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http://www.houzz.com/ideabooks/20091473

AFTER: After searching through dozens of kitchen photos on Houzz featuring black granite, the Freemans determined the look they wanted very quickly. “The ideabooks allowed us to communicate with Michael and Colleen much faster,” says Jessica Freeman. “It was an absolute dream to work with them.”
Michael closed off the kitchen ceiling and repainted the cabinets in a bright white. The cabinets had to be removed during construction, but he put them back in using almost the same layout. A new granite countertop and gray tile backsplash add contrast to the color palette, while new pot lights and ceiling pendants make the kitchen feel brighter than it did with the higher ceiling.

Facebook is for grandparents | Waccabuc NY Realtor

http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2013/11/24/

It’s time to move on. The feeling is becoming more and more significant with each passing day and it just keeps spreading.

It’s just not it any more… we want something new, exciting, which can take us places we’ve never been. We want to be surprised again. We want a new, better social network.

Facebook may say its user base is growing, but original members from the last decade appear to be leaving in droves. As more niche networking services and platforms enter the space, people are finding that not any one company is serving all of their networking needs. Our tastes and channels are becoming fragmented, and users are pushing back on accepted norms in the social media space.

This is inevitable. It’s a natural life cycle for any product; unless it somehow becomes a living organism with its own reproductive system and evolution, one will eventually wither and die. Facebook cannot evade this process – it regenerates with nuances, but is not reinventing itself.

For inventions, it usually looks like this:

Early adopters as shown in the Rogers’ bell curve

This curve is missing something important – the two-way migration that happens over time. When the late majority joins in, the innovators and early adopters are already feeling uncomfortable.

Facebook today doesn’t resemble a thriving, living metropolis – it’s more of a friendly neighborhood bar. For that reason, FB will face its cruel destiny of simply fading away. Living in the same city as your parents is forgiven and acceptable; there is enough diversity and distance between everyone. But finding yourself sitting in the same bar as your mom and dad – that’s horrifying. When your father posts pictures of sunsets and breakfast on his wall you know it’s over.

The conclusion is undeniable; a new social network is needed. These are the things that will make it awesome and sustainable…

Most Popular Manhattan Rental Listings Of The Last Week | Waccabuc Real Estate

Let’s continue the countdown >>

Yesterday we rounded up the top 10 most expensive rental listings in the city, but those places aren’t exactly where most of the city’s renters are looking. So today, we are looking at the top 10 most popular Manhattan rental listings of the past week, according to data from StreetEasy. The listings, which were sorted by the number of pageviews, highlight that everyone is always searching for the best deal—the most expensive unit on this list is a $3,000/month two-bedroom.

↑10) 32 East 7th Street, East Village The listing for this two-bedroom makes no mention of a living room, and judging by the photos, there may not be one. The kitchen is small, and one of the bedrooms is a super weird shape, but it’s just $2,350.

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↑ 9) 402 East 78th Street, Upper East Side A no-fee 1BR/1BA near First Avenue is listed for $1,895, and the photos looks pretty great, but the place has been sitting on the market for more than two months. The price was also recently reduced by $155, and there’s a free month of rent, so it seems like there’s something wrong with the place that’s not evident in the listing.

↑ 8) 226 West 16th Street, Chelsea There are no photos of this 600-square-foot 1BR apartment, which is never a good sign, but the price, $1,995, has obviously attracted attention. The listing says the unit is rent-stabilized and has a full kitchen, but it also says the rent is $2266.52.

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↑ 7) 322 West 11th Street, West Village Possibly the nicest unit on this list is this 2BR/1BA asking $3,000 per month. The kitchen is small, but there are high ceilings and both bedrooms can fit a queen-sized bed.

↑ 6) 551 West 165th Street, Washington Heights For just $925/month, there’s a furnished studio next to the Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center. The brokerbabble describes the building as “immaculate, secure and very safe,” but the place looks like a hotel room in the photos.

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↑ 5) 10 Jones Street, West Village If this listing for a $2,200/month one-bedroom in the West Village seems too good to be true, that’s because it is. It’s actually just for a bedroom in a 2BR/1BA duplex apartment that has 16′ ceilings and exposed brick walls. The photos were taken at nighttime, which always makes apartments, no matter how nice they are, look like a scene from a horror movie.

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↑ 4) 251 West 15th Street, Chelsea Between 7th and 8th Avenues, there’s a small duplex asking $1,680/month. The kitchen is teeny, with a half-sized refrigerator, and the sleeping loft looks like it’s only about 4-feet high.

http://ny.curbed.com/archives/2013/11/20/the_most_popular_manhattan_rental_listings_of_the_last_week.php

Fantasy and reality meet head-on in photos of costume fans in their own homes | Waccabuc Homes

Almost everybody has worn a costume at some point in their lives. For Halloween, a school play or just make-believe around the house. But for others, it’s an every-weekend thing.
For these costume enthusiasts, there are numerous communities. Cosplay followers dress up as characters from comics, anime, video games and film; LARPers (live action role players) get together to perform fantasy scenarios dressed up as cowboys, knights or other characters; furries wear furry animal suits for fun; and so on.
But most costume fans have normal day jobs, families and homes in which they put on regular clothes to cook dinner and watch TV. Looking to capture this strange world and the people behind it, photographer Klaus Pichler took photos of costume wearers in full regalia in their most revealing of spaces: their homes.

