HyggeHus: Office, Showroom, Investment, and Home.

Having long since grown out of the home office in our kitchen, we needed to find a place where we could establish a multi-membered office, small showroom, workshop and warehouse. This category two building checked all those boxes and gave us the opportunity to gain rental income.

Preserve, update and renovate. The balance between protecting the history of the building, updating dilapidated materials, and using not only quality but resilient materials for long term rental use.

A lot of wear and tear comes with a building built in 1906, especially when it's been used commercially and as a rental. The history in this building and neighborhood is rich, so going into this we knew we wanted to preserve as much as financially and physically possible, then use our aesthetic to update with modern elements when needed.

Water infiltration, cockroaches, rats, drop ceilings, fluorescent lights, structural damage, outdated electric, leaking plumbing, and HVAC were just some of the issues we needed to address.

We had a budget we hoped to stay within but once we opened up the walls, we realized it would be far more than what we had hoped.

We reached out to the the NorthEnd Neighborhood Association and were lucky enough to receive a city grant to help with some of those extra costs. There was a lot of potential with this building: flat roof for future deck/garden space (beehives are definitely in the vision!), extra office space to convert into studio apartment, unfinished basement to be remediated and turned into usable real estate, so we knew that even if we went over budget, with sweat equity and time, we would not only be creating a fruitful investment, but putting money back into the neighborhood with job opportunities, classes, workshops and community involvement.

Keep an eye out for more blogs on the different areas of renovations for the building and scroll through the photos and videos below to see where we started from.