Brooklyn Row House

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Bummer
2007-03-19 01:40:00
I was checking my email today when my computers and monitor suddenly shut down. The music went quiet in the living room downstairs as well. But I could hear the radio playing in the shop downstairs. It took me five seconds to figure out what happened. People a block away probably heard me yell, "NOOOOoooo!!" This has happened to other houses on the block. The underground feeder cables into these houses are old. Add a bunch of melting snow and road salt like we've had the past couple of weeks, throw in some leaky manhole covers and these cables can fry. A typical home has two legs of power coming into the breaker box, 180 degrees out of phase. If you lose one of them you typically lose power to half the breakers. I checked the main breaker in the panel to make sure it didn't "half trip" (it hadn't). That's about all any of us can do besides bend over and call an electrician. This isn't the kind of thing for a home owner tyromaniac to mess with, not that I could have done...
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Brooklyn wildlife
2007-03-16 06:01:00
No, I'm not talking about the street scene around here. I mean actual wildlife living in the shadow of downtown Manhattan. Rural folks are surprised to hear that we have something other than rats and pigeons here. But itsa fack, Jack. Last night around 1am, I was taking Jack and Auggie for their last walk of the evening when Auggie spotted something in my neighbor's garden and charged. I heard a hiss and caught a flash of white fur as it flew up a large bush. A cat? Then I saw the skinny tail and the lethal-looking teeth. It was a possum. I wasn't that surprised because I know that they exist here. Karen rescued one on Christmas Eve of '04. We took it to the Christmas party with us that night because there was an emergency vet specializing in wildlife rescues on the way out to her sister's place on Long Island. Karen adopted it, gave it a name (Lorilei) and took it for walks with her dogs. There's a whole colony of possums living on the Dyker Heights golf cours...
More About: Life , Wildlife , Wild , Brooklyn , Rook

My cute l'il attic
2007-03-12 18:09:00
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. I'm posting this as a community question. Should the lower closet doors have crown moulding over them like the windows and other doors? Or will this look weird with my "attic" doors above them? Do those "attic" doors need a little more tartin' up or are they fine the way they are? Any other suggestions? I know I still need to add door knobs to the closet door but I'd love to hear your opinion. So... Am I finishe...
More About: Cute

Restless natives
2007-03-11 04:20:00
There's a no more contentious issue with Bay Ridge residents than parking, or rather the lack thereof. It's actually easier to find street parking in Manhattan than it is in many Brooklyn bedroom neighborhoods, including here. When I composed my list of requirements for house hunting, a garage was at the very top. No kidding, I would have bought a house without a roof before one with no garage. The last thing I wanted to do was to play car hockey on alternate side day or to come home dead tired at 2am and have to park six blocks away. I also had several nice, theftable motorcycles to protect. Lately, Brooklyn driveways have become a hot issue. Rather, the proliferation of illegal ones, which have always been a sore point with the locals, have come under fire from politicians. One of the most prized NYC building permits you can get is called a curb cut permit. Basically, a curb cut permit is a license from DOT giving you ownership of the patch of street in front of your home o...
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Aaaand... done!
2007-03-05 07:04:01
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. Because the panel needs to be removable, I used some old-style cabinet spring catches. Sometimes a 99-cent solution is the best. By ...
More About: Done

One Dog Night
2007-03-01 19:01:02
After a long day at the terminal, like today, every so often, like tonight, I get the overwhelming urge to head downstairs to the shop, turn on my noisy dust collector and even more raucous bench tools and finish off some project, like the radiator grill for the bedroom reno. However, this being a row house on a quiet block that pretty much blacks out by 10:30pm, I'd get lynched. I even turn off my motorcycle engine and coast the wrong way down the street to my garage rather than rouse the neighbors, and I have street legal pipes on my bikes. But it wasn't always this way ["...always this way", "...this way" -insert dreamy, way-back transition music] When I built my downtown Manhattan loft I was in an industrial area called Noho, for NOrth of HOuston Street. With all the 24-hour factories and illegal discos in the neighborhood, I could make all the noise I wanted whenever I wanted. With my musician hours, my renovation day was typically 1pm to 6pm, then off to midtown to play...
More About: Night

Maybe a roof rack?
2007-02-26 07:00:01
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. Whatever, the Golf is perfect for me. I hate SUVs and the VW is small, quick and nimble -- something like a motorcycle. And it can carry a surprising amount of stuff with the rear seat folded down, like the ten eight-foot boards I hauled home today. What it can't carry is plywood. Not even half sheets. And that's a bitch on a day like today when I needed a sheet of birch pl...
More About: Maybe , Roof , Rack

