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  • Odds and Ends, Excuses and Alibis- By now, I was supposed to have posted about the successful completion of my stained glass construction projects. Maybe because I was coming off that year-long second floor renovation I needed time to recharge before throwing myself into another marathon. Instead, I got obssessed with maintenance, humdrum projects and pontificating on the Old House Web forums.

    First up: the garden, or more specifically my nine hybrid tomato plants. I've had diminishing returns from my 'maters the past couple of years. Last year, half the plants died shortly after flowering. So I decided to consult with the masters: the greybeard Italian gardeners in the neighborhood. They said that my soil was probably DOA and that nothing I could add to it now would fix that tomato bed. Just mix in some manure and let it steep for a year or two. So I put the tomatoes in planters this year.

    Within two weeks I knew this was the way to go. With the rich, bagged topsoil the plants took off.
  • Happy Halloween- The neighborhood was a mob scene of power rangers and fairy princesses tonight. Our state senator had the brilliant idea of turning the park down the block into "Haunted Halloween" with a disco, a haunted walk, hay rides, a food court and kiddy amusements as a safer alternative to trick-or-treating. As a result, half the kids in Brooklyn were there. Then they assaulted my neighborhood for their sugar rush. Next year I want a government subsidy on my candy supply.

    Halloween is a kids' thing and since I don't have kids it's not exactly my thing. But I endure it and get to meet a few neighbors in the process.

    I haven't posted anything about the master bedroom renovation in almost two weeks. I haven't been loafing, just too busy to sit down and write anything. The plaster repairs are done. I skimcoated and primed the walls and have begun the wainscotting and preliminary finish carpentry.
  • Kitchen and Extension-

    I decided to approach the kitchen renovation and replacement of the rear extension as one project. Both were in such bad shape that it made no sense to build new on to old.

    Click on any picture to expand it

  • New Stained Glass Projects- I have several stained glass tasks in the queue here. Some, like the upper cabinet doors in the living room media cabinet, have been on hold since 2003. Others, like the funky stairway skylight, I've wanted to replace since the day I first saw the place.

    While stained glass construction is fairly mechanical and basically just woodworking joinery using glass and lead came, the design, templating and piecing out can be very time consuming. Most of the glass I've done here is fairly simple and angular to match the existing stained glass. But I wanted something a bit more ornamental for these new projects.

    The delay is mostly because I suck at drawing. I can muddle my way through Photoshop if I have to and I've even built a few nice web page banners using "creative appropriation" of assets conceived by others. Change a few lines, overlay a mask or two, morph a few elements and, poof, it's mine. Derivative art.
  • Miscellaneous Before/After Shots-
    the entry

    Click on any picture to expand it

  • Time to buy a bed- I can't freakin' believe it. All my tools are back in the shop where they belong, the paint's up, the room is clean, the nine-month saga of the master bedroom renovation.... so OVER!

    Okay, there are still a few things left to do: the cabinet drawers and doors, the hallway stained glass windows, the doorknobs. I'll get around to it.

    Over the last few weeks I've been finishing up the hallway, the two closets and my outside plantings. There's always a sense of closure when I lay that second coat of paint, especially after a nine month project. I used a wedgewood blue matte finish. It was down to that, salmon or a pale yellow. I couldn't decide so I just closed my eyes and picked one. I like it. It's sorta weird in these shots because the camera makes it look lighter than it really is.


  • Bay window trim (almost) done.- Sheesh. Another "almost" cop out.

    The issue here isn't woodworking but thermodynamics. The steam radiator that Richie from Sessa Plumbing installed is something called an "element". An element works on the convection principle: as hot air rises off the element, it expands and exits through a grill at the top. This creates a low pressure area underneath which pulls in cold air from the floor through a grill at the bottom. An element radiator usually comes in a butt-ugly metal cabinet. It's what that missing panel under the middle window needs to replicate.



    I'm gonna give you a private snapshot into how my disturbed mind works, or at least as private as a few hundred hits/day can be. Then maybe you'll understand why this bedroom renovation is taking me forever.

