10K SF commercial, maybe mixed use building East Providence RI

[David Sisson]

About 3 months ago I purchased a commercial building in East Providence RI. This is about a 3500 SF footprint, on 3 levels, including the basement. The intention of this property is to move my architecture firm into & also have some rentable space to help finance the whole thing. It's a 1940 era concrete block building, with 12 foot wood ceilings, wood floors, industrial windows. We took a loan to renovate the first floor into 2 rentable units - 1300 SF and 1400 SF. I'm planning on putting my office on the 2nd floor (GSF 3500) - although I don't need this whole floor.

One of the challenges is rehabbing the building vs cost - a lot of delayed maintenance on the building (it was simply a storage warehouse for 30 years). My long term goal is to convert it to apartments or live/work units, but right now the best my budget can do is basic commercial space (white box). 

My goal of this diary is to hopefully get some advice, and some creative thinking going. In my area, small commercial spaces (class C or D commercial) do seem to be renting, but the market is much hotter for residential. Unfortunately, my cost for electrical, HVAC, plumbing, & fire protection is too high to do the residential conversion right now. Just getting one floor white boxed is taking all the $. 

Posting a couple of photos here

Exterior - front - we repainted two sides, to give it a bit more curb appeal. Obviously, it's  a basic industrial building. One thing I liked was that it already had 3 gas meters and 4 electrical meters, so it came with a bit of what we needed to split it to multiple units. Plenty of power supplied to the building.

One of the units under construction. 

Another interior shot. The block walls have been primed, and a big stack of windows waiting to get installed (to replace all the small ugly windows you can see in this shot). This unit looks horrible in this picture...but I'll post another one soon showing the windows installed and the walls painted. 

Here's one with some of the windows installed

One thing I'm mulling over is the conversion to residential. We'd probably max out at 10 one bedroom units (about 600 SF each) or could do fewer larger units. Although I'm an architect, I'm having a bit of trouble wrapping my head around the code requirements for live / work, especially in terms of HVAC (can we use the ceiling hung heaters or do we need new residential HVAC systems?), electrical (can we use the existing circuiting, or do we need new AFCI circuits everywhere?), and plumbing (can I do shared baths outside the units (allowing me to reuse existing baths - or do I need to build private baths inside each unit?). Getting solid answers on these questions could be huge in terms of the $. Obviously, any advice would be great.