Yet another "cool tool" article
2007-02-24 18:58:01
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. A biscuit joiner is a mini-circular saw mounted horizontally on a spring loaded handle. Its sole job is to cut a crescent-shaped slot in a board for an oval "biscuit", which is a piece of (usually) beech wood or compressed beech wood shavings. Functionally, the biscuit works like a dowel but without the sheer strength of a dowel. So why not use a dowel instead? Because dowels have to be ...
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All politics is local
2007-02-24 18:58:01
Thomas "Tip" O'Neill, a longtime Speaker of the House in the U.S. Congress, coined this phrase and it couldn't apply better than to my own neighborhood here in Bay Ridge. This morning's mail brought some very good news for the neighborhood. First a little background. Bay Ridge is a largely conservative Republican bubble surrounded by probably the largest liberal stronghold in the United States. While I'm a progressive political agnostic myself, the local Republicans have taken the former Democratic Speaker's words to heart. They know that throwing a bone to the electorate is worth a hundred airhead "I'm a Decider" slogans. Marty Golden, our GOP state senator and a former NYPD police officer, knows this better than anyone. I've had three contacts with him since I moved here and his office has always been responsive. The last time was after a female motorcyclist on one of the mailing lists I host here was killed by a trucker who ran a stop sign. Marty sent me a letter ...
More About: Politics , Local , Poli , Politic , Loca

Ten gallons of sawdust later...
2007-02-23 00:55:01
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! But what started off as a two bit job (hey!) became three bits. I didn't like the abrupt return to the panel so I modified it with a step down. These are the three bits I wound up using to c...
More About: Late , Sawdust , Gallo , Allo

Tool Show Post Mortem: The Good, the Bad, the Ugly
2007-02-19 12:53:02
I'm glad the Somerset Tool Show moved back it to the Exhibit Center because it was suffering at the Ramapo convention center. There were lots of new vendors this year, and lots of new tools. My primary misson however was finding a router bit to cut the bolection mouldings for the wainscotting in my bedroom reno. The router bit yodas I was counting on for enlightenment were no help. One guy even told me I needed a shaper to get that profile. He must have noticed me looking at him like he had two heads because he followed up with, "...but maybe not." So I was forced to do hard forensics. After digging through hundreds of bit profiles, I found what I needed at Woodside. Know what? There's nothing special about a bolection moulding. It's just a deep base cap moulding with an "aftermarket" 3/8" rabbet. Doh! Why couldn't I have seen this before?? I bought one and ran a test cut on my router table. It works. Now I have to knock off about 300 linear feet of it. The too...
More About: Post , Good , Ugly

Bay window trim (almost) done.
2007-02-16 12:52:02
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. For instance, how large should these vents be? Is a smaller vent more efficient than ...
More About: Wind , Most , Indo , Window , Trim

The Somerset (NJ) Woodworking Show - any NYC area bloggers going?
2007-02-13 00:50:01
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. read more
More About: Blogger , Show , Work , Blog

Your house as seen by...
2007-02-13 00:50:01
Yourself... Your Buyer... read more
More About: House , Your , Ouse

The Mystery of the Vanishing Paint Brushes
2007-02-13 00:50:01
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. read more
More About: Pain , Mystery , Brush , Rush , The V

Drupal Upgraded
2007-02-13 00:50:01
I spent the last two weeks upgrading the Drupal CMS software I use for the BrooklyRowHouse web site. Actually, it was more like a rebuild because I reluctantly moved the data store from my beloved PostgreSQL to MySQL. While Drupal runs fine (and I think faster) with PostgreSQL some third-party module developers are pretty clueless about it so I decided it was probably best not to live on the bleeding edge. There was no convenient upgrade script to handle porting data from one database to another so the data had to be migrated by hand. As a result, all the user data is gone so if you have an account here you'll need to recreate it. Sorry but the passwords were encrypted for PostgreSQL, not MySQL. This is Drupal 5.1. I made the upgrade mainly for security reasons. There are a few new features but from a user perspective it looks pretty much the same as it did before. I added a few cosmetic changes, like the CSS rounded boxes and making the house photo pages more readable. ...
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How to blow $300 in three seconds
2007-02-13 00:50:01
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? read more
More About: How To , Second , Three , Econ , Seconds

My toughest cabinet
2007-02-13 00:50:01
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. read more
More About: Tough , Cabinet , Cabin , Inet

The Mystery of the Ducts To Nowhere
2007-02-13 00:50:01
(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. read more
More About: Mystery , Here , Nowhere , Where , The D

Ah been tagged
2007-02-13 00:50:01
Chicago 2-Flat tagged me. For those who don't know this Houseblogs game, if you're tagged by another house blogger you're supposed to reveal five things about yourself that most people don't know. Then you tag five other house bloggers. Because of something I revealed about myself on this blog, I won This Old House Magazine's Stupid Human Trick. So I don't have much of a problem making an idiot of myself for a little attention. The challenge is finding five other house bloggers who haven't been tagged already. read more
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As If!
2007-02-13 00:50:01
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! I was put in charge of the effort. So tonight Karen and I visited our local Mexican restaurant, Casa Pepe, to see if they would be willing to host our little G8. It turns out that Jimmy, the owner, is a dog owner, uses the dog run and actually helped build it. He was only too happy to help. Cool. read more

It depends on what "almost" means...
2007-02-13 00:50:01
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. "Almost" also means that I need to make a decision about whether or not to incorporate bolection a/k/a rabbeted panel a/k/a panel inset moulding into the wainscotting. I couldn't find this stuff at my local lumberyards or online and the router bits I ordered which I thought might work didn't do a very good job of it. I'm hoping the router geeks at this weekend's Somerset NJ Tool Show will have some answers for me. read more
More About: Hat , Most , Ends , Epen