    Because I don't have that cabinet enclosure, I don't have a clue if this vent "engineering" involves some rocket science.
  • Phase 7: The Wrath of Details- Today officially begins the scheduled start of the next major phase of the renovation at My Old House: the rebuilding of the master bedroom and upstairs hallway. It started like most of my scheduled projects. In other words, it didn't.

    Dykes Lumber, which was given instructions to call me before delivery, arrived yesterday when I must have been out walking the grovelers. Granted, it's a contractor size order but, sheesh, even GC crews take lunch breaks, guys. They didn't call to confirm that they were even delivering yesterday so I could at least hang a note. For that matter, I still don't know what the charge is, although I'm figuring in the $2500 range.

    The delivery was rescheduled for Monday which isn't much of a setback because my weekend is shot anyway. I got volunteered to work with a bunch of dog people on the neighborhood dog run. DOT dumped 30 tons of wood chips just inside the dog run fence in a long mound, which provides a handy springboard for the more energetic pups (like Auggie) to jump the fence. So it's shovels and rakes for me this weekend. I'm glad my next door neighbor is a chiropractor.

    I thought of hooking the dogs to a plow and letting them do all the work. It would serve 'em right but where would I rent a plow in Brooklyn?
  • At last, that curved baseboard!- I've been pushing off this little project for a couple of months. The bedroom renovation began with construction of the closet and the curved plaster corner I absolutely had to have (if for no other reason than I'd never done one before). I knew that was going to create problems with the trim later but, hey, later is later. Six months later, later became today.


  • Mea Culpa.- Forgive me, blog, for I have sinned. It's been a month since my last confession. I've been so busy that I haven't found the time to sit down and write about what I was up to.

    I should break this update into a few posts. Lemme talk about the bedroom reno first.


  • My cute l'il attic- I built and installed the doors for the "attic" over my new closet. This being a row house and all, it's the closest it will ever come to actually having an attic.

    These doors were another scrounge job. It's leftover lumber and red oak plywood from the wainscotting and earlier projects. I'm on a kick now to reduce my lumber scrap bin.

    I think I did a pretty fair job of matching the pre-fab closet doors below. But I'm really undecided about whether to leave them like this or if it needs some additional trim element to finish them off. I'm undecided.
  • Dining Room-
  • Aaaand... done!- I completed all the woodwork on the bay window unit today. I won't play conquering hero either. With the weird angles and different depths of the windows, the embedded convection steam radiator, and more than a couple of measure-once goofs, I was very lucky to get through this without a major screwup.

    This weekend, I completed and installed that removable grill in the center of the windows. This was also a bit of work. There are seven boards and two store-bought but modified red oak grills in that face panel, all of them biscuited together with waterproof glue. I wanted no chance that heat and steam from a leaky air valve would cause problems with that lamination, as it did in the dining room cabinet. I was going to do some router scroll work between the grills. I caught myself just in time. It would have exposed those embedded biscuits.
  • My shop is a war zone!- I've completed boxing in the bay windows. I had to deal with these windows downstairs during the living room renovation so I knew this wasn't going to be a cake walk. The original builders pretty much winged the framing so the angles aren't consistent. The trim was essentially supported by a trash can full of shims... some of them three inches thick.


  • Al Bundy, Home Renovation- A few days ago, Jeannie from House In Progress referred a woman from a new ABC reality show to me. From the email it sounded like she was looking for folks who had gone way over their heads on a home improvement project and needed 911 from the professionals to bail them out.

    I told her that this was my fourth major construction project in 25 years and that I wasn't (*harumph*) a rookie at this stuff. I politely declined. But the next day I wondered if I wasn't exactly the sort of Al Bundy cartoon character she wanted. After all, I was three weeks behind where I wanted to be on the master bedroom renovation. That's a Bundy point right there: unrealistic expectations.
  • Hangover Eve- I've been working at a frantic pace on the master bedroom renovation the past couple of weeks, trying to get as much done before the official start of the holidays. That's why my blog is so stale. It's not just that the holidays are distracting but that some of my clients need to burn what's left of their fiscal budgets before Q1. Somewhere in those precious few weeks I'll also be on Nantucket to work on Karen's place.



