Here's a view of our former home facing the Prince's Canal in the Jordaan neighborhood of Amsterdam. Before we moved in, though, we did quite a bit of renovation to bring it up to date. At right is the new floorplan, which we implemented in the first half of 2002. The bottom faces the canal, and our neighbors shared the entire length of our left and right walls - windows at front and back only! At the top of the plan was our "back yard" - a 20 square meter (215 sq. ft) deck terrace. The front door is at the right side of the leftmost "2 hal" square, which is also the stairwell.

You'll notice, first of all, that the apartment is narrow and deep. This is in the style of most Amsterdam properties, and the reason for this design dates from a few centuries ago - taxes. At the time this neighborhood was first laid out, back in the 1600's, properties were taxed not by total area, but by the width visible from the street. (Easier on the tax collector, I suppose) As a result, people tended to build their homes as narrow as they could to avoid paying taxes.

This apartment is no exception, but here's the amazing part - it's really two properties side by side that have been combined. The originals were each half the width of the present combined property, at 3.25 meters - or only 10 1/2 feet wide! The depth, excluding the deck terrace out back, is 16.75 meters, or 54 1/2 feet. The middle "2 hal" was originally an airshaft - a necessity for such a long narrow space.

You might notice from the blueprint at the right that the left and right halves are mirror images of each other. One of the major revisions we made was to remove some of the redundancies - like the two toilets and the three showers.

Now let's take a look at the renovations...