Brooklyn Row House

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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. ...
More About: Graded

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
More About: Tagged , Been

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