Take the garage door facing the street - it's electric and rolls up into a wood-covered window seat in the bedroom. Or the staircase leading to the loft bedroom - floating treads of oak attached to a steel support system. Sclight designed both.
Does he have a professional design background? Not for this type of work.
"I don't let lack of knowledge stop me," he says. "I'm just a jump-into-the-pool kind of guy. I've been building things since I was a little kid. . . . I can look at something and see how it works."
When he walked into the garage so long ago, he knew what he wanted to do.
"I wanted loft living," says Sclight, who lived in Manhattan for 20 years; counts among his professions commercial photographer, adjunct professor, and set designer; and now is a property developer.
The journey he took to get the home he wanted was perhaps more arduous than other DIYers have traveled. When he bought the garage - and the 1840s Victorian dwelling it came with - in 2000, the plan was to restore the dwelling's three apartments, rent them, renovate the garage for his own use, and live in the property's storefront while the rehab work was going on.
He started with the apartments, for income's sake. At the same time, Sclight says, "I was teaching seven courses in three states and in my first semester at grad school."
For six years - a bit longer than he thought - he lived in a space no bigger than some people's living rooms. But instead of sharing space with just a sofa and a TV, Sclight also lived with table saws, shop vacs, and so on.
The storefront and a hallway will be the last spaces renovated, so the former is still used as a workroom. Tools are everywhere, and the floor is covered with sawdust, its blue linoleum tiles partly on, partly off.
But, indeed, from chaos comes creation. There doesn't seem to be an inch of space in Sclight's home that hasn't been thought out.
