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