Pichler spent three years taking photographs for the series, titled “Just the Two of Us.” He spent most of that time “researching people or communities with interesting costumes,” he says. “Quite hard work.”
This homeowner created a custom Cookie Monster costume for a private Carnival celebration.

Cosplay (“costume” plus “play”) is a Japanese-rooted practice; its followers portray characters from Japanese comics (manga), cartoons (anime) and films. This handmade cosplayer costume depicts Jaken, a character from the InuYasha manga series by Rumiko Takahashi.

Star Wars is perhaps one of the most-loved sources of muses for costume adopters. The 501st Legion is the official worldwide Star Wars fan club, founded in 1997 and based on George Lucas’ film series. Here a young Stormtrooper sits in a living room.

http://www.houzz.com/ideabooks/19997078

Meanwhile, Boba Fett spins a DJ set at home.
Pichler says he chose not to reveal any personal information about the people other than what’s shown in their homes. “I consciously decided to depict the persons in a way that the civic identities disappear behind the mask,” he says. “I tried to create a special kind of tension that’s linked to the refusal of answering the crucial question, Who is the person behind the mask?”

Top lenders forecast housing market gains despite new ability-to-repay rules | Waccabuc NY Homes

Top lenders forecast housing market gains despite new ability-to-repay rules | Lubbock Online | Lubbock Avalanche-Journal.

Midtown Equities Empire Stores | Midtown Equities Dumbo for Waccabuc NY Realtor

Midtown Equities Empire Stores | Midtown Equities Dumbo.

Supporting a Wide-Span Floor With Structural Steel | Waccabuc Real Estate

http://www.jlconline.com/framing/supporting-a-wide-span-floor-with-structural-steel.aspx

When my client described how he wanted to convert his home’s existing two-car garage into a spacious new living room, I knew it would be a great project for my design/build firm. Measuring 34 feet deep by 28 feet wide, the garage space was a blank slate — little more than an unheated box with a concrete slab for a floor. The garage had a full-height attic that he was planning to convert into a master suite, and the first floor had plenty of space for a nice living room and his many collectibles. The only problem was that the wide-open floor plan he wanted wouldn’t be possible until we figured out a way to support the second floor’s main girder, which was propped up by a steel I-beam running down the center of the garage (see Figure 1).

To transform this garage (top) into living space with an open floor plan, the author replaced the existing steel I-beam and supporting column with a framework of custom-fabricated decorative steel (bottom).

When we started the design process — specifically, figuring out how to create a unique space and support the second floor without posts or columns — I immediately thought of local steel fabricator and sculptor John Rubino, whose decorative steel beams are on display in various residential and commercial structures in northern Vermont. Although these structural elements function much like ordinary structural red iron, the stylized beams look anything but ordinary.

With the client’s go-ahead, John and I worked out a plan: We would support the top half of the building without intermediate posts and simultaneously create a living space using exposed steel framing that would become an integral part of the overall design. While John spent about a month fabricating the steel in his Morrisville, Vt., shop (see “Fabricating a Custom steel Beam“), my crew and I readied the building for its new structural elements.

The steel design was relatively simple — two upside-down U-shaped frames connected to another beam running perpendicular to them at the center. Designed with a graceful sweeping curve, the connecting beam would replace the garage’s existing center I- beam and eliminate the need for supporting columns; it would also add a sculptural element to the space.

Getting to Work

Before delivery of the steel, we built a pair of 2×4 walls that would temporarily support the second floor while we removed the existing steel I-beam and posts. Even though we had to frame new openings for a 6-foot patio door and several windows, we purposely left the existing garage-door openings in place to make it easier to bring the steel inside.

About a month after finalizing the plan, John backed his delivery truck into the garage and we lifted the beams off with a chain hoist (Figure 2). John had welded on lifting points near the center span of each beam, to help keep the components nice and level as they went up. This was good thinking, because this steel was meant to be exposed and had been spray-painted and finished with a water-based clear finish called Safecoat Acrylacq (AFM, 619/239-0321, www.afmsafecoat.com). This coating is pretty tough, but we still had to handle the steel with care so as not to scratch it. The lifting points made the process a lot easier and safer.

