New Apartment

Unquestionably the biggest project over the past few years has been buying, renovating, moving into, and now equipping a new apartment (including beginning to build out a new workshop!)

Rough timeline

We started looking seriously in ~May 2025, paused for a little while since there was nothing we especially loved, and then started looking again in August. We probably viewed around 20 apartments before finding one that we were happy with. We purchased it in December, then spent the first few months of 2026 arranging for some alterations - basically knocking down a wall in order to create a workshop, and renovating a bathroom into a darkroom. Excellent for resale value, I’m sure. We finally moved in April, and since then have been slowly unpacking, and I’ve started building out the workshop.

We saw a few really cool apartments that we had to pass on

Alterations

The apartment was great, but we had a few things to do:

  1. Combine the dining room + spare bedroom into a workshop.
  2. Renovate a spare bathroom into a darkroom.
  3. Odds and ends - repaint the black room, cut down a kitchen counter overhang, swap the kitchen sink.

It took about 3.5 months to arrange the architects, GC, permits, etc, which was agonizing - but once the GC got started, the demolition and construction went super fast. I only have a few photos, this was like day 3 of construction, they’ve got half the demo done already. You can see how much more open the workshop feels than the dining room + bedroom combo. I understand why the dining room + bedroom combo might have been more practical, but I do think this corner gets the best light in the apartment.

Truly shoutout to our GC here - his work was excellent, but moreover, he was unbelievably communicative throughout the process. If you’re ever doing apartment renovations or alterations in NYC, get in contact and I’ll recommend him. Skipping ahead in time a little bit, what will fill the bathroom after it gets renovated? A darkroom!

Darkroom sink

I searched quite a while for a darkroom sink, but couldn’t really find anything that matched what I was used to from Technique that was easy to source and moderately priced - basically a giant flat sink, not for holding an especially large amount of water, but to put trays of developing chemicals in so you wouldn’t have to worry about splashing. A few of the places I found, but didn’t decide to go with:

In the end, I figured although a stainless steel sink was nice, I could probably just make a wooden sink to my exact dimensions, coat it with marine varnish, and have that be good enough for at least a few years. So, in a project-within-a-project moment, I set off to build a giant sink in my then-extremely-crowded apartment. Luckily I had enough scrap plywood to build the basin and cabinet structure, and went to Home Depot to pick up some poplar 1x material for the basin walls, toekick, and “backsplash”/”countertop” (the thing the faucet is screwed into).

I very, very carefully measured the room and especially the door - I wanted the largest sink I could get (hoping to do 20x24 prints eventually) while still having room for the door to fully open and enough room for the faucet.

The sink was dry fitted together at first - the drain hole was cut with my Shaper Origin (thanks Audrey!), which was significantly more accurate than a jigsaw and significantly less effort than a circle cutting jig for a normal router. I also drew up the sink in CAD so I could figure out the exact dimensions and offsets for the rise/run slopes I needed for appropriate drainage (rule of thumb is 1/4” rise per 1’ run, which actually adds up pretty noticeably over a 5’ wide sink). I used calipers to judge the fit in the corners, and used a block plane to sneak up on the exact fit to make sure everything was locked tight. There’s actually no screws holding the sink floor to the walls, it’s pure friction fit and epoxy.

I started the finishing process with about a tube and a half of Thixo to get a nice fat radius in all the corners. This was definitely too much, and it was not the tidiest application. In the future if I really cared about getting a clean bead, a few things I’d do differently:

  1. I’d get an appropriately sized silicone scraper - the one I had was about a 3/4” radius and I needed more like 3/8”, so I wound up using my (gloved) finger to even out the epoxy, which got very sticky very quickly.
  2. I’d lay out tape guides like they do for aquariums, so that the squeezeout doesn’t get on the wood and can be peeled up more easily.

In the end though, it’s a wooden darkroom sink and as long as it’s waterproof, it doesn’t have to look that pretty. After the thixo was applied and set, I put on 7 or 8 coats of water-based marine varnish. It did indeed dry very quickly, so I got all the coats on in two days. All in all, supplies from TotalBoat were ordered one weekend, I took a trip to Home Depot Saturday morning, had the sink dry-fit by 10pm Saturday, Thixo applied by midnight, and most of the coats done throughout the day Sunday. I finished up a few bonus coats Monday night before hauling the sink over to the new apartment on Tuesday, right before taking off for a trip to Korea. I came back after the trip to finish assembling the sink.

