master bedroom

• Plague Walls- With great reluctance, I pulled myself out of my sick bed to get back to the master bedroom renovation, which means more demolition. Lovely.
  
  A couple of hours later Karen called to see how her patient was doing. Karen's an anesthesiologist who had to leave medicine because of a severe latex allergy. So she takes things like breathing both personally and professionally. When I told her I was ripping down old woodwork and plaster I thought her hands were going to zoom through the phone and strangle me, Bugs Bunny style.
  
  "Are you <bleeping> nuts, you stupid <bleep>?! Do you want bronchitis or pneumonia? Do you want your lungs full of mold spores while you're still fighting off a fever?"
  
  Message received. I told her I'd stop and hung up promising to go back to bed. I just didn't say when. I went back to work, making a note to look out the window every few minutes to check for her car.
  
  As usual, she was right. Even with a fresh mask I lasted about another hour before I started coughing like a coal miner. I knocked off, showered (I'm glad I installed that steam generator) and had just crawled back into bed when the doorbell rang. It was Karen. Talk about cutting it close.
  
  Anyway, I got this much done.
  
  What you don't see is the mess that was living behind this woodwork. Really fine spooge, like grey talcum powder mixed with sand. To avoid stirring up dust sweeping it I decided instead to use the central vacuum to clean out the cavities as I opened each one of them up. My vac, a VacuFlo, is one of those bagless tornado action units that exhausts the really fine dust outside, under my back deck. After sucking up a pile of this stuff I went into the office to answer an instant message summons when something caught my eye out the window in my back yard.
  
  Omigod, FIRE!! The back yard was full of billowing grey smoke belching from what appeared to be my basement. I ran downstairs in a panic, yelling at the dogs to pack their milkbones. But the basement was fine. It was dust from my central vac's exhaust port. Whoa. I figured that it probably wasn't in the best interests of public health to keep doing this. I managed to completely fill the vac's six-gallon collector bucket too.
• We have a winner- Yesterday was a rough one for me. For those who keep up to date here (there are a few of you and I really appreciate it), you know why.
  
  But today was a new day and, in a weird way, I figured I owed it to my buddy Chopper to get this place one step closer to completion. After all, this was his home too. So I returned (again) to the stained glass. While I have five stained glass projects ahead of me, at least the design of ONE of them is finally locked in. What did that take me? Sixteen months? I can't wait to post about the completion of this project, presuming blogs are still around in 2015.
  
  A lot of the credit for settling on the design goes to the folks on Old House Web forums and to a couple of people on the forum at Brownstoner.com. I was reaching the point of cognitive overload, scratching my head about whether stained glass even worked for that cabinet. I was getting ready to slap a couple of sheets of plywood in those doors until one of the OHW users, probably tired of reading my bellyaching about it, took one of the designs and 'shopped it into a photo of that cabinet.
• Returning to the stained glass saga...- Let's see. I finished painting the back wall, the tomatoes are flourishing, I lost 20 pounds... I've managed to exhaust all my excuses for not starting another project. Rather, I'm returning to a project I said I was going to have done by now.
  
  This marathon stained glass project breaks down to six sub-projects, or milestones in TechnoSpeak:
  1. Two door panels for the master BR bureau.
  2. Two window panels for the master BR hallway window.
  3. Two upper door panels for the LR home entertainment unit.
  4. Skylight over the staircase.
  5. Bathroom skylight.
  6. Three sealed light boxes for the back yard fence.
  
                             
  Up first, are the bureau panels. I'm not sure if I ever posted a pic of the completed bureau but that was another tail dragger. I think the finished doors sat against the wall for six months before I hung them. Yes, another fine example of HSC: Home Stretch Complacency.
  
  Anyway, here it is, with my large cache of Nantucket and motorcycle teeshirts. Each stained glass panel is 11"x31". And here's what they'll look like, as designed in GlassEye 2000.
  
  GlassEye is an amazing piece of software. I'm totally (like totally) sold on it. But one of the things it doesn't do is impart judgment on the part of the operator. My concern with this design is that it might be a little too detailed for such a relatively small area. This will be a lead came, not copper foil, job so at the very least I'm probably going to need to use a maximum of 3/16" face came. I hope Albert Stained Glass carries it. Shipping lead tends to get expensive.
  
  Some of the cuts are way too tricky for a wheel glass cutter, even with a grinder. So I did what I always do to kick myself out of an HSC stupor. I bought a new tool.
  
