I generally try not to criticize other people’s architectural taste. That said, there are certain rules about buildings that I’ve learned the hard way and/or watched other people learn the hard way. For example, as nice an apartment with a terrace in a pre-war building in Manhattan is to live in, understand that your terrace will be taken over every so often by a contractor with hanging scaffold. That doesn’t mean don’t live there – if someone offered me an apartment like that at a price I could afford, I’d take it – but also, don’t get upset about the occasional appearance of scaffold, because it comes with the territory.
However, my advice when you see this
in a building is to give serious thought to turning around and never coming back.
Someone has carefully cut gypsum bard to fit between the floor joists, leaving the bottoms of the joists exposed. This is inevitably referred to in real estate sales as a beamed ceiling or exposed beams. It’s a really terrible idea. First, the old plaster ceiling that was removed to do this provided some measure of fireproofing. Since heat rises, doing this exposes the most vulnerable part of the joists to fire. If the plaster was damaged, then put in a gypsum board cileing and it’ll do the same thing.
Second, there’s no way to seal the joists between the joists and the gyp board (you could literally use sealant, but that would be ugly). So count on odors having an easier-than-usual time going from one floor to the next.
Third, between the joints being not sealed, and the fact that the joists are physically exposed, count on sound transmitting through one floor to the next easier than usual.
Fourth – and this may be a little esoteric, but it’s real – New York rowhouses are not barns. Wood framing was, historically, never exposed anywhere but maybe in the service areas in the cellar. If you want a frontier aesthetic, maybe you shouldn’t be living in brownstone Brooklyn.
Fifth, if you see something that looks like the picture but then realize that the wood is not the joist bottoms but rather is strips of wood mounted to the ceiling to fake exposed joists, turn around and walk away because that’s just tacky.
Finally, if you’re wondering about the post title, you have a treat waiting for you in the form of Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
Permalink