In the NY Post 10.1.09 

Combo mambo 

Upper West Side couple strives for sanity during extreme home makeover

By ADAM BONISLAWSKI

  Posted: 12:43 AM, October 1, 2009  PAUL and Carolyn Zweben have never been the sort to sit around twiddling their thumbs. Before becoming a real estate broker, Carolyn worked as an art consultant and appraiser for clients such as the Guggenheim museum. Paul, meanwhile, juggled a career as a chef (The River Café, Django) with managing a portfolio of buildings he’d purchased in Williamsburg and Windsor Terrace.Today, the pair can be found selling apartments at Prudential Douglas Elliman, where Carolyn, a senior vice president, works alongside Paul in their Upper West Side office. And Paul is still actively involved in the restaurant field as a partner in hot spots like BarBao, Calle Ocho and BLT Prime. (He still occasionally can be found in front of one of the eateries’ stoves.) It’s typical for him to wake up before 6 a.m., go buy fish for one of his restaurants, show apartments all day and then work the door at another of his restaurants in the evening.Paul and Carolyn Zweben have been renovating and combining their two co-ops since January. They have seen their budget swell and had their nerves tested.  In other words, this is a pretty busy couple. Not too busy, though, to undertake a massive renovation of their Upper West Side apartment. Actually, make that apartments — plural.In 1996, Paul bought a one-bedroom on the sixth floor of a Riverside Drive co-op (for the retrospectively insane price of $240,000). Eight years later, in 2004, he and Carolyn (who’d joined him in the sixth-floor pad) bought the two-bedroom below it. For four years, they dreamed of combining the two units. The plan was to renovate both apartments and connect them via a staircase built within an old ventilation shaft running up the middle of the building. They wanted to add a bedroom upstairs and convert the downstairs master bedroom into a dining room.In the summer of 2008, they began putting that plan into action, interviewing contractors to take on the job. They also worked to convince their co-op board to let them go ahead with the project — a process that involved, as Paul puts it, an “intense” amount of paperwork. And they had to pay the co-op for the stretch of ventilation shaft where they wanted to build the staircase because it was technically a common area. They got the 24-square-foot space for $8,000, or about $330 a square foot — not a bad price, Paul notes, for the Upper West Side.In January of this year, work on the project officially got under way, with a roughly $200,000 budget and a mid-November deadline — in time for the couple to have friends and family over for Thanksgiving dinner.Nine months later, the top-floor two-bedroom is more or less finished, but there’s still quite a way to go on the downstairs one-bedroom. And, as you might expect, after almost a year of sawing and hammering and being confined to the upper half of their apartment, the couple is starting to get a bit renovation-weary.“If I ever had to do it again, I would make sure I had an extra $40,000, $50,000 to move all of our stuff into another apartment, live there and get everything done in six months instead of a year,” Paul says.“I don’t know how people do it,” Carolyn says. “Our contractor [Paul Hartigan of Cortland Contracting] has been wonderful, but living out of boxes and not having a kitchen has been really stressful.”Adding to the tension are the unanticipated but inevitable issues that crop up during construction. Just as no war plan survives its first contact with the enemy, no renovation plan goes the distance without some serious tweaking.Paul and Carolyn Zweben have been renovating and combining their two co-ops since January. They have seen their budget swell and had their nerves tested. For instance, when the builders first opened the air shaft to start work on the staircase, they discovered a pair of giant sewer lines no one had known about. Luckily, the lines were dormant, and they were able to cut them out and cap them, but the extra labor added $3,300 to the tab.Then, several weeks ago, came what Paul refers to as “the change order implosion” — when bills arrived for the extra fees involved in making mid-job changes to, among other things, the wainscoting around the stairway, the moldings around the living room ceiling and the floorboards in the living and dining rooms. The price for these swaps? An additional $17,000.“I almost had a heart attack,” he says.Including that $17,000, the couple has incurred a total of about $35,000 in change-order charges over the course of the project, Paul says. Adding in the bills for things like architects, inspections and permits, the renovation’s estimated price tag has risen to about $270,000. In the face of these costs, some other items have fallen by the wayside — a pair of custom French doors for the living room, for example. “We scratched those off the list,” Carolyn says.Also potentially off the list is making over the kitchen. Although part of the original plan, the couple is now having second thoughts about pumping more time and money into the project.“We’re afraid to take on much more right now,” Carolyn says. “I think we might just paint it over and live with it for another year.”In that case, they’d at least be guaranteed a place to cook their Thanksgiving turkey. Whether they’ll have a dining room ready for hosting, though, is still very much up in the air. In fact, Carolyn suggests she’s starting to let that dream go.“I would be pleasantly surprised right now if we were ready for Christmas and Hanukkah,” she says. “All I really want is to have a holiday cocktail party.”That&rsquo
;s not to say that there are no signs of progress. Almost all the demolition portion of the job is complete. The new staircase is finished. The electrical work is done. There’s molding up around the living-room ceiling and a new subfloor in the bathroom. The new dining-room wall has been framed out, and last week the contractor asked the Zwebens for their paint colors.Still, progress or not, life in a construction zone isn’t easy. As Carolyn puts it, “I feel like we’re in a dorm room. There’s a refrigerator next to our bed. Eight o’clock every morning I can hear men chitchatting downstairs.“We’re starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel,” she says, “but it’s very stressful still.”THE MONEY PIT THE COUPLE Paul and Carolyn ZwebenTHE PROJECT Renovating and combining two co-ops on the Upper West Side into a three-bedroom, 2,350-square-foot duplexTHE START DATE Jan. 5, 2009ORIGINAL ESTIMATED BUDGET $200,000CURRENT ESTIMATED BUDGET $270,000ORIGINAL DEADLINE Mid-NovemberNEW PROJECTION “I would be pleasantly surprised right now if we were ready for Christmas and Hanukkah.”