  It's a glass bandsaw, a Gryphon Omni-2 diamond wire saw. I've been wanting a glass bandsaw for a while, ever since I had to cut twelve small circles for another project. I spent an entire evening with a glass grinder doing those. YGlass.com had it on sale with a coupon for three replacement diamond blades so I bit.
  
  The next step is acquiring the materials. Albert has a pretty decent stock of art glass on hand so I'm hoping I can find something to approximate these colors and textures. GlassEye has a large database of commercially available glass but I doubt that any local vendor carries more than a tiny subset of it.
  
  Talk about it the Stained Glass Forum.
  
  
• "George is gettin' frustrated...!"- The saga continues on the stained glass design for the master bedroom bureau. I created two more designs (below) that look nice but seem inappropriate for this piece.
  
  I'm beginning to think that stained glass in general is too heavy for this cabinet. I considered using cane instead except my cat would make short work of that. Trixie hops up on the window sill, opens the sock drawer and sleeps in there. Giving her a climbing wall would be a mistake.
  
  Then I remembered something I've seen in old movies: wire glass. You see it a lot in Hollywood set depictions of judge's offices. It's like chicken wire safety glass except the wire is more decorative and usually made of brass. I've never actually seen this stuff in real life so I don't know if it's an actual product or something you sandwich between two panes of glass. All I know is that I spent a fruitless afternoon Googling for it. If you ever need to know about glass coat hangers or glass-impregnated wire, ask me.
  
  Does anyone know what this stuff is called and, better, where I can find it?
• 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.
  
• Engineered Flooring HOWTO v2.0- I don't like drywall. I like plaster. I don't like composite mouldings. I like hardwood. I don't even like prefab mouldings. I like to cut my own. So why would I like something as new-fangled and artificial as engineered flooring?
  
• The Mystery of the Ducts To Nowhere- (Or "Why A Duct?", with a tip o' the hat to the Marx Bros)
  
  This house has ancient, single-pipe steam heating. From what I've been able to determine from digging in these walls over the past seven years is that it's always had steam heating. Nothing interesting there.
  
  What's baffling is why the house also has ancient metal air ducting buried inside the walls. I discovered this shortly after I moved here when I ripped down the basement ceiling and found three vertical ducts to nowhere. Over the past hundred years, various plumbers and electricians had used them for service pulls. So did I when I ran 3/4" copper to the second floor bath, the central vac piping and various electrical branches from the basement panel.
  
  
  
  I moved the renovation activity into the upstairs hall two weeks ago. After ripping off an old baseboard for replacement, you can see one of those ducts here.
  
  
  
  Here's a closer look. The ducts are a fairly heavy gauge steel wrapped in another layer of corrugated steel, which functions as plaster lathing. It's real nasty to work with. It takes quite a bit of effort to knock a hole in this stuff. Because the ducts aren't anchored to anything, you can't use a saw on them. They just flap around, loosening the surrounding plaster. And after you succeed with tin snips you're left with metal edges as lethal as a machete blade.
  
  There used to be an old baseboard outlet here. I hate baseboard outlets. They're inconvenient and a trip hazard when anything is plugged into them. My intent was to move that outlet up the wall. But once I removed the baseboard and saw the ducting (which I'd forgotten about) I decided I liked my unlacerated flesh more than I hated baseboard outlets.
  
• A hundred pounds of plaster later...- It worked! It took four days, three fifty pound bags of plaster, a makeshift profiling knife and a couple of finish coats but the radiused closet corner is done.
  
  There was only one mishap. Jack the Dog, my Newfoundland, was standing at the base of the ladder looking up at me when about 8 ounces of wet plaster fell off my palette and landed squarely on his head and muzzle. Against his black fur it looked like he'd been smacked in the face with a custard pie. So there was a quick diversion to the back yard for a bath before the plaster dried. He took both ordeals in good spirit but when I got back my batch of plaster was hard as a rock. So I had to run out for another bag.
  
  If you're new to our three-part closet drama, Episode One was the framing. It was followed by the exciting tragedy in Part Two: the skinning, or the Drywall Strikes Back.
  
  Anyway, I cut my homemade knife to the profile I needed from a scrap of masonite. I gave it a couple of coats of urethane to seal the open edge and to keep the wet plaster from sticking to it. I drew a vertical pencil line on the wall as a guide for the outside edge of the knife. Then I painted two coats of Quikrete bonding adhesive on the wall.
  
  Plaster should be applied over a tacky bonding agent so before the second coat dried I mixed up a bag and a half of plaster and water spiked with a half cup of white vinegar to retard the plaster from setting too quickly. I made the mix a little wetter than normal so the knife wouldn't gouge the plaster.
  