Bonus alterations

Returning to the main theme - apartment alterations. Here’s a few bonus photos.

Packing

The alterations approached completion much more rapidly than we expected, especially given that we were away traveling in Korea for a good chunk of it, so packing became a panicked rush. Also, I have accrued at least 0.1 Bayley’s worth of cruft.

First, things were disassembled, and there was chaos

And then things were packed and transported.

Equipping

The one most massive upgrade of the new place is that I finally have space (and power - I got a pair of 208V outlets installed) to get a proper tablesaw indoors as well as a proper dust collection setup. No more needing to wait for the weather! Getting the big equipment into the apartment was an adventure. Things are on wheels instead of pallets now, so maybe they’ll be a bit easier to get out if we ever move, but I hope that’s a very long time from now…

The first bit of new equipment to arrive was a 61” Husky Tool Chest, so that I could start organizing the workshop. Surprisingly, this came (1) early, and (2) pre-assembled, so I could pretty easily just wheel it up to the apartment, minus the atrocious turning radius that made this very difficult to navigate out of the elevator and through the maintenance/trash room. Still, this was easy mode compared to what I was up for next.

Next to arrive was the dust collector. I got a G700 because it’s the quietest full-sized dust collector that exists - it’s only about as loud as an A/C when running on low, and not much louder when running at full tilt. It’s also compact and has good performance. It also weighs 445 lbs and has a shipping weight of 510 lbs. And I don’t have a pallet jack or engine hoist. The plan was to use some of workbench casters to be able to jack it up just enough to wheel around. That just barely worked, turns out pallets aren’t really designed to take torsional loads like that, and this particular pallet had no middle support, so the middle basically dragged on the ground the whole way there. Between myself and one of the building staff, we managed to shove and heave it into the elevator and then into the apartment. Removing the dust collection bin probably shaved off almost 100 lbs, so between the two of us we could sorta muscle it around.

The last big item (for now) to arrive was the table saw - a SawStop PCS 3HP, which I was thrilled to finally get a real cabinet saw instead of a mobile jobsite saw. It, again, weighs close to 500 lbs shipped. My plan was to run it back with the workbench casters, but again, that plan fell apart in short order. This pallet had support in the middle, but was even worse at resisting torsional loads. Similarly to the dust collector, I managed to get away with it by partially disassembling the pallet, carrying up the two wings and all the accessories by hand, and then dealing with just the main body as the final step. The main body is just light enough (and the center of mass is off-center enough) that I could lift one side and wheel it around on just two wheels, so again, with much struggling, I was able to haul it inside.

Projects!

Now that the workshop was equipped, I could start on projects!

3d printer cart

First up, a rolling cart for a new 3d printer. This’ll be part of a larger shelf redesign for the office, but I wanted to start with the 3d printer cart so that I could wheel it around out of the way if need be, and also to clear out all the filament. This cart was designed for two drawers of filament, each holding two rows of boxes, for a total theoretical storage capacity of just shy of 100 spools of filament. I hope I never hoard that many, but I do have about 45 rolls and a handful of accessories.

Other

In the spirit of putting things on wheels, I also put the old kitchen island on wheels to use as a semi-mobile workbench in the workshop. It’s amazing that I first wrote about this thing just over 6 years ago. It’s still going strong!

Conclusion

There’s plenty of future projects - the aforementioned shelves for my office, setting up a networking shelf, bookshelves for Amy’s office (boy that’s a lot of shelves), likely combining the kitchen island with another cabinet I made a few years ago, and many more. I absolutely love our new apartment, I feel incredibly lucky to be in a position to purchase something like this. I get excited every weekend to go into the workshop and build things, and I think I’ve already completed as many projects in the past 3 months of living here as I did in about the last year at the old apartment, just because I was so cramped on space.

As always, thanks for reading! :)

Tags: #engineering