    I thought I'd start with the "cute doggy" shot. Anyway, the trim carpentry in the large room is almost done. I still need to build the radiator grill and raised panels under the windows but that's a shop thing. Most of my tools are two flights up so I'm saving these for the end.
  • Rule #1: don't kill yourself- Work here has come to a halt for a little while.

    Several weeks ago I was working on our community dog run, shoveling wet wood chips like a teenager on dexadrine. I woke up the next morning with tendonitis in my right elbow. My next door neighbor is a chiropractor and told me to knock off the room renovation for two or three weeks to let it heal. I forged ahead as did my elbow pain. This morning I woke up feeling like I'd fractured the base of my thumb at the wrist. Back to Dr Joe, who reminded me what he'd said a month ago. Because of the pain in my elbow I'd probably been shifting leverage to my wrist. Now it's injured too. And if I keep it up it will spread to my shoulder and neck. Then he'll put me in a sling.

    Oh, the ravages of age. This, by the way, is apart from the six-inch bloody gash I gave myself on the same arm yesterday, trying to catch a falling piece of plywood.
  • Face Frame 101- There's a subculture in the carpentry world that one could call "wood nerds". They passionately argue with each other over arcane topics like fish glue and lumber humidity, armed with canons of really impressive woodworking knowledge. I learn a lot from them but after a while it's like listening to trekkie geeks debate the relative pulchritudes of Lt. Uhuru versus Seven of Nine.

    One of these contentious topics is "face frame" versus "32mm frameless" cabinet construction. Most traditional cabinets are face frame while "European style" cabinets are generally frameless, or boxes with full-width doors. Both work. That's about the extent of my interest.
  • Bah, humbug- It looks like slow going at BrooklynRowHouse but you'll have to take my word for it: trim like this takes a lotta time. I probably have 60 hours of woodworking just into this tiny ante room and it's still far from done. So what's the hold up?

    I won't spend a lot of time talking about my "real world" obligations, but my two oldest clients, Children's Health Fund and Operative.com, both hit me with a pile of work to complete before the end of the fiscal year, which is 12/31 in both cases. It's SNAFU for consultants like me this time of year. I'm used to squeezing in Christmas during a cigarette break.

    By the way, these are technically some of the worst pics I've ever taken but I liked the dogs in this shot.


  • Another mini-milestone reached- Just like software development, I like to break big projects down into milestones and mini-milestones.

    • MilestoneMini milestone
    Wall prep (done)
    Structural carpentry (done)
    Finish woodworking Wainscott east wall + outlets
    Window and door trim - large room
    Complete wainscott - large room
    Window trim and wainscott - ante room
    Construct and install dresser and cupboard - ante room

    Ahhhh... here were are (check!)


  • As If!- Here's the dubious segue to an on-topic post.

    My local dog run is under political attack from some panty waist co-oppers who started a petition this week to close it down because of barking dogs at 8am. Don't these people have frikkin jobs? But I digress.

    So we're going to have a summit with the various Owls Head dog run groups: the 7:30-9am "breakfast club" (my dogs' pack), the 10-12 noon "lazily retired", etc., elect a spokesmodel and assert ourselves in The System to save our precious dog run and perhaps convince the Parks Dept to spend a few bucks making some sorely needed repairs. Screw these whiners; we need a new fence!
  • How to blow $300 in three seconds- Six years ago, I was building the bar for our new restaurant in Brooklyn Heights. The bar was four plywood cabinet carcasses with a laminated mahogany top.

    A friend of mine and I stood freezing in the unheated storefront staring at the chop saw, the bar, and a sixteen foot piece of 8" rabbeted mahogany cap moulding we were going to use to trim the edge. The object of our fixation was a ninety degree corner. It's a simple cut except when the moulding costs $18/lf and it's the last last piece that Dykes has. We only had one chance to get it right. Which one of us had the juevos to make that cut?