• Where's the progress?- You DIYers know what I'm talking about. A friend comes by to check out your latest completed project and goes "ooh! ahh!" over the paint color and asks where you got your terrific door knobs. You modestly thank him for the compliment. But, deep inside, you feel like Michelangelo after hearing, "Hey, nice paint colors. Where'd you get the cool frame?"
  
  You shed blood on this room for... what?... three months and that's all he can see? Paint color and door knobs?! Is he blind or just clueless? He doesn't see the five hundred feet of mesh tape you skillfully buried in the wall to fix the broken plaster and the hours you spent scraping and spitting out paint chips? He doesn't appreciate the week you spent getting the squeaks out of the floor or the rerouted heating or the four independent lighting circuits or the door it took two days to get plumb and level or the brazillion trips you made up and down a ladder till your quads burned, the scraped knuckles, the twisted elbow and the bottle of Costco ibuprofen you've swallowed over the past 12 weeks just to dull the pain enough to get some sleep?
  
  Perhaps that's why we blog. It documents proof that we did more than just roll on some paint and screw on a door knob.
  
  I'm at that stage of the master bedroom rehab now. I've worked on it for the past five days. Last night I broke out the Canon to take took a "progress shot". Then I compared it with one taken last Saturday. I was crushed. The only thing that looked different is that I had more tools in the room. I know I did something in that room because I've got a blood blister on my thumb, "plaster hair" and a pile of filthy clothes that says I did.
  
• 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.
  
• 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.
  
• The Most Painful Free Drywall In the World- Yesterday, I got the framing completed in the new closet so it was time to fetch the free drywall my friend, John, around the corner had offered to me.
  
  John is another home renovation tyromaniac. In fact, I wouldn't have found this place if not for him. He was the former NYC City Register so I had a complete history on this place a few hours after its former owner had mentioned to John that he was thinking of selling.
  
  John knew I was looking for a cheap fixer-upper with a garage for my bikes. He called me, I rushed down here from Manhattan on my Triumph, did a quick inspection, negotiated a selling price and snagged a commitment from the owner before he had a chance to contact a real estate agent. Then I waited nine months to close, but that's another story.
  
  John and Joyce did a fantastic renovation job on their old house. He's a woodworker from way back and, like me, he opted for restoration rather than rehab. Joyce has an artistic decorating eye that I lack. Their house always feels like, I dunno... Christmas.
  
  Anyway, John and Joyce are a rare breed: home owners who actually completed their renovation. Just last year, in fact. Then they experienced a homeowner's worst nightmare: FIRE!
  
  This past February, John couldn't sleep and went downstairs around 3am for a glass of milk when he saw smoke. The power went out a few seconds later. He woke his wife, called 911 and they exited the house into the sub-freezing night.
  
• 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?
• The Last Lap Crash- Most people will experience a major home renovation only once in their lives. This is my third one and I think I've discovered a thus far unreported affliction which I call Home Stretch Complacency. Let's give it an acronym so it sounds official: HSC.
  
  HSC doesn't appear to be a unique defect in my genetic makeup. I know several tyromaniacs like me who have suffered and are suffering from this dibilitating condition. The symptoms of HSC are, after spending years on a difficult and time-consuming renovation project, crashing on the last lap. That final room doesn't get done, the trim doesn't go up, the primer doesn't get painted. You sink into lethargy and just live with it.
  
  
  Some people crash earlier; some only a few feet away from the finish line. One of the early warning signs of HSC seems to be Normphobia: a sudden avoidance of TV home improvement shows. Perhaps it's a mutation of the diY-chromosome but we won't know for certain until more research is done. Maybe we need a telethon.
  
• Phase 7: Plan A, Step One- Here's what I have planned for next week's start of the master bedroom renovation.
  
  Tomorrow evening, I have to move myself into the guest room. I also need to take an updated picture of that room with its macrame curtains (donated by my neighbor, Betsy), the almost new sofabed (donated by Karen) and the wall of pictures.
  
  It just occurred to me that a lot of things in that room were gifts: the side table and the large, mirrored O'Connell-Flynn whiskey sign too. I even have a couple of wall hangings given to me by magician, Doug Henning, back when we worked together on The Magic Show.
  
  Anyway, I really hope that sofabed is comfortable because I'll be sleeping on it till next spring.
  
  Monday morning, demolition starts. All of the woodwork, except the curved base mouldings, are going. I don't want to have to replicate those! They'll be stripped and I'll replicate the rest of the base mouldings from its profile in my shop.
  
  All the old aluminum BX is also going, if only because the floor outlets are cut into the base mouldings. I prefer an 18" high outlet anyway.
  
