December 2007

Designing Stained Glass

Leave a Comment / stained glass / By /

Rembrandt, I ain’t. I can visualize things pretty well but there’s a bridge out somewhere between my left and right brain. With woodworking, I usually wind up head jamming the fabrication. It works 90% of the time. The other 10% is handled by my hard-won skills in making dumb mistakes look like I meant to do that. But this ad hoc process doesn’t work for stained glass construction, where you need to have a completed design and pieces cut before you start soldering things together. My stained glass work to date has been pretty simple, angular and, yes, left brained. […]

Loading

Designing Stained Glass Read More »

New Stained Glass Projects (building a face frame)

Leave a Comment / cabinet making, finish carpentry, joinery, shop, stained glass / By /

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

Loading

New Stained Glass Projects (building a face frame) Read More »

My Fragrant Old House

Leave a Comment / scents / By /

I’ll be posting a new series of articles on stained glass construction in a few weeks. I purchased some new (expensive!) stained glass design software from Dragonfly, Glass 2000 Professional, to help me complete the half-dozen stained glass projects I’ve got on my plate. So I’ll post a review of that as well. I’m gonna change gears and show a bit of my metrosexual side. I like fragrant houses. I spent my early years living in a small town in Japan, where my mother became a passionate connoisseur of oriental incense. She often had a subtle fragrance burning in the

Loading

My Fragrant Old House Read More »

Scroll to Top

Welcome to Brooklyn Row House

This blog is about the challenges of renovating an old (1903) Brooklyn, New York row house.

My last major renovation project was the master bedroom, most of which is about finish carpentry. You’ll find other completed home improvement projects in the Projects submenu at the top of this page.

I’m not a professional builder and don’t pretend to be. I’m just an experienced amateur raised in a family of committed DIYers. I try to closely follow local and national building codes but don’t mistake anything on this site to be professional or even accurate advice! Your mileage may and definitely will vary.

This is the third iteration of BrooklynRowHouse.com, from scratch-built to Drupal and now Wordpress. I hope you enjoy your time here.