and throw away the keys

Today we visited a real estate open house (one of my favorite forms of free recreation) at the former jail in the next town. The main building was constructed perhaps in the 1830s, of massive granite blocks. The developers have carved new window openings (oddly placed in the units, generally) out of the walls and the floor-to-floor height is very large, so that smallish rooms have tall ceilings, like 12-15 feet tall.

The challenge must have been (hello, capitalism!) to maximize the number of 2-BR units. It's cleverly done in a developer sense, but not so clever in terms of the feel of the spaces. I am pretty sure that the people who laid out the units have no sense of the spatial quality of the rooms thus created. It was a plan-puzzle exercise rather than a 3D spatial exercise. But it must be very costly to gut the interior and build these units so I can't say I blame them for trying to maximize return-on-investment.

Some of the building was still open to studs (their insurance co must have been unaware of the open house) and I have to say that the construction sequencing was puzzling. They are at sheetrock and skim-coat in many places where they still haven't sandblasted the exposed brick walls. Shouldn't they have done all that prep work first??

But anyways, an interesting afternoon, and Mom came with us and found it interesting too, so a good day all around.