The 1916 Proposal To Expand Manhattan By 50 Square Miles | Waccabuc NY Real Estate

Thompson’s reason for the plan + how much it would cost >>

In the early 20th century, land reclamation was such a popular idea that at least once a decade, some engineer proposed filling in a New York waterway to make the city bigger and better. There was the 1934 plan to turn the Hudson River into land, which came 10 years after a plan to drain the East River. But both of those bonkers plans were preceded by an even more ambitious scheme, put forth by a Dr. T. Kennard Thomson in a 1916 issue of Popular Science. Not only did he want to fill in the East River, but the plan also called for creating a “New Manhattan” to the south that would subsume Governors and Liberty Islands. He also wanted to build new islands and tack new land onto Staten Island and New Jersey for a total of 50 square miles with 100 miles of new waterfront property.

Thompson was no crackpot engineer with fanciful ideas. He designed and built pneumatic caissons (water-tight supports) for dozens of bridges across the country, consulted on more than 20 New York skyscrapers by 1916, and helped create the New York barge canal system. Even still, he admits in the first paragraph of the Popular Science article that his new landmass idea “seems somewhat stupendous,” but he was convinced that creating new land and more shipping areas would ease congestion both on land and in the harbor.

Through his proposal, City Hall would become the literal center of the city, with a radius of surrounding land stretching for 25 miles. “…Within that circle, there would be ample room for a population of twenty-five millions,” wrote Thompson. The whole thing would take “a few years,” and supposedly hundreds of engineers supported his proposal.

The cost would be “a great deal more than the sum involved in the construction of the Panama Canal,” but Thompson believe that “the great returns would quickly pay off the debt incurred, and then would commence to swell the city’s money bags until New York would be the richest city in the world.” The Panama Canal cost the U.S. about $375 million, and Thompson’s endeavor would require “an annual expenditure” of $50 to $100 million. By today’s numbers, that’s a hefty amount more than $1 billion every year.

The plan would be carried out in phases, the first of which would be to extend Manhattan from the Battery to within one mile of Staten Island. Then the boroughs would be connected with new subway tunnels, which Thompson said would increase the value of Staten Island from $50 million to $500 million. Next, a large island would be built off the shore of Sandy Hook, which would protect a “new harbor” created by the addition of two new pieces of land jutting off Staten Island. The point? To create 40 miles of new docks, shipyards, dry docks, and coaling stations that could accommodate the biggest ships in the world.

After that, the East River would be wiped out. “Naval authorities agree that the East River is no place for the Brooklyn Navy Yard,” wrote Thompson. The Navy Yard would move to new land in Newark Bay, and a new East River would be cut through Brooklyn and Queens, connecting the Flushing and Jamaica Bays. A new Harlem River would be created as well, slicing through upper Manhattan from Hell Gate to the Hudson River. The old East River would be filled in, upon which new highways and “business blocks” like Grand Central’s Terminal City would be built. And of course, more subways would run beneath the new acreage.

t.kennard-thompson-2.jpg

Obviously, his plan never came to be. By 1930, Thompson must have realized his ambitious ideas would never become a reality, and he drastically scaled back the plan to include only the “New Manhattan.” Instead of filling in the East River, he proposed fusing the new island to New Jersey and creating a Four Mile Boulevard with three tiers, one each for car, trains, and planes. But given that New York’s harbor looks much the same as it did when Thompson dreamt up his scheme, we all know how this story ends. · A Really Greater New York [Popular Science via Google Books] · 1916 Plan for NYC Proposed Fusing Brooklyn and Manhattan, Building New Islands [io9] · 486 – “A Really Greater New York” [Strange Maps on Big Think] · Curbed’s Could Have Been archives [Curbed]

Mortgage rates drop for second straight week | Waccabuc Real Estate

Amid data that has lowered expectations for the performance of the housing market in the fourth quarter of this year, mortgage rates dropped for the second straight week.

Rates on 30-year fixed-rate mortgages averaged 4.1 percent with an average point of 0.7 percent for the week ending Oct. 31, down from 4.13 percent last week but up from 3.39 percent a year ago, according to Freddie Mac’s latest Primary Mortgage Market Survey.

Rates on 15-year fixed-rate mortgages and five-year Treasury-indexed hybrid adjustable-rate mortgage (ARM) loans also decreased, while rates on one-year Treasury-indexed ARMs increased.

“Fixed mortgage rates eased further leading up to the Federal Reserve’s (Fed) Oct. 30th monetary policy announcement,” said Frank Nothaft, vice president and chief economist at Freddie Mac. “The Fed saw improvement in economic activity and labor market conditions since it began its asset purchase program, but noted the recovery in the housing market slowed somewhat in recent months and unemployment remains elevated.”

“As a result, there was no policy change which should help sustain low mortgage rates in the near future.”

Source: Freddie Mac

– See more at: http://www.inman.com/wire/mortgage-rates-drop-for-2nd-straight-week/#sthash.Yi9iOhYW.dpuf

Mortgage originations expected to fall 32% in 2014 | Waccabuc Real Estate