Before and After: our garden level

Today we are going two floors down from my last post about our bedroom on our top floor. We are going down to the garden level of our house, which has seen many incarnations since we moved in. On this floor we had to pretty much gut out everything and reconfigure it all, as you'll see in the before pictures it was dark, dingy and uncared for. After our initial renovation I used this floor as my studio (such a nice big space!) until we needed some extra income, so we started renting out the garden level as a separate apartment. Our house is a legal "two family" residence, as many brownstones are in Brooklyn, which has been really nice for us to be able to rent out our bottom floor and have an income from our house. It has a separate entrance, underneath our front brownstone steps, so it is fully separate from our top two floors of the house, but we do have a stairway that connects the two floors which we can open up if we choose. Here is a view of the entry way on the garden level when we bought the house,

and here is the same view today,

In preparation for selling the house we stopped renting out the garden level last December, and we have started using the whole building for ourselves again. You can see the stairs in the above picture that head up to our kitchen and parlor level. We converted the front room on the garden level into a playroom, which the kids are thrilled about. Here is the front room before,

and after,

another view, before,

and after,

and, since I think that the playroom is just about the cutest thing ever, here is another quick view...

At the back of the house on this floor we now have our guest room, which was another pretty scary looking kitchen when we bought the house, here it is before,

and here it is after, this is the part of the room that was the kitchen for our rental unit,

another before of the same space,

and after,

here is where we have our guest bed, on the other side of this large room,

and here is a before shot of the bathroom on this floor,

and after.

I'll be back with the before and after pictures of our new front door in my next post!