What’s up everyone. Chris Kennedy here with Mayfair Real Estate, and I’m here in our Victoria Park Project. This is project update number one. We’ve now started work in the apartment. As you can see right here beside me, we’ve got a pile of demolition debris and we’ve actually made some good progress already one week into the project. And I’m going to take you through the updates, show you what we’ve done and where we’re headed.
Okay. So one of the main things we were doing in terms of layout in this unit was to open up the kitchen. And what you can see here is we’ve already taken this wall that was here, remember we had an electric panel and kind of a corner here that had a closet on it. We’ve taken that out and we were taking the wall down to a half size, so we’re going to put the countertops here, extend it out so we’ll have a breakfast bar and a counter top that goes around the corner. Also, from the structural point of view, since the guys have been putting in this, you can see, as you saw in the previous videos there was a ton of damage to the wood here.
So some of that was pulled out, we pulled out the old plumbing. They’ve gone in and they’re starting to put in the support columns here or trusses so that we can put up the new drywall and put this whole apartment back together.Okay. So like we said earlier, we were going to go ahead and open up this kitchen and you can see here, we’ve already accomplished that the wall has been taken out and the guys have left a half wall here, put in some new wood on top. This is going to form the base of the breakfast bar and countertop area.
So we’ll have a nice open kitchen looking into the living room.So you’ll see our team has been making progress here in the kitchen area where we had a lot of rusted out pipes, corroded pipes. We had to pull out the lines bringing the water into the kitchen area because they just were in such bad shape we couldn’t really salvage them. So the guys will be running new lines into the kitchen here. You’ll also see, because we had a lot of damage to the studs and the wood here. We had to replace some of those and put in sister beams here in order to just provide a place to put up the new drywall and obviously provide the structure for the new kitchen and electrical and plumbing going in.
So in terms of the layout that we’ve decided on, we’re going to have the refrigerator here, it’s going to be opening this way into this area. And we’re keeping the location of the original sink right here. And then we’re going to have cabinetry, cabinetry. And then over on this side where all the junk is, we’ll be putting in the range, the microwave and some additional cabinets. But in order to prepare for that, obviously we’ve got to run electrical, which we’ll talk about in a moment, but we’ve also got to make sure we’ve got the right structure in place. So you’ll see here, we’ve got new wood, pieces of two by fours that have gone in, and we’ll be doing that on this side too so that we can actually attach the cabinets to those. And we can also attach the drywall to those on the flip side, inside the bathroom here.
All right. So here we are partway through the electrical update. And what has happened is that the guys have already put in a brand new panel. They flipped it onto this wall, as opposed to being located in the kitchen. It’s given us more space in the kitchen. So here’s the new panel and you can see it’s wide open. The circuits are already being run throughout the house. So the way this works, in general, basic understanding is that the electrical service comes in from the utility company, FPL in this case, it comes into the building and then it goes to the meters outside the unit, outside the apartments, and then there’ll be a line from the meter to in here. And that comes in down here, this is the main electrical line coming into the unit. And then the function of the circuit breaker or the panel is to separate that out into different circuits within the house.
So right here, they’ve already started labeling lighting, refrigerator, bath, kitchen, bedroom, et cetera. And you can see looking around the apartment, a bunch of different areas where they’ve run the electrical lines into the receptacles and that sort of thing.So I’m standing here in what used to be kind of a hallway area that is now not so much of a hallway because we’ve opened up here and you’ll see we’ve put in a new door frame around here. Now, before there was no door here and actually what we had was a closet here and another door here. We have shifted across the one side of this door, opened it up wider, and we’re actually going to use this closet to put in a stackable washer dryer unit. And what will happen is you will have a door here, it’ll open and you’ll come in here, washer dryer here and a much more open space to get into the bathroom.
So the overall result in this design is that we’re making a much more open feeling space, it feels larger, and people will really like that. And obviously we’re putting in an in-unit washer dryer, which is for people as opposed to having to go elsewhere to do their laundry.So here we are in the bathroom starting to put things back together again. And from here, you can see we’ve put in some new studs and what these studs are going to do is, among other things, they’re going to be what the drywall gets anchored to and we’re in the bathroom so a lot of this is wet area. We’re actually going to use a different dry wall, it’s typically called Durock. It’s similar to dry wall, except it’s water resistant, meaning that obviously in a bathroom, using a shower, the Durock can get wet and it’s not going to create a problem. Whereas if you use regular drywall, even if you’ve got tile on top of it, if water starts seeping in there, you start having issues with sagging, the tiles coming off, et cetera.
So these new studs give a place for the drywall simply to be installed. They’ll put screws through here. The drywall goes up or the Durock in this case and then the tile will go on top of that.All right. So we decided to go a little bit of a different route with the air conditioning in this apartment. I’m outside the property here. We are going to go with a mini-split system, but we’re actually not doing two heads. It actually worked out to be more cost-effective to do two separate mini split systems. Meaning we’ll have two exterior compressor units each with their own individual head unit. The benefits of that, aside from it being actually a little cheaper to do, is that even if one of the AC system goes out there’ll be a backup system. Meaning it’s unlikely that the resident here, if one AC goes out they’ll probably still have another air conditioning unit. It might be in the bedroom or in the living area, but at least they’ll have some air conditioning, which is great as opposed to having all or nothing.
Now, I’m outside at the back of the apartment here. We’re going to put one compressor at the back and one at the front towards the side. And what you’ll see here is what our electrician has done, this is the electrical wiring that’s going to connect to the mini-split compressor units. This is a shutoff, this is what you would use to basically stop power going to this compressor unit if it needed to be serviced, you can just open this up and pull the shut off. And then here is the conduit for the wiring to come from that electrical panel inside from one of the circuits, for the AC unit number two, the wiring comes down here and it goes in at the roof. So it comes out of the electrical panel into the ceiling area. It’s wired across the ceiling and then comes down to the conduit here to the shutoff.