• More and more sawdust- With a challenging software project winding up, the top floor reno winding down and my tools reunited with their friends in the basement, it was time to turn my attention to the crime scene that used to be my shop. This cleaning has to last several months because it will probably be that long before I'll be using the tools again.
  
  I don't mind working in a messy environment but I can't start a new project unless everything is neat and tidy, with every tool in its proper place, the table saw waxed, stationary tools aligned, blades sharpened, etc. This is my operating room, after all, and you don't open up a new patient with the last one's blood still on the walls.
  
  
  
  Today was the marathon cleanup of the past nine months of mayhem. It actually began last night because I needed to catch this morning's garbage pickup. Did I mention how much the Sanitation guys love me? They even autographed one of my garbage cans a few years ago, scrawling "Balls!" on it with black magic marker.
  
• I actually do have house stuff to blog about- After all, it's been almost two weeks since my last blog post. However, I like to accompany my renovation articles with photos and the bedroom is currently an eyesore while I reorganize closets and get rid of clothes I've had since my disco show band days. No way am I posting photos of it now.
• 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.
  
• 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.
  
• Phase 7: Plan B- The animals aren't particularly happy about my relocation to the smaller guest bedroom. The cats seem determined to remain in the master bedroom demolition site regardless. But at least the fold-out sofa's pretty comfortable.
  
  I began ripping out the funky old woodwork today which is when Plan B started to take shape in my head. No matter how much time I put into planning, drawings and so forth it's not until I actually start the project that the ideas start coming.
  
  So here's Plan B: the first project will be a new walk-in closet in the master bedroom's alcove, which used to be another (tiny) bedroom. It will be a six foot expansion of an existing closet in that room. The reason I want to do this now is to get rid of the pile of 2x3s, plywood and drywall that's making my shop unnavigable at the moment. I'm gonna need lots of shop floor space to build the cabinets.
  
• You don't know until you try- The guys at Kamco were right. Quarter-inch drywall can curve to a minimum five-foot radius, dry. Wetting/scoring it can reduce that to as little as three feet "if you're really good!" The problem is, the radius of this corner is about ten inches. That's even too shallow for High Flex, which I could only get by special order and only in palette quantities anyway.
  
  The story of this closet starts here. I could have saved myself a lot of problems if I'd just built a square corner on that closet. But I really wanted a radius here to match two other curved walls in the room as well as one in the hallway leading into the bedroom. I haven't even started thinking about how I'm gonna do the 9" red oak baseboard moulding around that curve. I imagine there will be a few blog entries about that ordeal too.
  
• Into the closet- I've been fighting a sore throat and sniffles all day, but I'm tired of my belly aching. That's why I'm so behind bloody schedule here.
  
  Yesterday, I got the rough framing done for the new closet in the master bedroom. Well, almost done. I thought I had the 4" lags and shields I needed for the upper cabinet's deck support. Because these houses don't have attics, I need to build one for dead storage. There will be two levels in this closet, with cabinet doors on top.
  
  
  
  I want a profiled corner on the closet, not a square edge. This will make a softer return back to some oak built-ins I have planned for the space on the left (four 42" drawers and a linen cabinet above).
  
  The curved corner top and bottom plates were made from 3/4" scrap plywood. I made a circle from a tracing of my drill press table, then scribed the inner diameter with a compass.
  
• Forging ahead...- At last, some visible progress on the master bedroom renovation. For most of last week and the weekend I repaired plaster, which isn't very exciting photography. If you can see something it means you didn't do a very good job of it.
  
  Four years ago, I replaced a termite-ridden center support beam in the basement with a steel I-beam. As careful as we were, there was enough settling that the upstairs plaster took a minor beating. Because these were stress fractures that went all the way through the brown coat, I had to dig out each crack with an old beer can opener and embed mesh tape over it. There's probably a hundred feet of it buried in these walls. I wonder what plasterers will use when the last of the old fashioned beer can openers disappears into history? It's perfect for this job.
  
• 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.
  
  

  Milestone	Mini 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.
  
• The Mystery of the Vanishing Paint Brushes- I thought I was suffering from early dementia. Over the several months of this bedroom renovation I've lost like four paint brushes. I'd clean them and stick them... hell, I don't know where. I just couldn't find them again.
  
  I found two of them today, laying on the floor at the rear of my new closet. I know I didn't put them there. With all the construction crap that was stuffed in there, the only life forms that could get back there are my two cats and one of my two dogs. Or maybe a poltergeist screwing with me.
  
  The reason I found them is because my new closet doors arrived from InteriorDoors.com.
  
  
  
• 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.