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  • 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.

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  • 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 Basement-
    The basement was, well, a basement. Besides the obvious, the concrete floor had worn away to dirt in several places, there was evidence of severe termite infestation and the main beam had a serious looking crack. After adding a lally column for temporary support, the basement was so filled with obstructions that it would have been almost impossible to make it a functional living space (or in my case, a functional shop).

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  • 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.
  • 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

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  • A Prodigal Door Returns- Okay, it's a lightweight job and it's not even for my house. But after several months of heads-down work on a software task for my client, The Children's Health Fund, I've got another DIY project. Maybe it will kick me back into gear to finish the cabinet doors and stained glass projects that have been dogging me all summmer. Well, some of it for a lot longer than that.

    The job is stripping an old interior door and replacing its center panel with some sort of a screen. Karen is a licensed wildlife rescuer and needs this door so her animal room has adequate ventilation. She wanted to install an aluminum screen door but my relentless bleating about what a hideous scar that would leave on her old house succeeded. I suggested that she instead do some dumpster diving for a 30" door and we'd modify it so it would at least have some architectural integrity with her old federal style house. She agreed.

    More importantly, I figured that would keep her busy until sometime next year, when she might forget all about it.


  • 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?
  • My toughest cabinet- My dogs are killing my floors! They're large and energetic pups who like to use the floor as a skating rink. I decided to look in my photo archives to see what they look like now as opposed to five years ago.

    Thankfully, it wasn't as bad as I thought but I'll probably get the floors lightly sanded and refinished when I'm done with the construction here and the dogs are a little older and more sedate. One of the reasons I don't stain floors is so I have the option to screen them if they need refinishing rather than having to do a thorough sanding.

    While looking for those old photos I got sidetracked by a few pix of the nearly completed media cabinet I had built for the living room. This project started as an afterthought. Because the living room isn't huge, I had originally planned to stash most of my media hardware in a basement locker. It was a poorly conceived idea.

    The location of the cabinet was dictated by the layout of the room. It was going to have to be a corner cabinet. But I piled on a few more requirements. It had to hide all my audio and video gear as well as my favorite 300 or so CDs. Even though I didn't own one yet, it had to support a 38" wide HD monitor. There would be no visible wiring and there would be a hardwired Ethernet connection. It had to blend into the finish trim style of the room, which meant that it had to be a built-in.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.


  • 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.


  • 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!
  • 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.
  • Guest Room-

    Renovation By The Numbers


    A few House page viewers asked me to walk them through a typical room renovation. This room already had a lightweight renovation when I moved in and needed to set up my office quickly. Now it will undergo a complete refab for a guest room.

    Generally speaking, I have a few fixed strategies for renovation, at least in this house:

    • Preserve the plaster whenever possible. Some people do drywall rehabs, then spend a bundle paying someone to skim coat blue board so it looks like plaster. Plaster is superior to drywall for sound and durability so it makes sense to save it.
    • Replace old electrical with new BX and boxes. Romex is legal here but I don't like pulling plastic-sheathed cable through nail-strewn walls. Romex also means another wire hookup inside the box.
    • New floors.
    • Shop Stuff-

      Shop Stuff


    • This isn't my house. I mentioned on the home page how tasty the original woodwork was in these houses and how the previous owners of mine inexplicably ditched it all. This is the dining room in my neighbors' house. It's hard to believe that a hundred years ago this was how formula homes were built. You wouldn't find woodwork like this in a modern house costing seven figures.

    Originally, I wanted to replicate this without the dark stain but as I got into the project I decided to be a little more creative and a bit more practical.

    The Cabinets

    Labor Day weekend, 2002 was a rain-out so I holed up in the shop.

    I'm constructing the two built-in china cabinets for the dining room. One will be a media cabinet and the other a display cabinet.
  • Compound Casings (or What To Do With Scrap Lumber)- One question I used to get asked on the old blog was, "where did you buy your window and door casings?" As any old houseophile knows, in the olden days trimwork wasn't something you picked up at The Borg. Even in modest turn-of-the-century homes those mouldings were often designed by the home's architect. Constructing them was the job of a master carpenter. Elaborate trimwork is one of the major details of an old home as well as one of its greatest attractions today. People with old homes go to great lengths to carefully strip and rehabilitate old baseboards and casings. I can't stand stripping so I prefer to just remake them.

    Compound casings are one of my favorite things to build -- not because they're a woodworking challenge but because they're a lot easier to construct than they look. They're also a great way to disguise an uneven plaster wall.

    The trick is to create setbacks and shadow lines. Below is a relatively simple example, which I annotated to show the various components. This is the entrance to my living room.