Rapid Reno Expert, Naomi Findlay, is in New York City highlights the importance of embracing the old with the new when renovating, to maximise your profits!
Hi everyone! It’s Naomi Findlay here, Australia’s Rapid Renovation Expert… and I’m actually coming to you from New York City right now!
That’s right. I’m going to try and pan the camera around so you can see I’m on the rooftop terrace of an apartment in New York City… it’s just a humble suite, a little terrace that I’m renting out for my stay here.
I’m very fortunate that I get to travel the world for my work and travel the world looking for amazing renovation products, renovation ideas, and getting to teach and speak…
Now, the lesson that I want to talk to you guys about today, the success tip, is the importance of not being a demo diva.
The thing I’ve noticed here in New York – they are amazing at not throwing out old, just to bring in the new – they really embrace old materials, older fixtures and fittings, and how they can juxtapose new finishes next to old finishes.
You can see behind me, this is actually the door from the apartment that I’m staying in – the very small, very sweet, one bedroom penthouse suite that I’m staying in – and it leads out onto this gorgeous deck.
So, as you can see, we’ve got some beautiful lights here, we’ve got a beautiful view of the city, but the thing I want to show you today is how that they’ve embraced the combination of old and new material.
This is literally an original wall of the terrace next to me, and you can see here that this is an existing chimney stack, all the way up to the top there.
These guys have obviously needed more space in their penthouse, they’ve needed to expand it just that tiny bit so they can ‘swing a cat’ – so what I wanted to show you guys is the amazing use of this clad. This is like aluminium cladding, I guess it would be similar to the new beautiful profile of the colorbond, the really square colorbond.
It’s not like one of the more expensive aluminium wraps, it’s literally in sheets and it looks like it’s been hex-screwed in, and the thing that I love so much about it, is that it butts straight up to the old… the new and the old.
And there’s so much we can learn from that. So much when you renovating, you can actually save yourself sooo much money and you can do things quicker – if #1 you don’t tear down the old, and #2 you only tear it down when you really need to for functional purposes, or maybe compliance purposes, or #3 you can also consider that if I was to pull this down, I’d have no doubt that there would actually be an existing wall there. I doubt that they have even ripped the old one out.
So guys, this month’s success tip is embracing the old with the new when renovating – working out how they can live together – you can save yourself a fortune – you can produce a beautiful, quality product… and that’s a wrap from me in New York City!