    We spent an hour measuring, second guessing, aligning the saw, making test cuts on scraps, postponing the inevitable. John was fed up and proved he had the bigger pair. The cut worked. Well, close enough for his Harbor Freight Special miter saw anyway.
  • It depends on what "almost" means...- I've been looking forward to this day for months. Almost all the trim, the doors, cabinets, etc are done! What's "almost"?

    By "almost" I mean that the center of operations moves downstairs to my shop. The remainder of the trim work -- the cabinet doors and drawers, the panels under the bay window, the stained glass window, the overhead closet doors and even the curved baseboard moulding for the closet corner have to be fabricated. I need my stationary power tools for this stuff.


  • Ten gallons of sawdust later...- I finished cutting 208 feet of bolection moulding for the wainscotting in the bedroom reno and guess what? I needed 216 feet to complete the job, dammit! I knew I was cutting it close (literally) but I only had a couple of (expensive) red oak 1x8s left which I need for the wainscotting shelf. I'll dig into my red oak scrap pile and cut the remainder this afternoon.

    Anyway, I was right. A bolection moulding is just an inverted base cap profile with a rabbet. After my router bit quest, I settled on a $28 base cap bit from Woodside.

    So it was back to the shop to rip a bunch of red oak to the 1-1/4" width I needed for 26 eight-foot blanks, which I thought would do the job if I planned my cuts carefully.

    Man, this shop needs cleaning and reorganizing after six months of this renovation!
  • Maybe a roof rack?- Not counting the 12 year-old Pontiac wreck I owned for all of four months and on which I managed to put maybe 400 miles before I donated it in disgust to a charity, my 2001 VW Golf is the first car I've owned. I've been a motorcyclist since I was 18. When I lived in Manhattan, it was all I needed, or wanted. But when I moved to a 'burban house with a garage, I had to get four wheels, if only for lumber runs. That's pretty much all I use it for too. I've had the car for six years and it just broke 14k miles on the odometer. I put more miles than that on my last Harley in the first year I owned it.
  • The Staircase-

    When you tackle a home renovation project you'll inevitably question the taste and common sense of the previous owners. This is one example. It’s a hundred year-old, carved red oak staircase obliterated by cheap paint. Something like this would cost at least ten thousand bucks to build from scratch today and it would still lack the same wood quality. Then again, I've never understood why anyone would prefer paint to natural hardwood.

    Click on any picture to expand it

  • Yet another "cool tool" article- I've blathered a lot on the blog about the coolness of routers but another tool I use quite a bit is a biscuit joiner.

    Wuzzat? A social dinner roll? Bread glue?

    It's a tool I first saw TOH demigod, Norm Abrams, use back in the 80s. Okay, let's be honest: Norm has a shop full of bizarre, narrow purpose tools. But a biscuit (or plate) joiner is really useful, especially for edge-laminating boards as I'm about to do here. It can also be used to strengthen mitered corners or to insert alignment pins. I did the latter when I installed the heavy mahogany header in my garage door surround.
  • The Somerset (NJ) Woodworking Show - any NYC area bloggers going?- 
    Feb 16-18, 2007
Garden State Exhibit Center
50 Atrium Drive
Somerset, NJ
(exit 19, Route 287)
    Sponsored by Wood Magazine

    This will be like my 8th or 9th visit to this show. It's like a crack house for woodworking junkies. Every conceivable tool, useful or not, is on display and usually being demonstrated. At least half of my present shop was purchased at one of these shows, including my Delta X Unisaw and Dewalt SCMS. I also load up on all my sandpaper, nitrile gloves and other consumables for the year. The prices are that good.

    If there's an answer to my still unanswered question, "what router bits do I need to make bolection moulding?", this is where I'll find it. All the router bit gurus are there from CMT, Freud and Whiteside.

    I've never done a seminar there but there are two that are particularly timely for me at this stage of the bedroom reno: Doors & Drawers and Understanding Finishes. Most of the seminars are free, BTW.